An introduction to hardware reverse engineering and HAL
- Speaker: Simon Klix
- Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy
- email: simon.klix@mpi-sp.org
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Abstract
This talk offers a beginner-friendly introduction to the field of hardware reverse engineering, an essential capability for ensuring trust in hardware, which supply chains span the whole globe. It highlights the challenges reverse engineers face when analyzing integrated circuits to understand their structure and function. The main focus is on HAL, an open-source hardware reverse engineering framework that helps explore gate-level netlists. The talk walks through HAL's core features and how it supports tasks like graph exploration and interactive visualization. Recent updates to the framework, including new plugins and improvements in automation, are also covered. Additionally, it showcases recent studies and practical use cases where HAL has played a central role.
If you want to learn more about hardware reverse engineering or connect with industry and academia in the hardware reverse engineering space consider joining our hardware reverse engineering workshop HARRIS in 2026.
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Software
The Talk covers the hardware analyzer software HAL developed at Max Planck Institute for Security in Privacy in Bochum. HAL is primairly a tool for netlist analysis written in c++ but also exposes python bindings for many functions and comes with a GUI.
- Github page: https://github.com/emsec/hal