Break IC, Recover MCU, Microcontroller Reverse Engineering

Posts Tagged ‘dsp program restore’

Restore IC Program from its embedded flash memory and eeprom memory has to change the status of Microcontroller from encrypted to un-encrypted, then readout code from MCU memory with universal programmer;

Restore IC Program from its embedded flash memory and eeprom memory has to change the status of Microcontroller from encrypted to un-encrypted, then readout code from MCU memory with universal programmer

Semiconductor manufacturers offer valuable customers an easy way to increase the protection of their products: IC chips with custom marking on the packages instead of standard chip names. That gives the impression that the final product was designed using ASICs or full custom ICs.

‘Everyone knows’ that ASICs offer very good protection against different sorts of ic attacks and only well equipped and highly skilled ic crackers could succeed with br restore IC program from them. This may stop many potential mcu attackers fiddling with the product.

However, a determined mcu cracker could try an easy way to check whether this chip was actually an ASIC. The easy way is to note which pins are connected to power supply, ground, clock, reset, serial, and other interfaces, and to compare all this information with the database of suspect microcontrollers or other ICs.

This works very reliably, as each microcontroller family has its own characteristic pinout. Once similarities are found the suspected microcontroller could be verified by placing it into a programming device or universal programmer and trying to read it.