Hacking the Unhackable Chip
March 30th, 2010
Security researcher Christopher Tarnovsky has managed to hack Infineon’s SLE66 CL PE chip, which the company had claimed was unhackable. Despite this, we shouldn’t be overly concerned. Tarnovsky used acid to reveal the chip’s circuitry, and he also required an electron microscope—not something that your average person has sitting around the house. Once he reverse-engineered the chip’s logic, he modified the circuitry to bypass its (formidable) defenses. Tarnovsky then used tiny probes to view the chip’s internal data signals, allowing him to read its stored memory. This just goes to show that unlimited physical access can break almost any security scheme.
Link #1: http://www.darkreading.com/…
Link #2: http://localtechwire.com/…
