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Defcon 21 - Decapping Chips The Strike Easy Hard Way

HackersOnBoard · 68.8K views · 2013-11-16 · 1:41:27

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Overview

A DEF CON 21 talk by Adam Laurie and Zac Franken on decapping chips, covering how to remove chip packaging and image the die to read out contents such as ROM.

On Hacker News

Regarded as a favorite practical walkthrough of chip decapping, linked in threads on die shots, hardware backdoors and key extraction.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2014–2025

Topics

Security & hackingSemiconductors & chip manufacturing
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decappingreverse engineeringdefcondie imaginghardware security

What people said

amboar · 2021-11 · Strong recommendation

One of my favourite talks is Decapping Chips the Hard Way by Adam Laurie and Zac Franken: [VIDEO] That was 8 years ago

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sweetjuly · 2023-01 · Recommendation

I really like this one Defcon talk on chip decapping [1]. It's a pretty nasty process but absolutely one you can do on your driveway (poor man's fume hood, don't tell the EPA) at home. You can then just use a standard front lit microscope to take die shots. [1] [VIDEO]

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amckenna · 2014-03 · Recommendation

There was also a great talk at Defcon 21 (last year) walking through a similar process all the way to using a picture of the ROM and image recognition to pull binary data. The first half is about building the lab to do this kind of work so you can skip the first 1/3 - 1/2 if you don't care about that part. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by HackersOnBoard, played through YouTube.

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