  The participation of third-party entities in the globalized semiconductor
supply chain introduces potential security vulnerabilities, such as
intellectual property piracy and hardware Trojan (HT) insertion. Graph neural
networks (GNNs) have been employed to address various hardware security
threats, owing to their superior performance on graph-structured data, such as
circuits. However, GNNs are also susceptible to attacks. This work examines the
use of GNNs for detecting hardware threats like HTs and their vulnerability to
attacks. We present BadGNN, a backdoor attack on GNNs that can hide HTs and
evade detection with a 100% success rate through minor circuit perturbations.
Our findings highlight the need for further investigation into the security and
robustness of GNNs before they can be safely used in security-critical
applications.
