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.

翻译：由于硬件是现代计算系统中信任的根基，硬件逆向工程（HRE）是安全保障的基础。实践中，HRE支持关键安全应用，包括设计验证、供应链保障和漏洞发现。过去二十年中，关于集成电路（IC）、现场可编程门阵列（FPGA）和网表逆向工程的学术研究稳步增长。然而，相关知识仍因领域和学术社群而异，这既妨碍了对当前技术水平的评估，也阻碍了对共同研究挑战的识别。本文基于对187篇同行评审出版物的深入分析，提出知识系统化。利用该语料库，我们表征了HRE工作流程中的技术方法，并识别出阻碍研究进展的技术与组织挑战。我们采用成熟的工件评估实践，分析了语料库中的所有30个工件，仅能复现七个出版物（4%）的关键结果。基于研究发现，我们针对学术界、产业界和政府部门提出了以利益相关者为中心的建议，以推动更协调、可复现的HRE研究。这些建议聚焦三个跨领域契机：（i）通过以工件为中心的实践提升可复现性与复用性，（ii）通过标准化基准与评估指标实现严格的可比性，（iii）提升公开HRE研究的法律清晰度。