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

Posted Sep 20th 2005 5:50AM by Eliot Phillips

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.

Reader Comments

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

Posted at 3:08PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Nate

2. 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 3:08PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Karl

3. 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 3:08PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Stew

4. i wanna learn what does a hacker do?

Posted at 3:08PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by emre

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