Highway to HAL: Open-Sourcing the First Extendable Gate-Level Netlist Reverse Engineering Framework
This provides a foundational tool for researchers and practitioners in hardware security to detect malicious manipulations in IoT devices, though it is incremental as it builds on existing reverse engineering advancements.
The authors tackled the lack of publicly available software frameworks for analyzing gate-level netlists in hardware reverse engineering by developing HAL, the first open-source, gate-library agnostic framework, and demonstrated its workflow through two case studies.
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 prevalent technique to detect such manipulations. Over the last years, an active research community has significantly advanced the field of hardware reverse engineering. Notably, many open research questions regarding the extraction of functionally correct netlists from Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) have been tackled. In order to facilitate further analysis of recovered netlists, a software framework is required, serving as the foundation for specialized algorithms. Currently, no such framework is publicly available. Therefore, we provide the first open-source gate-library agnostic framework for gate-level netlist analysis. In this positional paper, we demonstrate the workflow of our modular framework HAL on the basis of two case studies and provide profound insights on its technical foundations.