Related papers: Highway to HAL: Open-Sourcing the First Extendable…

HAL is an open-source framework for gate-level netlist analysis, an integral step in hardware reverse engineering. It provides analysts with an interactive GUI, an extensible plugin system, and APIs in both C++ and Python for rapid…

As hardware serves as the root of trust in modern computing systems, Hardware Reverse Engineering (HRE) is foundational for security assurance. In practice, HRE enables critical security applications, including design verification,…

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…

Since underlying hardware components form the basis of trust in virtually any computing system, security failures in hardware pose a devastating threat to our daily lives. Hardware reverse engineering is commonly employed by security…

Reverse engineering of FPGA designs from bitstreams to RTL models aids in understanding the high level functionality of the design and for validating and reconstructing legacy designs. Fast carry-chains are commonly used in synthesis of…

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.…

In the context of hardware trust and assurance, reverse engineering has been often considered as an illegal action. Generally speaking, reverse engineering aims to retrieve information from a product, i.e., integrated circuits (ICs) and…

The globalization of integrated circuit (IC) design and manufacturing has increased the exposure of hardware intellectual property (IP) to untrusted stages of the supply chain, raising concerns about reverse engineering, piracy, tampering,…

IoT security and privacy has raised grave concerns. Efforts have been made to design tools to identify and understand vulnerabilities of IoT systems. Most of the existing protocol security analysis techniques rely on a well understanding of…

Hardware Reverse Engineering (HRE) is a technique for analyzing integrated circuits. Experts employ HRE for security-critical tasks, like detecting Trojans or intellectual property violations, relying not only on their experience and…

Intellectual Property (IP) theft is a cause of major financial and reputational damage, reportedly in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars annually in the U.S. alone. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are particularly exposed…

This full research paper focuses on skill acquisition in Hardware Reverse Engineering (HRE) - an important field of cyber security. HRE is a prevalent technique routinely employed by security engineers (i) to detect malicious hardware…

The globalization of the Integrated Circuit (IC) supply chain has moved most of the design, fabrication, and testing process from a single trusted entity to various untrusted third-party entities around the world. The risk of using…

With recent advances in reverse engineering, attackers can reconstruct a netlist to counterfeit chips by opening the die and scanning all layers of authentic chips. This relatively easy counterfeiting is made possible by the use of the…

Obfuscation stands as a promising solution for safeguarding hardware intellectual property (IP) against a spectrum of threats including reverse engineering, IP piracy, and tampering. In this paper, we introduce Obfus-chat, a novel framework…

Reverse engineering has been a standard practice in the hardware community for some time. It has only been within the last ten years that reverse engineering, or "program comprehension", has grown into the current sub-discipline of software…

Reverse engineering of a communications network is the process of identifying the communications protocol used in the network. This problem arises in various situations such as eavesdropping, intelligent jamming, cognitive radio, and…

Gate camouflaging is a known security enhancement technique that tries to thwart reverse engineering by hiding the functions of gates or the connections between them. A number of works on SAT-based attacks have shown that it is often…

Hardware decompilation reverses logic synthesis, converting a gate-level digital electronic design, or netlist, back up to hardware description language (HDL) code. Existing techniques decompile data-oriented features in netlists, like…

Globalization in the semiconductor industry enables fabless design houses to reduce their costs, save time, and make use of newer technologies. However, the offshoring of Integrated Circuit (IC) fabrication has negative sides, including…