Reverse Engineering Circuits Using Behavioral Pattern Mining

Wenchao Li, Zach Wasson, and Sanjit A. Seshia. Reverse Engineering Circuits Using Behavioral Pattern Mining. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), June 2012.

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Abstract

Systems are increasingly being constructed from off-the-shelf components acquired through a globally distributed, untrusted supply chain. The lack of trust in these components necessitates additional validation of the components before use. Additionally, hardware trojans are becoming a pressing concern. In this paper, we present a novel formalism and method to systematically derive the high-level function of an unknown circuit component given its gate-level netlist. We define the high-level description of a circuit as an interconnection of instantiations of abstract library components characterized using logical specifications. The proposed approach is based on mining interesting behavioral patterns from the simulation traces of a gate-level netlist, and representing them as a pattern graph. A similar pattern graph is also generated for library components. Our method first computes input-output signal correspondences via subgraph isomorphism on the pattern graphs. The general function of the unknown circuit is then determined by finding the closest match in the component library, by model checking the unknown circuit against each logical specification.We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on publicly-available circuits.

BibTeX

@InProceedings{li-host12,
  author = 	 {Wenchao Li and Zach Wasson and Sanjit A. Seshia},
  title = 	 {Reverse Engineering Circuits Using Behavioral Pattern Mining},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST)},
  month = {June},
  year = 	 {2012},
  abstract = {Systems are increasingly being constructed from 
off-the-shelf components acquired through a globally 
distributed, untrusted supply chain. The lack of trust in these 
components necessitates additional validation 
of the components before use. Additionally, 
hardware trojans are becoming a pressing concern. 
In this paper, we present a novel formalism and method to 
systematically derive the high-level function of an unknown circuit 
component given its gate-level netlist. 
We define the high-level description of a circuit as an interconnection 
of instantiations of abstract library components characterized using 
logical specifications. 
The proposed approach is based on mining interesting behavioral patterns from 
the simulation traces of a gate-level netlist, and representing them as 
a pattern graph. A similar pattern graph is also generated for library 
components. 
Our method first computes input-output signal correspondences via subgraph isomorphism on the pattern graphs. 
The general function of the unknown circuit is then determined by 
finding the closest match in the component library, by model checking the unknown circuit against each logical specification.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on publicly-available circuits.},
}