Hardware Honeypot: Setting Sequential Reverse Engineering on a Wrong Track. (arXiv:2305.03707v1 [cs.CR])

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 …

attacks engineering finite state hardware honeypot honeypots key machine machines protecting protection reverse reverse engineering secret secret key security serious state techniques threat tools work