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Defcon 21 - Decapping Chips The Strike Easy Hard Way

HackersOnBoard · talk · Watch on YouTube

Security & hackingSemiconductors & chip manufacturing

What it is

A DEF CON 21 talk by Adam Laurie and Zac Franken on decapping chips, covering how to remove chip packaging and image the die to read out contents such as ROM.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Regarded as a favorite practical walkthrough of chip decapping, linked in threads on die shots, hardware backdoors and key extraction.

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2014, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “One of my favourite talks is Decapping Chips the Hard Way by Adam Laurie and Zac Franken”

    Favourite talk on decapping chips.

    amboar, 2021-11 · Strong recommendation · in “Full key extraction of Nvidia TSEC”

  2. “There was also a great talk at Defcon 21 (last year) walking through a similar process”

    Walks through decapping chips and reading ROM from images.

    amckenna, 2014-03 · Recommendation · in “Depackaging the Nintendo 3DS CPU”

  3. “I really like this one Defcon talk on chip decapping”

    Practical home decapping process for die shots.

    sweetjuly, 2023-01 · Recommendation · in “Casio-F-91W die-shot”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: decapping, reverse engineering, defcon, die imaging, hardware security

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