Netlist reverse engineering for high-level functionality reconstruction

8 years 1 months ago

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Abstract— In a modern IC design ﬂow, from speciﬁcation development to chip fabrication, various security threats are emergent. Of particular concern are modiﬁcations made to third-party IP cores and commercial oﬀ-the-shelf (COTS) chips where no golden models are available for comparisons. Toward this direction, we develop a tool, named Reverse Engineering Finite State Machine (REFSM), that helps end-users reconstruct a high-level description of the control logic from a ﬂattened netlist. We demonstrate that REFSM eﬀectively recovers circuit control logic from netlists with varying degrees of complexity. Experimental results also showed that the developed tool can easily identify malicious logic from a ﬂattened (or even obfuscated) netlist. If combined with chip level reverse engineering techniques, the developed REFSM tool can help detect the insertion of hardware Trojans in fabricated circuits.

Travis Meade, Shaojie Zhang, Yier Jin

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