Title pages

Abstract

Hardware security relies on the difficulty of reverse engineering to protect critical information. While virtually anything can be reverse engineered given enough time and money, the question usually is: “is it worth it?” The intellectual property industry uses reverse engineering to drive innovation, to protect patented inventions, and to enforce copyright and trade secret rights. Intellectual property transactions, licensing, and litigation, relies on technical information to drive the patent assertion and monetization process. Others use reverse engineering for more nefarious purposes. The cost and potential benefit of a reverse engineering approach must be considered before embarking on a complex project. The continuous scaling of the complexity and level of integration of semiconductor devices and systems presents major challenges to the analysis of the technological principles of a system. Hardware encryption and software embedded in integrated circuits, together with hardware and software obfuscation techniques add additional layers of difficulty to the analysis. Today, very sophisticated techniques are used to analyze the function, structure and operation of integrated circuits and systems. This presentation gives examples of state-of-the-art reverse engineering techniques for hardware and software system analysis, transistor level-to-schematic circuit extraction, and semiconductor fabrication process analysis. The presentation concludes with a discussion of some of the best practices in system design that can be used to create substantial barriers to the success of a reverse engineering attack. Biography Dr. Adams joined TAEUS International Corporation in 1993. He has over thirty years experience in managing the definition, development, and transfer of new products and technologies. Dr. Adams has held senior engineering and management positions with Sandia National Laboratories, INMOS, Monolithic Memories, United Technologies, and TAEUS, and has served as an expert witness in copyright, trade secret, and patent infringement cases. His expertise includes strategic planning and program management, patent evaluation and analysis, forensic engineering, process integration, device physics, microelectronic reliability and failure analysis, electronic materials, semiconductor memories and microprocessors, software, management of quality, and radiation effects in microelectronics. Dr. Adams holds three patents in integrated circuit technology. He is listed in Who’s Who in Technology Today, 1984–1995 and has received the TOBIE Award for most significant R&D