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

Publications

2024

  • Brunner, Michaela and Lee, Hye Hyun and Hepp, Alexander and Baehr, Johanna and Sigl, Georg: Hardware Honeypot: Setting Sequential Reverse Engineering on a Wrong Track. 2024 27th International Symposium on Design & Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits & Systems (DDECS), 2024Kielce, Poland more…
  • Chuah, Czea Sie and Hepp, Alexander and Appold, Christian and Leinmueller, Tim: Trojan Assets and Attack Vectors in Processors. 2024 25th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), 2024 more…
  • Mildner, Michael and Brunner, Michaela and Gruber, Michael and Baehr, Johanna and Sigl, Georg: Fault-Simulation-Based Flip-Flop Classification for Reverse Engineering. 2024 27th International Symposium on Design & Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits & Systems (DDECS), 2024Kielce, Poland more…
  • Schupp, Jonas and Karl, Patrick and Nöpel, Jens and Hepp, Alexander and Music, Tim and Sigl, Georg: RISC-V Triplet: Tapeouts for Security Applications. 2024 IEEE Nordic Circuits and Systems Conference (NorCAS), 2024Lund / Sweden more…

2023

  • Lippmann, Bernhard and Hatsch, Joel and Seidl, Stefan and Houdeau, Detlef and Subrahmanyam, Niranjana Papagudi and Schneider, Daniel and Safieh, Malek and Passarelli, Anne and Maftun, Aliza and Brunner, Michaela and Music, Tim and Pehl, Michael and Siddiqui, Tauseef and Brederlow, Ralf and Schlichtmann, Ulf and Driemeyer, Bjoern and Ortmanns, Maurits and Hesselbarth, Robert and Hiller, Matthias: VE-FIDES: Designing Trustworthy Supply Chains Using Innovative Fingerprinting Implementations. 2023 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), 2023 more…

2022

  • Aksoy, Levent and Hepp, Alexander and Baehr, Johanna and Pagliarini, Samuel: Hardware Obfuscation of Digital FIR Filters. 25th International Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems, IEEE, 2022Prague, Czech Republic, 68-73 more…
  • Baehr, Johanna and Hepp, Alexander and Brunner, Michaela and Malenko, Maja and Sigl, Georg: Open Source Hardware Design and Hardware Reverse Engineering: A Security Analysis. Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design DSD, 2022Maspalomas, Gran Canarias, Spain more…
  • Baehr, Johanna; Zeh, Alexander: Post-Quantum Logic Locking. 2022 more…
  • Brunner, Michaela and Hepp, Alexander and Baehr, Johanna and Sigl, Georg: Toward a Human-Readable State Machine Extraction. ACM Trans. Des. Autom. Electron. Syst. 27 (6), 2022 more…
  • Brunner, Michaela; Ibrahimpasic, Tarik; Li, Bing; Zhang, Grace Li; Schlichtmann, Ulf; Sigl, Georg: Timing Camouflage Enabled State Machine Obfuscation. 2022 IEEE Physical Assurance and Inspection of Electronics (PAINE), 2022Huntsville, USA more…
  • Hepp, Alexander and Baehr, Johanna and Sigl, Georg: Golden Model-Free Hardware Trojan Detection by Classification of Netlist Module Graphs. Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference, IEEE, 2022Antwerp, Belgium, 1317-1322 more…
  • Hepp, Alexander and Perez, Tiago and Pagliarini, Samuel and Sigl, Georg: A Pragmatic Methodology for Blind Hardware Trojan Insertion in Finalized Layouts. Proceedings of the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design ICCAD (ICCAD '22), Association for Computing Machinery, 2022 more…
  • Lippmann, Bernhard and Ludwig, Matthias and Mutter, Johannes and Bette, Ann-Christin and Hepp, Alexander and Baehr, Johanna and Rasche, Martin and Kellermann, Oliver and Gieser, Horst and Zweifel, Tobias and Kovac, Nicola: Physical and Functional Reverse Engineering Challenges for Advanced Semiconductor Solutions. 2022 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition DATE, IEEE, 2022Antwerp, Belgium more…
  • Weber, Selina and Baehr, Johanna and Hepp, Alexander and Sigl, Georg: Analysis of Graph-based Partitioning Algorithms and Partitioning Metrics for Hardware Reverse Engineering. 11th International Workshop on Security Proofs for Embedded Systems (PROOFS), 2022Leuven, Belgium more…

2021

  • Hepp, Alexander and Sigl, Georg: Tapeout of a RISC-V Crypto Chip with Hardware Trojans: A Case-Study on Trojan Design and Pre-Silicon Detectability. Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers (CF '21), Association for Computing Machinery, 2021Virtual: Catania, Italy more…
  • Ludwig, Matthias and Hepp, Alexander and Brunner, Michaela and Baehr, Johanna: CRESS: Framework for Vulnerability Assessment of Attack Scenarios in Hardware Reverse Engineering. 2021 IEEE Physical Assurance and Inspection of Electronics (PAINE), 2021Washington DC, US more…

2020

  • Baehr, Johanna; Bernardini, Alessandro; Sigl, Georg; Schlichtmann, Ulf: Machine learning and structural characteristics for reverse engineering. Integration 72, 2020, 1 - 12 more…
  • Brunner, M. and Gruber, M. and Tempelmeier, M. and Sigl, G.: Logic Locking Induced Fault Attacks. 2020 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI), 2020Limassol, CYPRUS more…
  • Zhang, G. L. and Li, B. and Li, M. and Yu, B. and Pan, D. Z. and Brunner, M. and Sigl, G. and Schlichtmann, U.: TimingCamouflage+: Netlist Security Enhancement with Unconventional Timing. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systemsde IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems , 2020, 1-1 more…
  • Zhang, G. L. and Brunner, M. and Li, B. and Sigl, G.and Schlichtmann, U.: Timing Resilience for Efficient and Secure Circuits. 2020 25th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), 2020Beijing, China, 623-628 more…

2019

  • Baehr, Johanna; Bernardini, Alessandro; Sigl, Georg; Schlichtmann, Ulf: Machine Learning and Structural Characteristics for Reverse Engineering. 24th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference Conference (ASPDAC’19), 2019Tokyo, Japan more…
  • Brunner, M. and Baehr, J. and Sigl, G.: Improving on State Register Identification in Sequential Hardware Reverse Engineering. 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), 2019Washington, D.C., USA more…

2018

  • Werner, M.; Lippmann, B.; Baehr, J.; Gräb, H.: Reverse Engineering of Cryptographic Cores by Structural Interpretation Through Graph Analysis. 2018 IEEE 3rd International Verification and Security Workshop (IVSW), 2018Platja d’Aro, Costa Brava, Spain, 13-18 more…

Open Positions for Students

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