Detecting Hardware Trojans in Synthesized Gate-Level Netlists (UW-Madison, Marist)

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Marist University published a technical paper titled “Demystifying Gate-Level Localization of RTL Trojans.” Abstract Excerpt: “In this work, we show that RTL Trojans exhibit stable structural and signal-flow patterns post-synthesis, enabling effective detection through targeted heuristics rather than generic ML feature learning. We propose LoRD, a lightweight heuristic-based approach that exploits these distinctive subgraph signatures, achie