alt Hacker NewsCan you reverse engineer an ASIC?
Comments
Hasn’t Ken Shirriff been doing this for quite a while? (:->
I've looked at Visual 6502 and it's way beyond me. I've even looked at the scans where it shows how they severed the connection to disable 6502 decimal mode on the NES.
Getting a logic-gate-level netlist from a GDS is trivial with industry standard chip design tools. Circuit designers do this every day. The hardest part will be reverse engineering the functionality.
I wish I had more time and I'd throw Calibre at it.
At my uni, 15 years ago, one postdoc reverse engineered NVIDIA chip and wrote more performant compiler. He did that by connecting oscyloscops to all chip's outputs and started with applying random current on inputs. Using ML and his genius he rediscoverd all opcodes including a few hidden ones. Eventually he got hired by some company that was doing a lot of GPU on supercomputers.
What prerequisites I need to solve this puzzle? I don't have much knowledge in electrical engineering.
Is there something like an Extract-SPICE tool that takes a circuit and gives you back a text rendering of it ?
looks like they didn't post any blog post about 2nd NN challenge (https://huggingface.co/spaces/jane-street/droppedaneuralnet)
I was waiting for some writeup about permutation decyphering
30 minutes with /goal for the solution from Sol w/ high.
In a simplified scenario (not too far from this)? Yeah, we've done that in CTFs almost a decade ago.
That sounds like a fun challenge. Feels a lot more tractable than the neural net one.
people who can do this stuff are super-smartypants
but reminds me how we're going to find out on an industrial level when the Saudis give China some nvidia chips they were grifted
they've cloned lots of chips before but nothing that advanced
Is this the chip they used to steal money from the Indian stock market until they got banned from India?
I thought the article was going to be about how people scan chips
Rapid Chip Reverse Engineering Using Laser, Focused ion beams, and Scanning electron microscope https://academic.oup.com/mam/article/30/Supplement_1/ozae044...
FIBs are also used to test modifications before doing a respin. I'm still in awe that matter can be manipulated so precisely