SoK: An Overview of Algorithmic Methods in IC Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering of integrated circuits (IC) serves an evergrowing need for both defensive and offensive applications, such as competitive analysis, IP theft evidence and hardware Trojan detection. The IC reverse engineering process comprises two phases, netlist extraction and specification discovery. The latter draws a particular research interest due to fundamental questions of the process, which are how to represent specification and how to measure success of the process. In this paper, we survey the state of the art in IC reverse engineering, focusing on the specification discovery. We generate a taxonomy of the published methods and algorithms, list the challenges and open questions and discuss future directions.