Related papers: Empirical Studies on Adversarial Reverse Engineeri…
Reverse engineering is a complex process essential to software-security tasks such as vulnerability discovery and malware analysis. Significant research and engineering effort has gone into developing tools to support reverse engineers.…
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…
Should students be used as experimental subjects in software engineering? Given that students are in many cases readily available and cheap it is no surprise that the vast majority of controlled experiments in software engineering use them.…
Debuggers are a popular reverse engineering and tampering tool. Self-debugging is an effective technique for applications to defend themselves against hostile debuggers. In penetration tests on state-of-the-art self-debugging, we observed…
In a recent article, Falessi et al. (2017) call for a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of using students and professionals in experiments. The authors state: we have observed too many times that our papers were rejected because we…
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…
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…
CONTEXT: There is growing interest in establishing software engineering as an evidence-based discipline. To that end, replication is often used to gain confidence in empirical findings, as opposed to reproduction where the goal is showing…
[Context] In software engineering research, emphasis is given to sound evaluations of new approaches. While industry surveys or industrial case studies are preferred to evaluate industrial applicability, controlled experiments with student…
Evaluating the effectiveness of software protection is crucial for selecting the most effective methods to safeguard assets within software applications. Obfuscation involves techniques that deliberately modify software to make it more…
The chapter supports educators and postgraduate students in understanding the role of simulation in software engineering research based on the authors' experience. This way, it includes a background positioning simulation-based studies in…
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…
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…
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…
Conducting empirical research in software engineering industry is a process, and as such, it should be generalizable. The aim of this paper is to discuss how academic researchers may address some of the challenges they encounter during…
Background: Software project management activities help to introduce software process models in Software Engineering courses. However, these activities should be adequately aligned with the learning outcomes and support student's…
In contrast to software reverse engineering, there are hardly any tools available that support hardware reversing. Therefore, the reversing process is conducted by human analysts combining several complex semi-automated steps. However,…
Understanding the internals of Integrated Circuits (ICs), referred to as Hardware Reverse Engineering (HRE), is of interest to both legitimate and malicious parties. HRE is a complex process in which semi-automated steps are interwoven with…
The increasing importance of supply chain security for digital devices -- from consumer electronics to critical infrastructure -- has created a high demand for skilled cybersecurity experts. These experts use Hardware Reverse Engineering…
Empirical Software Engineering has received much attention in recent years and became a de-facto standard for scientific practice in Software Engineering. However, while extensive guidelines are nowadays available for designing, conducting,…