Related papers: SoK: From Silicon to Netlist and Beyond $-$ Two De…

Since hardware oftentimes serves as the root of trust in our modern interconnected world, malicious hardware manipulations constitute a ubiquitous threat in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). Hardware reverse engineering is a…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Trust in digital systems depends on secure hardware, often assured through Hardware Reverse Engineering (HRE). This work develops methods for investigating human problem-solving processes in HRE, an underexplored yet critical aspect. Since…

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…

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…

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…

Software development relies heavily on traceability links between various software artifacts to ensure quality and facilitate maintenance. While automated traceability recovery techniques have advanced for different artifact pairs, the…

Replication packages are crucial for enabling transparency, validation, and reuse in software engineering (SE) research. While artifact sharing is now a standard practice and even expected at premier SE venues such as ICSE, the practical…

Software engineering research has experienced rapid growth in both output and participation over the past decades. Yet concerns persist about the field's ability to accumulate, integrate, and reuse knowledge in ways that support long-term…

Reverse Engineering (RE) is central to software security, enabling tasks such as vulnerability discovery and malware analysis, but it remains labor-intensive and requires substantial expertise. Earlier advances in deep learning start to…

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.…

Research artifacts are widely shared to support reproducibility, and artifact evaluation (AE) has become common at many leading conferences. However, AE mainly checks whether artifacts work as claimed and can be reproduced. It largely…

Consumer and defense systems demanded design and manufacturing of electronics with increased performance, compared to their predecessors. As such systems became ubiquitous in a plethora of domains, their application surface increased, thus…

In any field, finding the "leading edge" of research is an on-going challenge. Researchers cannot appease reviewers and educators cannot teach to the leading edge of their field if no one agrees on what is the state-of-the-art. Using a…

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 article provides a comprehensive systematic literature review of academic studies, industrial applications, and real-world deployments from 2018 to 2025, providing a practical guide and detailed overview of modern Retrieval-Augmented…