4 ms·
One possibility, as mentioned, is that these ICs are not what they're claimed to be. Someone should take them out of equivalent devices, decap them, and publish
by jimrandomh 12y ago
One possibility, as mentioned, is that these ICs are not what they're claimed to be. Someone should take them out of equivalent devices, decap them, and publish some photos.
Another possibility is that they weren't just looking to destroy data, but also to sneak a peak at the data being destroyed. Scraping off a power IC might let them attach a power source, to turn on parts that were supposed to be off. Scraping off other ICs might get them access to I2C buses.
- leoedin 12y agoThere's a huge leap between having access to pins and actually accessing data. Even talking to unknown i2c devices requires some experimentation. Even if there was a clear channel through which you could access data over i2c (I'm not aware of any consumer bulk storage device which makes data available over i2c), doing that covertly in a short period of time while giving pretences that you're destroying the device would be practically impossible. GCHQ employees aren't magicians. I suppose it's possible that the guardian hid all the secret data in i2c eeprom chips which happened to be on their motherboard. "Possible" in the very remotest sense. You'd need to be pretty knowledgeable in digital electronics to even approach that successfully. I suspect it's more likely that GCHQ have a list of ICs which can store data, and to be safe they are required to destroy them all.