DOE OSTI · 1345466
Non-Destructive State Machine Reverse Engineering
Abstract
Most of the integrated circuits (ICs) that are in electronic systems today are based on state machines. We are taking advantage of this to develop a hardware reverse engineering method that discovers the IC’s underlying state machine, rather than its transistors and gates. While there are other methods for destructively reverse engineering ICs or for non-destructively characterizing ICs, our method offers a fast and accurate analysis while remaining non-destructive. To do this, we present an intelligent brute-force method of exploring the logic of the IC using only the input and outputs designed into the IC - the I/O pins. From this exploration, we can apply a folding algorithm to discover the designed state machine.
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Smith, Jessica L.. 2013-10-10. Non-Destructive State Machine Reverse Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/isrcs.2013.6623762
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