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Reliability and trustworthiness are dominant factors in designing System-on-Chips (SoCs) for a variety of applications. Malicious implants, such as hardware Trojans, can lead to undesired information leakage or system malfunction. To ensure trustworthy computing, it is critical to develop efficient Trojan detection techniques. While existing delay-based side-channel analysis is promising, it is not effective due to two fundamental limitations: (i) The difference in path delay between the golden design and Trojan inserted design is negligible compared with environmental noise and process variations. (ii) Existing approaches rely on manually crafted rules for test generation, and require a large number of simulations, making it impractical for industrial designs. In this paper, we propose a novel test generation method using reinforcement learning for delay-based Trojan detection. This paper makes three important contributions. 1) Unlike existing methods that rely on the delay difference of a few gates, our proposed approach utilizes critical path analysis to generate test vectors that can maximize the side-channel sensitivity. 2) To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first attempt in applying reinforcement learning for efficient test generation to detect Trojans using delay-based analysis. 3) Our experimental results demonstrate that our method can significantly improve both side-channel sensitivity (59% on average) and test generation time (17x on average) compared to state-of-the-art test generation techniques. 

Malicious software, popularly known as malware, is widely acknowledged as a serious threat to modern computing systems. Software-based solutions, such as anti-virus software, are not effective since they rely on matching patterns that can be easily fooled by carefully crafted malware with obfuscation or other deviation capabilities. While recent malware detection methods provide promising results through effective utilization of hardware features, the detection results cannot be interpreted in a meaningful way. In this paper, we propose a hardware-assisted malware detection framework using explainable machine learning. This paper makes three important contributions. First, we theoretically establish that our proposed method can provide interpretable explanation of classification results to address the challenge of transparency. Next, we show that the explainable outcome can lead to accurate localization of malicious behaviors. Finally, experimental evaluation using a wide variety of realworld malware benchmarks demonstrates that our framework can produce accurate and human-understandable malware detection results with provable guarantees. 

Malicious software, popularly known as malware, is a serious threat to modern computing systems. A comprehensive cybercrime study by Ponemon Institute highlights that malware is the most expensive attack for organizations, with an average revenue loss of $2.6 million per organization in 2018 (11% increase compared to 2017). Recent high-profile malware attacks coupled with serious economic implications have dramatically changed our perception of threat from malware. Software-based solutions, such as anti-virus programs, are not effective since they rely on matching patterns (signatures) that can be easily fooled by carefully crafted malware with obfuscation or other deviation capabilities. Moreover, software-based solutions are not fast enough for real-time malware detection in safety-critical systems. In this paper, we investigate promising approaches for hardware-assisted malware detection using machine learning. Specifically, we explore how machine learning can be effective for malware detection utilizing hardware performance counters, embedded trace buffer as well as on-chip network traffic analysis.