An official University of Illinois tool, Illinois Chat allows campus members to create their own AI-powered chatbots to enhance their work.

From smartphones to medical devices, computer chips power nearly everything we use today. But hidden deep inside these chips, there’s a little-known threat: hardware trojans — malicious modifications to a chip’s design that can steal data, weaken security and sabotage systems. Traditionally, detecting hardware trojans has been an expensive, time-consuming and complicated process. Now, University of Missouri researchers are introducing a new artificial intelligence-driven method to find these threats faster and more easily than before, said Ripan Kumar Kundu, a doctoral candidate in Mizzou’s College of Engineering. In a project led by Kundu, Mizzou’s team is leveraging existing large language models — the same type of AI that powers popular chatbots — to scan chip designs for hidden threats. The method doesn’t just identify suspicious lines of code with 97% accuracy; it also explains why it’s malicious, making the process more transparent.