Hardware Trojans (HT) are the most malicious components attacking modern integrated circuits (ICs). Information leakage, incorrect functionality, and overheating are the major effects of HT insertion. Due to the outsourcing of multi-stage digital circuit design and fabrication, HTs can be inserted by rogues at every stage. The types of HTs and insertion methods evolve continuously and their detection becomes more complex. Consequently, designing integrated circuits robust to HT insertion seems efficient. A prerequisite for such a strategy is the evaluation of integrated circuit vulnerability to HT insertion. There are several factors involved in the vulnerability of fabricated integrated circuits such as the distribution of white spaces in the IC layout, the ratio of unutilized routing resources, the amount of activity of the circuit’s nodes, the geometrical properties of the circuit’s gates, the delay of various paths, and etc. The interrelation of these diverse factors makes IC vulnerability modeling a challenging problem. In this paper, a deep neural network (DNN) based approach is developed to combine all the effective factors in IC vulnerability analysis. Firstly, we generate a comprehensive dataset containing various types and sizes of hardware Trojans inserted into benchmark circuits. The benchmark circuits used in this study are ISCAS 85, ISCAS 89, and ITC 99. Then using the transfer learning concept seven state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks are trained and verified using the constructed dataset to classify every integrated circuit into three vulnerability levels (low, moderate, and highly vulnerable classes). Simulation results show that our proposed method achieves almost 95 % accuracy in the most successful case (VGG16). The lowest accuracy belongs to Inception V3 (~87.65 %) which is much better than the most successful previous studies (72 %). This is mainly because the DNN-based method handles shortcomings (such as incomplete modeling of vulnerability-related factors) in the previous state-of-the-art methods efficiently.
