Home / Series / Chaos Communication Congress / Aired Order / Season 36 / Episode 148

Understanding millions of gates

(Introduction to IC reverse engineering for non-chip-reverse-engineers.) Reverse Engineering of integrated circuits is often seen as something only companies can do, as the equipment to image the chip is expensive, and the HR costs to hire enough reverse engineers to then understand the chip even more so. This talk gives a short introduction on the motivation behind understanding your own or someone else’s chip (as a chip manufacturing company), and why it might be important for the rest of us (not a chip manufacturing company). The focus is on understanding what millions of logical gates represent, rather than the physical aspect (delayering, imaging, image processing…), because everyone can do this at home. I will introduce some proposed countermeasures (like logic encryption) and explain if, how and why they fail.

English
  • Originally Aired December 30, 2019
  • Runtime 40 minutes
  • Production Code 10976
  • Created December 29, 2019 by
    Administrator admin
  • Modified December 29, 2019 by
    Administrator admin