  Since underlying hardware components form the basis of trust in virtually any
computing system, security failures in hardware pose a devastating threat to
our daily lives. Hardware reverse engineering is commonly employed by security
engineers in order to identify security vulnerabilities, to detect IP
violations, or to conduct very-large-scale integration (VLSI) failure analysis.
Even though industry and the scientific community demand experts with expertise
in hardware reverse engineering, there is a lack of educational offerings, and
existing training is almost entirely unstructured and on the job. To the best
of our knowledge, we have developed the first course to systematically teach
students hardware reverse engineering based on insights from the fields of
educational research, cognitive science, and hardware security. The
contribution of our work is threefold: (1) we propose underlying educational
guidelines for practice-oriented courses which teach hardware reverse
engineering; (2) we develop such a lab course with a special focus on
gate-level netlist reverse engineering and provide the required tools to
support it; (3) we conduct an educational evaluation of our pilot course. Based
on our results, we provide valuable insights on the structure and content
necessary to design and teach future courses on hardware reverse engineering.
