18 Chip Decapsulation
So far, we’ve covered a number of vulnerabilities that can be exploited electrically, either through software bugs or through externally triggered fault injection. Many more attacks are possible once the packaging is stripped away, revealing the bare glass of the microchip beneath. In this chapter, we’ll cover the chemistry used to open up chips, then a little later we can see examples of firing lasers into them, photographing their mask ROMs, and using ultraviolet light to erase their EEPROM, OTP, or flash memory.
Before we begin, it’s important to know a bit about how chips are put inside their packages. Microchips are first manufactured on discs called wafers through a lithography process. Layers are individually placed ...
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