DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

Hardware Reverse Engineering: Overview and Open Challenges

10/01/2019
by   Marc Fyrbiak, et al.
0

Hardware reverse engineering is a universal tool for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes. On the one hand, it supports confirmation of IP infringement and detection of circuit malicious manipulations, on the other hand it provides adversaries with crucial information to plagiarize designs, infringe on IP, or implant hardware Trojans into a target circuit. Although reverse engineering is commonplace in practice, the quantification of its complexity is an unsolved problem to date since both technical and human factors have to be accounted for. A sophisticated understanding of this complexity is crucial in order to provide a reasonable threat estimation and to develop sound countermeasures, i.e. obfuscation transformations of the target circuit, to mitigate risks for the modern IC landscape. The contribution of our work is threefold: first, we systematically study the current research branches related to hardware reverse engineering ranging from decapsulation to gate-level netlist analysis. Based on our overview, we formulate several open research questions to scientifically quantify reverse engineering, including technical and human factors. Second, we survey research on problem solving and on the acquisition of expertise and discuss its potential to quantify human factors in reverse engineering. Third, we propose novel directions for future interdisciplinary research encompassing both technical and psychological perspectives that hold the promise to holistically capture the complexity of hardware reverse engineering.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 3

10/01/2019

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

A massive threat to the modern and complex IC production chain is the us...
10/01/2019

Highway to HAL: Open-Sourcing the First Extendable Gate-Level Netlist Reverse Engineering Framework

Since hardware oftentimes serves as the root of trust in our modern inte...
10/02/2021

A Minimal Intervention Definition of Reverse Engineering a Neural Circuit

In neuroscience, researchers have developed informal notions of what it ...
10/01/2019

Towards Cognitive Obfuscation: Impeding Hardware Reverse Engineering Based on Psychological Insights

In contrast to software reverse engineering, there are hardly any tools ...
03/23/2023

Frankenstein's Toolkit: Prototyping Electronics Using Consumer Products

In our practice as educators, researchers and designers we have found th...