DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

A Look at the Dark Side of Hardware Reverse Engineering – A Case Study

10/01/2019
by   Sebastian Wallat, et al.
0

A massive threat to the modern and complex IC production chain is the use of untrusted off-shore foundries which are able to infringe valuable hardware design IP or to inject hardware Trojans causing severe loss of safety and security. Similarly, market dominating SRAM-based FPGAs are vulnerable to both attacks since the crucial gate-level netlist can be retrieved even in field for the majority of deployed device series. In order to perform IP infringement or Trojan injection, reverse engineering (parts of) the hardware design is necessary to understand its internal workings. Even though IP protection and obfuscation techniques exist to hinder both attacks, the security of most techniques is doubtful since realistic capabilities of reverse engineering are often neglected. The contribution of our work is twofold: first, we carefully review an IP watermarking scheme tailored to FPGAs and improve its security by using opaque predicates. In addition, we show novel reverse engineering strategies on proposed opaque predicate implementations that again enables to automatically detect and alter watermarks. Second, we demonstrate automatic injection of hardware Trojans specifically tailored for third-party cryptographic IP gate-level netlists. More precisely, we extend our understanding of adversary's capabilities by presenting how block and stream cipher implementations can be surreptitiously weakened.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

page 5

page 6

10/01/2019

Hardware Reverse Engineering: Overview and Open Challenges

Hardware reverse engineering is a universal tool for both legitimate and...
04/01/2022

Preventing Distillation-based Attacks on Neural Network IP

Neural networks (NNs) are already deployed in hardware today, becoming v...
06/23/2020

SCARE: Side Channel Attack on In-Memory Computing for Reverse Engineering

In-memory computing architectures provide a much needed solution to ener...
10/01/2019

Teaching Hardware Reverse Engineering: Educational Guidelines and Practical Insights

Since underlying hardware components form the basis of trust in virtuall...
11/03/2017

Dynamic FPGA Detection and Protection of Hardware Trojan: A Comparative Analysis

Hardware Trojan detection and protection is becoming more crucial as mor...
02/21/2022

Hardware Obfuscation of Digital FIR Filters

A finite impulse response (FIR) filter is a ubiquitous block in digital ...