Yeah, and for PCB's which are worthy of reverse engineering, there is still A LOT of work to do beyond getting the netlist and components. On the other hand ci

Yeah, and for PCB's which are worthy of reverse engineering, there is still A LOT of work to do beyond getting the netlist and components. On the other hand circuit designs, in most cases, closely follow datasheet recommendations or reference designs around the core components, so there's a lot of angles that can solve this problem. The paper, however, seems to be motivated for goals like penetration testing and MITM attacks on hardware _without_ destroying it-- like what "Agent Q" might do in a James Bond film (after Bond is able to pocket the circuit board and deliver it to the lab in an ESD safe pouch). The far more common and boring scenario would be reverse engineering for the purpose of knock-off products. Not very sexy. Also, do-able in many cases by just noting a few key components, extracting eeprom/flash content and then consulting datasheets.