HAWKEYE – Recovering Symmetric Cryptography From Hardware Circuits
summary
An automated netlist analyzer called Hawkeye finds symmetric cipher implementations by structural graph reduction to flip‑flop connections, extracting round functions and matching S‑boxes against a database. It runs as a plugin to the Hill framework, flags SPN/AR/Feistel candidates, and on an OpenTitan FPGA netlist of 420,000 gates it returns useful hits in 44 seconds on a laptop. It reliably finds S‑box based rounds but struggles with shift‑register ciphers, heavy masking, and very large states (e.g., SH3 timeouts).
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction to Hawkeye
- 3:02Hardware reverse engineering
- 4:15Cryptographic implementations
- 8:07Detection properties
- 11:45Multi-stage approach
- 13:12Structural candidate search
- 16:33Functional candidate analysis
- 19:13Evaluation on benchmarks
- 20:52Conclusion and Q&A
