PATCH-FFT: Unmasking Dormant Hardware Trojans with Patch-Based Frequency-Domain Transformers

2026-07-25

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of detecting dormant hardware Trojans, which are typically undetectable by conventional time-domain power analysis. To overcome this limitation, the authors propose a novel frequency-domain Patch Transformer architecture that integrates real-valued Fast Fourier Transform (rFFT) with a patch-based Transformer. This approach converts power traces into spectral representations and leverages the Transformer’s capacity to effectively extract and identify subtle spectral signatures indicative of hidden Trojans. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an average detection accuracy of 90.94% across both dormant and active hardware Trojan scenarios, substantially outperforming existing techniques. Notably, it delivers breakthrough performance in detecting dormant-state Trojans, where prior methods have largely failed.

Abstract

Hardware Trojans embedded by malicious entities in integrated circuits can covertly leak sensitive information through power side channels, often remaining undetected in their dormant state until specific trigger conditions activate their malicious behavior. For information-leaking Trojans, detection in the dormant state is critical, as once triggered, the secret data is already exfiltrated. This paper introduces a patch-based Transformer architecture for detecting dormant hardware Trojans through frequency-domain analysis of power traces. Our approach converts time-domain power measurements into frequency-domain representations using real Fast Fourier Transform (rFFT), revealing spectral signatures hidden in conventional time-series analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves 90.94% average detection accuracy across dormant and active Trojan scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches particularly in detecting dormant Trojans that prior time-domain methods do not address.

Problem

• Hardware Trojans
• dormant state
• power side channels
• detection
• frequency-domain analysis

Innovation

• PATCH-FFT
• Hardware Trojan detection
• Frequency-domain analysis
• Transformer architecture
• Power side-channel