Microcontroller Firmware Recovery Using Invasive AnalysisThe internet-of-things revolution is here and it is here to stay. From internet-enabled cat boxes to Wi-Fi-controlled stoves, smart devices permeate our lives at an ever-increasing increasing pace. The rush to get items like the next greatest internet-connected wine bottle to market coupled with the lack of regulatory oversight frequently puts system security on the back burner; a feature to be “added on later.” Rather than focus on product security, many manufacturers and integrators choose instead to disable hardware debugging functionality and enable firmware readback protection to make vulnerability discovery more challenging.
Once these microcontroller interfaces are locked, there is usually no manufacturer-prescribed way to unlock them without also wiping out the firmware. Historically, there have been ways to bypass these lockouts, often because the manufacturer doesn’t realize how attackers can abuse certain functionality. For instance, manufacturers sometimes unwittingly allow readback of firmware through faulty implementations of the hashing algorithms used to validate flashing at the factory. If a debugging interface is available, researchers can sometimes extract the firmware through side-effect analysis. There are more involved attacks such as voltage or clock glitching using toolkits, like the venerable ChipWhisperer, that inject faults to try to trip up internal subsystem behavior during critical operations.
Another class of attacks, referred to as invasive,” requires physical access to the silicon dies inside of the package while maintaining chip functionality. These are often dismissed as infeasible for the average security researcher due to the perceived difficulty and expense of IC decapsulation. The goal of this guide is to demonstrate that researchers don’t need a multi-million dollar lab to perform practical invasive attacks against a typical microcontroller and to detail a novel method of utilizing safer acid mixtures at or below room temperature to decapsulate semiconductor packages that utilize copper interconnects and wires. At the end, I will cover common mitigations employed and how to spot them.
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