HARDWARE REVERSE ENGINEERING TECHNIQUES

PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARDS (PCBS)

Computer vision has been widely used to scan PCBs for quality control and inspection purposes, and based on this, there are a number of machine vision for analysing and reverse engineering PCBs (3). Several firms on the Internet offer a service of scanning a PCB and supplying a corresponding netlist.

INTEGRATED CIRCUIT (IC) COMPONENTS

This is much harder work, since everything is on a much smaller scale.

The first step is to get through the encapsulating material into the product itself, by chemical etching or grinding. This can be tough in itself, since some manufacturers include hard particles such as carborundum or sapphire in the encapsulating the resin, so that mechanical grinding also destroys the chip.

Once at the chip surface, each layer of components is photographed, then ground away to reveal the layer below. This process reveals the structure of the chip. Again, the process can be made more difficult, for example by providing some of the components vertically across several layers.