Towards Cognitive Obfuscation: Impeding Hardware Reverse Engineering Based on Psychological Insights
This addresses the problem of hardware security for designers and analysts by introducing a novel approach, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing obfuscation concepts with a psychological twist.
The paper tackles the lack of tools for hardware reverse engineering by proposing cognitive obfuscation, which leverages psychological insights to create problems difficult for human analysts, aiming to develop stronger obfuscation techniques and new quantification metrics.
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, countermeasures against reversing are evaluated solely against mathematical models. Our research goal is the establishment of cognitive obfuscation based on the exploration of underlying psychological processes. We aim to identify problems which are hard to solve for human analysts and derive novel quantification metrics, thus enabling stronger obfuscation techniques.