John McMaster (@johndmcmaster) told us about the process of opening up chips to see how the processors are structured and what the firmware says. 

See John’s website for information on getting started (as well as digging much deeper).

John has given some interesting Hardwear.io talks including Capturing Mask ROMs and Taming Hydrofluoric Acid to Extract Firmware. His talks and many others are available on the Hardwear.io archive. Or sign up for the Hardwear.io Online Hardware Security Training, Berlin Jan 2021.

As mentioned in the show:

• John wrote a blog post about his top lab accidents and explosions.

• Paper: Reverse engineering Flash EEPROM memories using Scanning Electron Microscopy by Franck Courbon, Sergei Skorobogatov, and Christopher Woods

• Rompar and bitract are the two programs mentioned as helpful for getting from an image to binary code.