VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Jörn Langheinrich
dblp:364/0333
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
0as first author
1since 2021 · last 2024
—ORCID · unresolved
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Security and privacy · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Network and information security
1 paper |
Hardware security and side channels · 100% | |
| Computer architecture, parallel and distributed computing, and storage systems
1 paper |
Reconfigurable computing and FPGAs · 62% Electronic design automation · 38% |
Topics — the 4 heaviest of 5, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Hardware security and side channels › integrated circuit security
FPGA security |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Stealing Maggie's Secrets-On the Challenges of IP Theft Through FPGA Reverse Engineering · CCS 2024 |
Hardware security and side channels
intellectual property theft |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Stealing Maggie's Secrets-On the Challenges of IP Theft Through FPGA Reverse Engineering · CCS 2024 |
Electronic design automation › hardware verification and test
hardware verification |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | Stealing Maggie's Secrets-On the Challenges of IP Theft Through FPGA Reverse Engineering · CCS 2024 |
Electronic design automation › circuit analysis
netlist analysis |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | Stealing Maggie's Secrets-On the Challenges of IP Theft Through FPGA Reverse Engineering · CCS 2024 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
reverse engineering · 1.5case study · 1.5
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Stealing Maggie's Secrets-On the Challenges of IP Theft Through FPGA Reverse EngineeringabstractIntellectual Property (IP) theft is a cause of major financial and reputational damage, reportedly in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars annually in the U.S. alone. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are particularly exposed to IP theft, because their configuration file contains the IP in a proprietary format that can be mapped to a gate-level netlist with moderate effort. Despite this threat, the scientific understanding of this issue lacks behind reality, thereby preventing an in-depth assessment of IP theft from FPGAs in academia. We address this discrepancy through a real-world case study on a Lattice iCE40 FPGA found inside iPhone 7. Apple refers to this FPGA as Maggie. By reverse engineering the proprietary signal-processing algorithm implemented on Maggie, we generate novel insights into the actual efforts required to commit FPGA IP theft and the challenges an attacker faces on the way. Informed by our case study, we then introduce generalized netlist reverse engineering techniques that drastically reduce the required manual effort and are applicable across a diverse spectrum of FPGA implementations and architectures. We evaluate these techniques on six benchmarks that are representative of different FPGA applications and have been synthesized for Xilinx and Lattice FPGAs, as well as in an end-to-end white-box case study. Finally, we provide a comprehensive open-source tool suite of netlist reverse engineering techniques to foster future research, enable the community to perform realistic threat assessments, and facilitate the evaluation of novel countermeasures. Simon Klix, Nils Albartus, Julian Speith, Paul Staat, Alice Verstege, Annika Wilde, Daniel Lammers, Jörn Langheinrich, Christian Kison, Sebastian Sester, Daniel E. Holcomb, Christof Paar |
CCS | 8 |