Hardware Honeypot: Setting Sequential Reverse Engineering on a Wrong Track
Reverse engineering of finite state machines is a serious threat when protecting designs against reverse engineering attacks. While most recent protection techniques rely on the security of a secret key, this work presents a new approach: hardware state machine honeypots. These honeypots lead the reverse engineering tools to a wrong, but for the tools highly attractive state machine, while the original state machine is made less attractive. The results show that state-of-the-art reverse engineering methods favor the highly attractive honeypot as state machine candidate or do no longer detect the correct, original state machine.
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