SoK: From Silicon to Netlist and Beyond $-$ Two Decades of Hardware Reverse Engineering Research

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 18 Mar 2026] SoK: From Silicon to Netlist and Beyond - Two Decades of Hardware Reverse Engineering Research Zehra Karadağ, Simon Klix, René Walendy, Felix Hahn, Kolja Dorschel, Julian Speith, Christof Paar, Steffen Becker As hardware serves as the root of trust in modern computing systems, Hardware Reverse Engineering (HRE) is foundational for security assurance. In practice, HRE enables critical security applications, including design verification, supply-chain assurance, and vulnerability discovery. Over the past two decades, academic research on Integrated Circuit (IC), Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), and netlist reverse engineering has steadily grown. However, knowledge remains fragmented across domains and communities, which complicates assessing the state of the art and hampers identifying shared research challenges. In this paper, we present a systematization of knowledge based on an in-depth analysis of 187 peer-reviewed publications. Using this corpus, we characterize technical methods across the HRE workflow and identify technical and organizational challenges that impede research progress. We analyze all 30 artifacts from our corpus using established artifact evaluation practices. Key results could be reproduced for only seven publications (4%). Based on our findings, we derive stakeholder-centric recommendations for academia, industry, and government to enable more coordinated and reproducible HRE research. These recommendations target three cross-cutting opportunities: (i) improving reproducibility and reuse via artifact-centric practices, (ii) enabling rigorous comparability through standardized benchmarks and evaluation metrics, and (iii) improving legal clarity for public HRE research. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2603.17883 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.17883v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.17883 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Zehra Karadağ [view email] [v1] Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:05:35 UTC (281 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs 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?)