Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?

bbschne about 3 hours ago 19 commentsRead Article on blog.janestreet.com

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zie1ony•about 1 hour ago

At my uni, 15 years ago, one postdoc reverse engineered NVIDIA chip and wrote more performant compiler. He did that by connecting oscyloscops to all chip's outputs and started with applying random current on inputs. Using ML and his genius he rediscoverd all opcodes including a few hidden ones. Eventually he got hired by some company that was doing a lot of GPU on supercomputers.

tverbeure•3 minutes ago

There is absolutely no way that happened. 15 years ago, we're talking Maxwell class GPUs and chips with hundreds of millions of bits of on-chip state and much more if you include the DRAM.

You can't tease out the right information by applying random inputs. Which input would you even use? The PCIe interface?

Your postdoc probably wrote micro-benchmarks of some sort. That is a common technique.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

You can't do that by applying random inputs to any integrated GPU. I can see that perhaps it worked on some of the early multi-chip cards - where one chip was a texture sampler, and so on.

You'll have more luck reverse engineering the software driver first. They're not hidden, you can just open the driver files in Ghidra, the almost-universal tool for open-sourcing proprietary code. Hidden opcodes can be discovered first by just trying all the opcodes you couldn't discover any other way. You only need to go to the physical level if they're really hidden.

sigbottle•29 minutes ago

To be fair, Ghidra was released in 2019 and in general knowledge was still hard to find even back in 2010 I feel (well, compared to 2026 in the age of AI)

inigyou•6 minutes ago

Before that there was, and still is, IDA Pro. Works largely the same but costs a lot, on the order of $1000/seat/year. Useless for hobbyists unless pirated, but reasonable if it's your job. Probably had academic discounts.

whitten•about 1 hour ago

Is there something like an Extract-SPICE tool that takes a circuit and gives you back a text rendering of it ?

Joel_Mckay•37 minutes ago

Practically No, the stack-up of metal layers often hides the gate structures underneath, and the billions of process cells may not all be the same.

Theoretically Yes, as an ion-beam-mill and electron-microscope combination machine can slice up semiconductors layer-by-layer. Given these machines can often also give precise x-ray analysis material data, the exact makeup of the chip can be extracted by competitors given enough time. =3

saltcured•20 minutes ago

Now you're making me imagine some kind of 3D-scanning, confocal x-ray fluorescent spectroscope.

Or maybe some kind of hybrid of x-ray microtomography and spectroscopic analysis all in one.

But, maybe the energies involved would be about the same destructive power as some microtome slicing technique...

inigyou•4 minutes ago

We already know that X-rays don't destroy chips.

NooneAtAll3•about 2 hours ago

looks like they didn't post any blog post about 2nd NN challenge (https://huggingface.co/spaces/jane-street/droppedaneuralnet)

I was waiting for some writeup about permutation decyphering

q3k•about 1 hour ago

In a simplified scenario (not too far from this)? Yeah, we've done that in CTFs almost a decade ago.

https://blog.dragonsector.pl/2017/10/?m=1

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

From where do I know the name Dragon Sector and q3k? You aren't the ones who hacked the train DRM, are you? Or maybe active in the demo scene? Or maybe I'm just confusing you with TRSi?

q3k•about 1 hour ago

Maybe. :)

IshKebab•about 2 hours ago

That sounds like a fun challenge. Feels a lot more tractable than the neural net one.

ck2•about 1 hour ago

people who can do this stuff are super-smartypants

but reminds me how we're going to find out on an industrial level when the Saudis give China some nvidia chips they were grifted

they've cloned lots of chips before but nothing that advanced

inigyou•4 minutes ago

You can do this. If you commit the whole next month to it you'll make quite some progress. But you won't.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

China has no shortage of Nvidia chips. It costs nothing (relatively) for someone to just buy a 5090 off the shelf and send it there.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

Is this the chip they used to steal money from the Indian stock market until they got banned from India?

perching_aix•12 minutes ago

They're not banned; their trading restrictions were temporary and have been since lifted, once the allegedly unlawful gains were deposited into escrow, just like SEBI demanded.

Their market manipulation is further alleged, not settled. It was also not a high-frequency trading thing, so no, it wouldn't have required anything technically advanced like this either.