HAL: The Hardware Analyzer
HAL- Hardware Analyzer
Virtually all available research on netlist analysis operates on a graph-based representation of the netlist under inspection. At its core, HAL provides exactly that: A framework to parse netlists of arbitrary sources, e.g., FPGAs or ASICs, into a graph-based netlist representation and to provide the necessary built-in tools for traversal and analysis of the included gates and nets.
Our vision is that HAL becomes the hardware-reverse-engineering-equivalent of tools like IDA or Ghidra. We want HAL to enable a common baseline for researchers and analysts to improve the reproducibility of research results and abstract away recurring basic tasks such as netlist parsing etc.
- High performance thanks to the optimized C++ core
- Flexibility through built-in Python bindings
- Modularity via a C++ plugin system
- Stability is ensured via a rich test suite
HAL is actively developed by the Embedded Security group of the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy. Apart from multiple research projects, it is also used in our university lecture “Einführung ins Hardware Reverse Engineering” (Introduction to Hardware Reverse Engineering) at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB).
Features
- Natural directed graph representation of netlist elements and their connections
- Support for custom gate libraries
- High-performance thanks to optimized C++ core
- Modularity: write your own C++ Plugins for efficient netlist analysis and manipulation (e.g. via graph algorithms)
- A feature-rich GUI allowing for visual netlist inspection and interactive analysis
- An integrated Python shell to exploratively interact with netlist elements and to interface plugins from the GUI
