Talk Title:

Building a Silicon Analysis Toolkit

Abstract:

It's more important than ever to look inside microchips to find vulnerabilities or verify authenticity. You don't need to send your parts to a lab, you can BUILD the lab! It's easier than you think.

In this talk I will show you one way to make fuming nitric acid to gain access to the silicon within microchips. Then, how to build and adapt an open source motorized stage for use with an off the shelf microscope to create detailed images of that silicon. And finally, techniques to de-cap chips without removing them from their PCB for in-circuit experiments.

Speaker Bio:

Hash Salehi

Interested in electronics and taking things apart since he was a kid, Hash enjoys reverse engineering things to understand how they work and how they can be made to work differently than they were originally intended.

Long ago, Hash worked on reverse engineering the Neato XV-11 LIDAR and more recently Landis+Gyr Smart Meters. He presented his work decoding their frequency hopping protocol at the GNURadio conference and DEFCON ICS Village in 2021.

You can find more on his RECESSIM Reverse Engineering YouTube channel, or his bio on the RECESSIM Wiki.

https://www.youtube.com/@RECESSIM
https://wiki.recessim.com/view/User:Hash