Reverse engineering (RE) of finite state machines (FSMs) is a serious threat when protecting designs against RE attacks. While most recent protection techniques rely on the security of a secret key, this work presents a new approach: hardware FSM honeypots. These honeypots lead the RE tools to a wrong but, for the tools, very attractive FSM, while making the original FSM less attractive. The results show that state-of-the-art RE methods favor the highly attractive honeypot as FSM candidate or do no longer detect the correct, original FSM.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2305.03707,
title = {Hardware Honeypot: Setting Sequential Reverse Engineering on a Wrong Track},
author = {Michaela Brunner and Hye Hyun Lee and Alexander Hepp and Johanna Baehr and Georg Sigl},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.03707},
year = {2024}
}