Hacking IC's and PCB's - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 24, 2014, 11:54:44 am
content: http://www.break-ic.com/It means they could provide services to pirates and intellectual property thieves. Of course, they might be a legitimate company, because they do advertise their address and phone numbers.Is there any way to thwart all efforts for a product not to be reverse engineered? My guess is it is near impossible.

author: jeremy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 24, 2014, 11:59:20 am
content: Quote from: VK3DRB on October 24, 2014, 11:54:44 amDon't think so, can you make software that is "unhackable"?. Some other more reputable looking companies:http://www.flylogic.net/http://www.chipworks.com/

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 24, 2014, 12:01:37 pm
content: Quote from: VK3DRB on October 24, 2014, 11:54:44 amThere are many reasons why someone wants to probe into the workings of another company's devices. Most of them legitimate according to the law. Any sane semiconductor company at least regularly decaps competing devices to benchmark their own performance.

author: Bored@Work
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 24, 2014, 09:51:13 pm
content: Quote from: VK3DRB on October 24, 2014, 11:54:44 amYou found one, but there are hundreds of such companies around.

author: nitro2k01
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 25, 2014, 04:15:35 am
content: Unhackable chips don't exist. If you're lucky, there's a vulnerability in the chip that you can abuse to easily bypass the readout protection and get whatever data you want. If there isn't, there may be glitching techniques you can use, overclocking, such as short reset pulses, fast pulses outside the voltage rails. Doing that kind of thing may cause a device to be reset without setting the protection bits which are supposed to prevent read-out of the memory.If that doesn't work, you can dissolve the chip carrier with nitric acid and attack the die. The die consists of silicon substrate, on which you imprint transistors, and then on top of that a varying number of metals layers, much like a PCB but smaller. The top (metal) side can then be probed with sharp needles once the top of the chip carrier is removed. An electron microscope is also helpful here, as it can mark continuity between metal traces. A similar instrument is a FIB (focused ion beam) which allows you to etch and deposit metal onto the die, atom by atom.Recently, with the help of precision milling equipment, someone made a so called back side attack, where they ground away silicon from the back side of the die (the substrate) until reaching right below the transistor. Since transistors have a tendency to emit near IR light when turned on, this could be used to collect some amount of data from a device using a relatively ordinary optical camera.So no, there are no safe chips. There are (from the perspective of a chip reverse engineer) only unsafe chips, and chips that require a time investment to break. They do thing like put dummy metal layers over the regular metal layers, that the chip can check if they still exist. Or randomize the execution timings of a CPU core to confuse reverse engineers. If you are interested in the topic, I recommend the work of Chris Tarnovsky of Flylogic. He started cracking TV smartcards back in the '90s, and never stopped. He has spoken at several computer security conferences about these things.For example:

author: RLBennett
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: November 07, 2014, 02:42:05 am
content: Seems like a monpoly when a manufaturer wants to have all repairs performed by their own company. Worked for PageNet and started a repair facility. Companies charged a flat rate of hundreds to thousands depending on the which "black box" need repairs. $800 to replace an RS232 smd chip!!!? Lots of other companies that do the same thing with their equipment. No schematics or other technical literature. No problem, reverse engineer it!

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 08, 2014, 03:15:29 pm
content: Well if it matters that much seal the board with tamper proof stuff like they used in Mike's credit card reader teardown. Lots of volatile memory dipped in epoxy with embedded fragile wires.

author: janengelbrecht
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 08, 2014, 04:58:11 pm
content: I think all products that dont have avaible service manuals with schematics and source code listings (if needed!) should be reverse engineered and the info placed in public on the internet

author: KG7AMV
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 15, 2014, 03:56:52 am
content: Quote from: janengelbrecht on November 08, 2014, 04:58:11 pmI agree...