CRESS: Quantifying Vulnerabilities of Attack Scenarios in Hardware Reverse Engineering

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 3 Jun 2026] CRESS: Quantifying Vulnerabilities of Attack Scenarios in Hardware Reverse Engineering Alexander Hepp, Matthias Ludwig, Michaela Brunner, Johanna Baehr, Georg Sigl The safety, security, and reliability of microelectronic systems depend on a trustworthy, secured supply chain and design flow. Globally distributed supply chains or unintentional design weaknesses leave the door open for attacks on the hardware level. These scenarios encompass counterfeiting, hardware trojans, or on-device attacks. For these, hardware reverse engineering (RE) results play a pivotal role. The ongoing publication of new RE-involved attacks motivated the development of the common RE scoring system (CRESS). The system enables a general classification of RE-involved scenarios for a common, consistent rating. In this work, the originally qualitative system is extended to a quantitative system. We performed an extensive interview study with experts in the field. The interview results allowed us to derive weights that measure the severity of different RE-involved attack categories. The weights form an equation that quantifies scenarios, resulting in the severity-indicating CRESS score. The score enables the coherent rating of novel scenarios, renders them comparable, and supports the development of effective countermeasures. To showcase the effectiveness of the quantitative CRESS Score, six selected case studies are rated qualitatively and quantitatively. The CRESS Score proves to be significantly more expressive than the industry-standard Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Systems and Control (eess.SY) Cite as: arXiv:2606.05459 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.05459v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.05459 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Alexander Hepp [view email] [v1] Wed, 3 Jun 2026 21:34:57 UTC (535 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.SY eess eess.SY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)