Defcon 21 - Decapping Chips The Strike Easy Hard Way
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.
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.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2014 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec amboar · 2021-11 · on “Full key extraction of Nvidia TSEC”
One of my favourite talks is Decapping Chips the Hard Way by Adam Laurie and Zac Franken: [this video] That was 8 years ago
Recommends amckenna · 2014-03 · on “Depackaging the Nintendo 3DS CPU”
There was also a great talk at Defcon 21 (last year) walking through a similar process all the way to using a picture of the ROM and image recognition to pull binary data. The first half is about building the lab to do this kind of work so you can skip the first 1/3 - 1/2 if you don't care about that part. [this video]
Recommends sweetjuly · 2023-01 · on “Casio-F-91W die-shot”
I really like this one Defcon talk on chip decapping [1]. It's a pretty nasty process but absolutely one you can do on your driveway (poor man's fume hood, don't tell the EPA) at home. You can then just use a standard front lit microscope to take die shots. [1] [this video]
Cites wpdev_63 · 2018-10 · on “Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story”
This[0] is a backdoor that was discovered _only_ through reading patents on the chip. It gave the highest possible privilege(ring -4) to the user by simply running an undocumented cpu register. It would be incredibly easy to hide something like this within one of the 100 of thousands of computers that go to the big 4 or even the pentagon. I'd imagine people at the pentagon select randomly from a number of computers coming in and do some chip analysis like this[1] but I can only speculate and they probably can't stop all the hardware backdoors this way. Anybody that would be caught disclosing highly classified information would probably be found and promptly hanged(or get in some sort of frea
Cites wpdev_63 · 2018-10 · on “AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story”
I don't do chip decapping but from the looks of it[0], it's incredibly hard and time consuming. They would have to do it to every server. It would be easier to suggest that there's no actual guarantees of hardware security these companies can make unless I am missing something. I am not a computer engineer nor do I have I worked in secops at any of these companies. [0]: [this video]
Cites saidnooneever · 2025-12 · on “Texas Attorney General Sues Five Major TV Companies for Spying on Texans”
I feel your comment and realize the cynic in me but i havw to tell you this. and its not a conspiracy. this is litterally why smart TV, internet, mobiles etc. were made smart. they hadn't enough spying capabilities in their dumb form. more than 145 countries spend in excess of 10 million (most MUCH more) on offensive digital spying operations. These devices are their main vehicles. If you really worry about this and dont want it, there are really only few alternatives and they are more and more risky to use. (for tv really there are none). and keeping it 'offline' or 'unplugged' also does not work. if you dont beleive it. people found things like RF chips that hack wifi in proximity, packed