Volunteers to help cleanup WordPress problems?
Whenever the blog is enabled, spammers are able to deface the main pages index.html file replacing it with hundreds of spam links to software. The only way we can stop it is to stop the blog. We’ve tried cleaning the blog up but they still get in somehow through WordPress :(. If you think you can help us, please email tech at flylogic.net Thanks!
Intel 4004
Before going deeper into the analysis of today’s chips, we will take a quick journey to where it all began: the Intel 4004, world’s first widely-used microprocessor. The 4004 and most other antiquated chips differ from modern chips in two main characteristics: They only use a single type of transistor (PMOS or NMOS) and each logic gate is custom-designed to best utilize the available area — an inevitable optimization for chips built from transistors about 150x larger than those used in their modern descendants. Each of the gates is composed…
Reverse-Engineering Custom Logic (Part 1)
Today we are taking you one step deeper into a microchip than we usually go. We look at transistors and the logic functions they compose, which helps us understand custom ASICs now found in some secured processors. To reverse-engineer the secret functionality of an ASIC, we identify logic blocks, map out the wiring between the blocks, and reconstruct the circuit diagram. Today, we’ll only be looking at the first step: reading logic. And we start with the easiest example of a logic function: the inverter. To read logic, you first…
New author- Herr Karsten Nohl!
We are proud to announce that those who enjoy reading the blog (which we apologize for the lack of content lately) can soon enjoy reading posts from Karsten Nohl as well. For those of you who are not familiar with Karsten, he played an important role in the discovery and analysis of the Crypto-1 mathematical algorithm found in Philips (NXP) Mifare RFID devices. He recently obtained his PhD from University of Virginia in the United States. He’s well known within the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Germany as well. We too…