3 ms·
Nice reminder of the reasons things go wrong in manufacture, from shock and vibration to thermal cycling. But this is now essential tech for "end users" too, t
by nonrandomstring 3y ago
Nice reminder of the reasons things go wrong in manufacture, from
shock and vibration to thermal cycling.
But this is now essential tech for "end users" too, to assure supply
chain provenance from tampering and implanting of malicious VLSI.
I first heard of the work of Andrew "bunnie" Huang [0] here on HN, and
the ability to inspect with near-IR radio instead of more difficult
and dangerous X-rays.
I look forward to the day I can borrow or hire an electronics "hand
scanner" microscope and verify that Intel hasn't quietly popped
another backdoor "management engine" into the board I bought.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Huang_(hacker) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Huang_(hacker)
- close04 3y agoThe equipment is probably the less influential aspect of the trade. You need the skill. You can also rent that by hiring an expert. Good equipment (microscopes, cameras, cars) don’t get you much closer to the goal unless you already know what you’re doing and that can’t be too common, especially in topics like this one.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoGood point. Even though I have hardware knowledge and studied VLSI I'd be completely lost with the raw data. How I imagine this working - Huang and Applebaum both suggested similar - is that someone would publish "ground truth" templates of what hardware should look like. The validation would only flag suspicious differences (using "AI"/pattern-matching etc) and then those would definitely be escalated to an expert.