There's Waldo: PCB Tamper Forensic Analysis using Explainable AI on Impedance Signatures
Abstract
The security of printed circuit boards (PCBs) has become increasingly vital as supply chain vulnerabilities, including tampering, present significant risks to electronic systems. While detecting tampering on a PCB is the first step for verification, forensics is also needed to identify the modified component. One non-invasive and reliable PCB tamper detection technique with global coverage is the impedance characterization of a PCB's power delivery network (PDN). However, it is an open question whether one can use the two-dimensional impedance signatures for forensics purposes. In this work, we introduce a novel PCB forensics approach using explainable AI (XAI) on impedance signatures. Through extensive experiments, we replicate various PCB tamper events, generating a dataset used to develop an XAI algorithm capable of not only detecting tampering but also explaining why the algorithm makes a decision about whether a tamper event has happened. At the core of our XAI algorithm is a random forest classifier with an accuracy of 96.7%, sufficient to explain the algorithm's decisions. To understand the behavior of the classifier in the decision-making process, we utilized SHAP values as an XAI tool to determine which frequency component influences the classifier's decision for a particular class the most. This approach enhances detection capabilities as well as advancing the verifier's ability to reverse-engineer and analyze two-dimensional impedance signatures for forensics.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2506.05734,
title = {There's Waldo: PCB Tamper Forensic Analysis using Explainable AI on Impedance Signatures},
author = {Maryam Saadat Safa and Seyedmohammad Nouraniboosjin and Fatemeh Ganji and Shahin Tajik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.05734},
year = {2025}
}