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DOE OSTI · 1345466

Non-Destructive State Machine Reverse Engineering

Smith, Jessica L.
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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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BibTeXRIS

Smith, Jessica L.. 2013-10-10. Non-Destructive State Machine Reverse Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/isrcs.2013.6623762

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