TC7 day 2 – Hacking silicon: secrets behind the epoxy curtain

posted Sep 20th 2005 5:50am by Eliot Phillips
filed under: Uncategorized

bunnie
UPDATE: Slides

This was probably my favorite talk at the conference and I hadn’t even planned on going till someone pointed out what bunnie’s previous work was. There are a couple reasons why bunnie enjoys reverse engineering silicon: It is constrained by physics, silicon is hard enough to design before thinking about security, and the chips have to be reverse engineered during the production process. He has a really interesting example on his blog of how he hacked the PIC18F1320 which will give you a good overview of the process.

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Comments [5]

Reader Comments

Talk about complicated.

Yikes.

Sending a PIC away to MEFAS and messing with the internal parts is definitely a lazy-afternoon-grade project. :P

Posted at 7:50 pm on Sep 20th, 2005 by Stew

Hacking silicon may become significantly harder in the future. A while ago, there was a talk at the University of Washington on creating a truly secure chip.

A research team at MIT has developed a way to derive a unique chip ID from the inherent variances in manufacturing. Essentially, they measure the amount of time a signal takes to propagate through a series of multiplexers. The evil genius of this scheme is that any attempts to probe the chip while it’s computing the ID will change the physical properties of the chip, and thus change the unique ID!

You can listen to or watch the talk here: http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/details.cgi?id=385

Posted at 9:21 pm on Sep 20th, 2005 by Karl

As an electrical engineer, this story about hacking a PIC was awesome. Very awesome.

Posted at 9:45 pm on Sep 22nd, 2005 by Nate

i wanna learn what does a hacker do?

Posted at 9:45 am on Nov 26th, 2005 by emre

@emre:

Anything they want to. Hacking is not limited to a single discipline, but to an ideal of discipline. They strive for things ranging from brilliance to “just making it work” with what they have. They tend to bend or break set rules when they do this, or stay inside the lines, depending on what needs to be done. The hacking ideal states that there are no such things as “no-win” scenarios; it is about ingenuity, cunning, knowledge, experience, and – sometimes – just a little dash of audacity.

If you want to learn about what hackers do, just keep poking around the site. You’ll get it eventually.

Posted at 5:40 pm on Jul 27th, 2009 by shadeofsound23