SoK: From Silicon to Netlist and Beyond $-$ Two Decades of Hardware Reverse Engineering Research
This work addresses the problem of fragmented and irreproducible research in hardware security for academia, industry, and government, with incremental contributions through stakeholder recommendations.
The paper tackles the fragmentation and reproducibility issues in hardware reverse engineering (HRE) research by systematizing knowledge from 187 publications, finding that only 4% of artifacts could be reproduced.
As hardware serves as the root of trust in modern computing systems, Hardware Reverse Engineering (HRE) is foundational for security assurance. In practice, HRE enables critical security applications, including design verification, supply-chain assurance, and vulnerability discovery. Over the past two decades, academic research on Integrated Circuit (IC), Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), and netlist reverse engineering has steadily grown. However, knowledge remains fragmented across domains and communities, which complicates assessing the state of the art and hampers identifying shared research challenges. In this paper, we present a systematization of knowledge based on an in-depth analysis of 187 peer-reviewed publications. Using this corpus, we characterize technical methods across the HRE workflow and identify technical and organizational challenges that impede research progress. We analyze all 30 artifacts from our corpus using established artifact evaluation practices. Key results could be reproduced for only seven publications (4%). Based on our findings, we derive stakeholder-centric recommendations for academia, industry, and government to enable more coordinated and reproducible HRE research. These recommendations target three cross-cutting opportunities: (i) improving reproducibility and reuse via artifact-centric practices, (ii) enabling rigorous comparability through standardized benchmarks and evaluation metrics, and (iii) improving legal clarity for public HRE research.