Reverse engineering (RE) of finite state machines (FSMs) is a serious threat when protecting designs against RE attacks. While most recent protection techniques rely on the security of a secret key, this work presents a new approach: hardware FSM honeypots. These honeypots lead the RE tools to a wrong but, for the tools, very attractive FSM, while making the original FSM less attractive. The results show that state-of-the-art RE methods favor the highly attractive honeypot as FSM candidate or do no longer detect the correct, original FSM.

翻译：有限状态机（FSM）的逆向工程（RE）是保护设计免受逆向工程攻击时面临的严重威胁。虽然近期大多数防护技术依赖于密钥的安全性，但本研究提出了一种新方法：硬件FSM蜜罐。这些蜜罐能将逆向工程工具引导至一个错误但极具吸引力的FSM，同时使原始FSM的吸引力降低。结果表明，现有最先进的逆向工程方法要么优先选择高吸引力的蜜罐作为FSM候选，要么无法再检测到正确的原始FSM。