TY - JOUR
T1 - Recent advances in FPGA reverse engineering
AU - Yu, Hoyoung
AU - Lee, Hansol
AU - Lee, Sangil
AU - Kim, Youngmin
AU - Lee, Hyung Min
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported as part of Military Crypto Research Center (UD170109ED) funded by Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) and Agency for Defense Development (ADD).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
PY - 2018/10/22
Y1 - 2018/10/22
N2 - In this paper, we review recent advances in reverse engineering with an emphasis on FPGA devices and experimentally verified advantages and limitations of reverse engineering tools. The paper first introduces essential components for programming Xilinx FPGAs (Xilinx, San Jose, CA, USA), such as Xilinx Design Language (XDL), XDL Report (XDLRC), and bitstream. Then, reverse engineering tools (Debit, BIL, and Bit2ncd), which extract the bitstream from the external memory to the FPGA and utilize it to recover the netlist, are reviewed, and their limitations are discussed. This paper also covers supplementary tools (Rapidsmith) that can adjust the FPGA design flow to support reverse engineering. Finally, reverse engineering projects for non-Xilinx products, such as Lattice FPGAs (Icestorm) and Altera FPGAs (QUIP), are introduced to compare the reverse engineering capabilities by various commercial FPGA products.
AB - In this paper, we review recent advances in reverse engineering with an emphasis on FPGA devices and experimentally verified advantages and limitations of reverse engineering tools. The paper first introduces essential components for programming Xilinx FPGAs (Xilinx, San Jose, CA, USA), such as Xilinx Design Language (XDL), XDL Report (XDLRC), and bitstream. Then, reverse engineering tools (Debit, BIL, and Bit2ncd), which extract the bitstream from the external memory to the FPGA and utilize it to recover the netlist, are reviewed, and their limitations are discussed. This paper also covers supplementary tools (Rapidsmith) that can adjust the FPGA design flow to support reverse engineering. Finally, reverse engineering projects for non-Xilinx products, such as Lattice FPGAs (Icestorm) and Altera FPGAs (QUIP), are introduced to compare the reverse engineering capabilities by various commercial FPGA products.
KW - Bitstream
KW - FPGA
KW - Hardware security
KW - Netlists
KW - Reverse engineering
KW - Xilinx
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85056249297&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3390/electronics7100246
DO - 10.3390/electronics7100246
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85056249297
SN - 2079-9292
VL - 7
JO - Electronics (Switzerland)
JF - Electronics (Switzerland)
IS - 10
M1 - 246
ER -