HAL - The Open-Source Hardware Analyzer

(A dive into the foundations of hardware reverse engineering and our netlist analysis framework HAL) Since the Snowden revelations the fear of stealthy hardware manipulations is no longer regarded as far fetched. This fear is also reflected in the massive discussions sparked by last year's Bloomberg allegations on a supposed hardware spy implant on Supermicro serverboards or the recent USA ban on Huawei telecommunication equipment. Hardware reverse engineering (HRE) is a promising method to detect such manipulations or hidden backdoors. However, HRE is a highly complex and cumbersome task. It takes months of work as well as expensive equipment to even obtain the netlist of a chip, the equivalent to the binary in software reverse engineering (SRE). In contrast to SRE where various paid or open-source tools for binary analysis exist, e.g., IDA Pro or Ghidra, in HRE simply no tool for netlist analysis were available - neither commercial, nor free. To close this gap, researchers from the Ruhr University Bochum developed HAL, the first open-source netlist analysis framework. In this talk, we start with a basic introduction into the challenges of HRE. Then, we demonstrate the capabilities of HAL before giving a brief overview on our current research with HAL.