Promoting the Acquisition of Hardware Reverse Engineering Skills

Abstract

This full research paper focuses on skill acquisition in Hardware Reverse Engineering (HRE) - an important field of cyber security. HRE is a prevalent technique routinely employed by security engineers (i) to detect malicious hardware manipulations, (ii) to conduct VLSI failure analysis, (iii) to identify IP infringements, and (iv) to perform competitive analyses. Even though the scientific community and industry have a high demand for HRE experts, there is a lack of educational courses. We developed a university-level HRE course based on general cognitive psychological research on skill acquisition, as research on the acquisition of HRE skills is lacking thus far. To investigate how novices acquire HRE skills in our course, we conducted two studies with students on different levels of prior knowledge. Our results show that cognitive factors (e.g., working memory), and prior experiences (e.g., in symmetric cryptography) influence the acquisition of HRE skills. We conclude by discussing implications for future HRE courses and by outlining ideas for future research that would lead to a more comprehensive understanding of skill acquisition in this important field of cyber security.

References in corpus (5)

• Hardware Reverse Engineering: Overview and Open Challenges
• A Look at the Dark Side of Hardware Reverse Engineering -- A Case Study
• Highway to HAL: Open-Sourcing the First Extendable Gate-Level Netlist Reverse Engineering Framework
• Teaching Hardware Reverse Engineering: Educational Guidelines and Practical Insights
• Towards Cognitive Obfuscation: Impeding Hardware Reverse Engineering Based on Psychological Insights

Cited by in corpus (1)

• I see an IC: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Study Human Problem-Solving Processes in Hardware Reverse Engineering