Understanding Millions of Gates

Explore the world of integrated circuit reverse engineering in this 36-minute conference talk from the 36th Chaos Communication Congress (36C3). Gain an introduction to IC reverse engineering aimed at non-chip-reverse-engineers, focusing on understanding what millions of logical gates represent. Learn about the motivations behind chip reverse engineering for both manufacturing companies and end-users, including IP overproduction, counterfeits, hardware trojans, and IC trust. Discover the reverse engineering workflow, from decapsulation to netlist abstraction, with emphasis on methods used in research to interpret netlists. Delve into relevant theories such as circuit design, formal verification, and graph theory. Examine current ideas for making reverse engineering more challenging and potential attacks on these methods. Get insights into the research side of reverse engineering that can be performed at home, rather than the resource-intensive approaches used by large companies.