Reverse engineering (RE) is a widespread practice within engineering, and it is particularly relevant for discovering maliciousfunctionality in digital hardware components. In this paper, we discuss bitstream or firmware RE for field programable gate arrays (FPGAs). A bitstream establishes the configuration of the FPGA device fabric. Complete knowledge of both the physical device fabric and a specific bitstream should be sufficient to determine the complete configuration of the programmed FPGA. However, a significant challenge to bitstream RE arises because information about the FPGA fabric and interpretation of the bitstream is typically incomplete. The uncertainties limit the confidence in the correctness of any configuration determined through the RE process. This paper identifies representative sources of uncertainty in bitstream RE of FPGA devices.
Determining Confidence in FPGA Bitstream Reverse Engineering Results
2023-08-28
5499655 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Progressive Bitstream Transmission over Tandem Channels
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2005
|Assessing confidence in parallel simulation results
IEEE | 2013
|Progressive bitstream transmission over tandem channels
IEEE | 2005
|