Real-time ML-based Defense Against Malicious Payload in Reconfigurable Embedded Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Stahle-Smith, Rye, Karakchi, Rasha
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Stahle-Smith, Rye
Karakchi, Rasha
author_facet Stahle-Smith, Rye
Karakchi, Rasha
contents The growing use of FPGAs in reconfigurable systems introducessecurity risks through malicious bitstreams that could cause denial-of-service (DoS), data leakage, or covert attacks. We investigated chip-level hardware malicious payload in embedded systems and proposed a supervised machine learning method to detect malicious bitstreams via static byte-level features. Our approach diverges from existing methods by analyzing bitstreams directly at the binary level, enabling real-time detection without requiring access to source code or netlists. Bitstreams were sourced from state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks and re-engineered to target the Xilinx PYNQ-Z1 FPGA Development Board. Our dataset included 122 samples of benign and malicious configurations. The data were vectorized using byte frequency analysis, compressed using TSVD, and balanced using SMOTE to address class imbalance. The evaluated classifiers demonstrated that Random Forest achieved a macro F1-score of 0.97, underscoring the viability of real-time Trojan detection on resource-constrained systems. The final model was serialized and successfully deployed via PYNQ to enable integrated bitstream analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02387
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Real-time ML-based Defense Against Malicious Payload in Reconfigurable Embedded Systems
Stahle-Smith, Rye
Karakchi, Rasha
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
The growing use of FPGAs in reconfigurable systems introducessecurity risks through malicious bitstreams that could cause denial-of-service (DoS), data leakage, or covert attacks. We investigated chip-level hardware malicious payload in embedded systems and proposed a supervised machine learning method to detect malicious bitstreams via static byte-level features. Our approach diverges from existing methods by analyzing bitstreams directly at the binary level, enabling real-time detection without requiring access to source code or netlists. Bitstreams were sourced from state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks and re-engineered to target the Xilinx PYNQ-Z1 FPGA Development Board. Our dataset included 122 samples of benign and malicious configurations. The data were vectorized using byte frequency analysis, compressed using TSVD, and balanced using SMOTE to address class imbalance. The evaluated classifiers demonstrated that Random Forest achieved a macro F1-score of 0.97, underscoring the viability of real-time Trojan detection on resource-constrained systems. The final model was serialized and successfully deployed via PYNQ to enable integrated bitstream analysis.
title Real-time ML-based Defense Against Malicious Payload in Reconfigurable Embedded Systems
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02387