September 2024
Intermediate to advanced
408 pages
7h 29m
English
The third chapter of McCormac (1996) describes a few firmware extraction exploits from the early days of TV piracy. Of particular interest is a trick against the PIC16C84, the very first PIC to include electrically erasable EEPROM memory rather than OTP ROM or UV erasable EPROM. Like the PICs we saw in Chapter 19, a protection fuse is implemented with the same floating gate transistor as the EEPROM bits.
The trick involves the difference between the supply voltage VDD and the programming voltage on the !MCLR pin. In normal operation, VDD should be less than 7.5V and !MCLR should be less than 14V, relative to ground on VSS. This technique does not work against earlier chips, which lacked an electrical ...
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