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The Old Frontier of Reverse Engineering: Netlist Partitioning

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Abstract

Without access to high-level details of commercialized integrated circuits (IC), it might be impossible to find potential design flaws or limiting use cases. To assist in high-level recovery, many IC reverse engineering solutions have been proposed. This paper focuses on a hard problem facing reverse engineering researchers, that of netlist partitioning. To assist in this endeavor, we propose our own methods that focus on signal matching by analyzing fan-in trees. This analysis extends to representing signal’s fan-ins numerically by their structural properties. These values go through certain common dimension reducing algorithms; clustering practices are also leveraged to assist in our proposed partitioning process. Adversely researchers have almost never agreed on the metric for evaluating such netlist partitioning methods. To keep our results unbiased, we leverage the Normalize Mutual Information (NMI) to evaluate our proposed partitioning method and compare its results with other techniques that aim to solve the same problem. Lastly, we show how our proposed methods are capable of effectively partition netlists of larger scale than previously proposed schemes.

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Notes

  1. The netlist partitioning mentioned in the paper involves breaking the signals of a netlist into smaller disjoint subsets that can represent either different words, modules, or even IPs. It should not be confused with the optimization problem presented in [9] or [10].

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Funding

The work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF-1812071, NSF-1703602).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 32816, USA

    Travis Meade & Shaojie Zhang

  2. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Kaveh Shamsi & Yier Jin

  3. University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, 72701, USA

    Thao Le & Jia Di

Authors
  1. Travis Meade
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  2. Kaveh Shamsi
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Correspondence to Yier Jin.

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Meade, T., Shamsi, K., Le, T. et al. The Old Frontier of Reverse Engineering: Netlist Partitioning. J Hardw Syst Secur 2, 201–213 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41635-018-0043-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41635-018-0043-4

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