Hardware Reverse Engineering

Contact:

Johanna Baehr

Michaela Brunner

Alexander Hepp

Over the past years, the trend in hardware development has gone towards third party IP Cores and commercial off-the-shelf ICs, with more and more high-level design being outsourced, and fabrication often taking place in external foundries. This gives way to a number of security threats, such as insertion of Hardware Trojans, IP Theft or IP Counterfeitung through illegal reverse engineering. Reverse engineering can provide a convenient tool to facilitate identification of malicious code entities, by creating a better understanding of the unknown circuit, on the other hand it can also be used to identfiy possible insertion points. Furthemore, the illegal reverse engineering of IP causes a significant financial cost to the hardware industry. Particularly in the field of cryptology, reverse engineering can severely impact the security of encryption and decryption algorithms, by helping in the identification of  new attack vectors on cryptographic implementations. To protect the integrity of the design, hardware obfuscation, both on a physical and netlist level, is becoming more and more prevalent. Understanding the process behind reverse engineering can provide insights into future possibilities for obfuscation or other countermeasures.

Research Topics:

• Functional high-level netlist reconstruction
• FSM Reconstruction
• Netlist Partitioning
• Hardware Obfuscation
• Hardware Trojan Identification
• Hardware Trojan Design
• Machine Learning 
• Graph Analysis
• Benchmark Creation