Towards Cognitive Obfuscation

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" summary

A three-phase model of hardware reverse engineering emerges: candidate identification, candidate verification and realization; participants (students plus one expert) find all 50 potential watermark components and finish the task in 3–6.5 hours, spending 58% of time in verification (~2.5 hours). The study records interactions in the Hardware Analyzer HELL (MIT GitHub), uses a watermark hidden in LUTs, finds higher working-memory scores trend toward faster solutions, and proposes obfuscation primitives (dummy wires, camouflaged gates) to inflate candidate sets and overload working memory.

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" chapters (23)

1. 0:00Intro
2. 0:38Interdisciplinary Research Team
3. 1:45Purposes of Hardware Reverse Engineering (Quadir et al., 2016)
4. 4:02Netlist Analysis
5. 4:46Hardware Reverse Engineering Strategy
6. 6:17Our Model of Hardware Reverse Engineering
7. 8:01Psychological View on Reverse Engineering
8. 8:11Psychological View on HRE
9. 9:06Hardware Reverse Engineering = Problem Solving
10. 9:58Research of Lee & Johnson-Laird (2013)
11. 11:31Evaluation of Lee & Johnson-Laird (2013)
12. 12:58Research Gap and Research Questions
13. 13:46User Study & Participants
14. 14:53Variables
15. 15:33Study Task: Breaking Watermarks
16. 16:23HRE Tool HAL (Fyrbiak et al., 2018)
17. 17:17Detection of 3 Phases
18. 17:57RQ1: Solution Time per Phase
19. 18:52Cognitive Factors
20. 20:23Novel Approach: Cognitive Obfuscation
21. 21:30Why Obfuscation?
22. 21:57Implications for Cognitive Obfuscation
23. 22:51Conclusion & Future Work

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