NetDeTox: Adversarial and Efficient Evasion of Hardware-Security GNNs via RL-LLM Orchestration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Zeng, Shao, Minghao, Saha, Akashdeep, Karri, Ramesh, Knechtel, Johann, Shafique, Muhammad, Sinanoglu, Ozgur
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Zeng
Shao, Minghao
Saha, Akashdeep
Karri, Ramesh
Knechtel, Johann
Shafique, Muhammad
Sinanoglu, Ozgur
author_facet Wang, Zeng
Shao, Minghao
Saha, Akashdeep
Karri, Ramesh
Knechtel, Johann
Shafique, Muhammad
Sinanoglu, Ozgur
contents Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown promise in hardware security by learning structural motifs from netlist graphs. However, this reliance on motifs makes GNNs vulnerable to adversarial netlist rewrites; even small-scale edits can mislead GNN predictions. Existing adversarial approaches, ranging from synthesis-recipe perturbations to gate transformations, come with high design overheads. We present NetDeTox, an automated end-to-end framework that orchestrates large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) in a systematic manner, enabling focused local rewriting. The RL agent identifies netlist components critical for GNN-based reasoning, while the LLM devises rewriting plans to diversify motifs that preserve functionality. Iterative feedback between the RL and LLM stages refines adversarial rewritings to limit overheads. Compared to the SOTA work AttackGNN, NetDeTox successfully degrades the effectiveness of all security schemes with fewer rewrites and substantially lower area overheads (reductions of 54.50% for GNN-RE, 25.44% for GNN4IP, and 41.04% for OMLA, respectively). For GNN4IP, ours can even optimize/reduce the original benchmarks' area, in particular for larger circuits, demonstrating the practicality and scalability of NetDeTox.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_00119
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NetDeTox: Adversarial and Efficient Evasion of Hardware-Security GNNs via RL-LLM Orchestration
Wang, Zeng
Shao, Minghao
Saha, Akashdeep
Karri, Ramesh
Knechtel, Johann
Shafique, Muhammad
Sinanoglu, Ozgur
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown promise in hardware security by learning structural motifs from netlist graphs. However, this reliance on motifs makes GNNs vulnerable to adversarial netlist rewrites; even small-scale edits can mislead GNN predictions. Existing adversarial approaches, ranging from synthesis-recipe perturbations to gate transformations, come with high design overheads. We present NetDeTox, an automated end-to-end framework that orchestrates large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) in a systematic manner, enabling focused local rewriting. The RL agent identifies netlist components critical for GNN-based reasoning, while the LLM devises rewriting plans to diversify motifs that preserve functionality. Iterative feedback between the RL and LLM stages refines adversarial rewritings to limit overheads. Compared to the SOTA work AttackGNN, NetDeTox successfully degrades the effectiveness of all security schemes with fewer rewrites and substantially lower area overheads (reductions of 54.50% for GNN-RE, 25.44% for GNN4IP, and 41.04% for OMLA, respectively). For GNN4IP, ours can even optimize/reduce the original benchmarks' area, in particular for larger circuits, demonstrating the practicality and scalability of NetDeTox.
title NetDeTox: Adversarial and Efficient Evasion of Hardware-Security GNNs via RL-LLM Orchestration
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00119