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Someone in 1988 had a boring job...

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AndyBeez:
Not as much fun as this guy somewhere in south east asia was having.

I was asked by a nieghbour if I could fix their solar light? As you can see from the image, there was an ingress of water/condensation and, the light was long gone to the great WEEE pile in the sky. Originating from Britain's defunked Poundworld store, it was not made from top quality materials. So why then did someone go to all the trouble of grinding off the chip numbering? From the component layout it's a jellybean solar light chip - like the QX5252. Another identical light was ground in the same way.
Pehaps the IC's were stolen, were on a technology export blacklist or, would be traced back to the slave labor camp were someone is making these for half-a-dime a piece? Whatever, there be a happy man out there ;D

james_s:
There's always some idiots out there that think grinding the number off an IC does anything to stop someone from reverse engineering something. I'd probably reverse engineer it and replace the IC out of spite.

CatalinaWOW:

--- Quote from: james_s on October 15, 2022, 06:05:38 pm ---There's always some idiots out there that think grinding the number off an IC does anything to stop someone from reverse engineering something. I'd probably reverse engineer it and replace the IC out of spite.

--- End quote ---

There is no method for anti-tampering which stops reverse engineering.  Grinding numbers off of chips makes enough trouble to stop the only slightly motivated.  It may add an increment of cost or time to the cost of copying devices with other means of protection.

Just because you can and have.overcome this method doesn't mean it didn't meet the objectives of the originator.  Which might have been something as simple as a few days advantage in time to market

james_s:

--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on October 15, 2022, 10:06:48 pm ---There is no method for anti-tampering which stops reverse engineering.  Grinding numbers off of chips makes enough trouble to stop the only slightly motivated.  It may add an increment of cost or time to the cost of copying devices with other means of protection.

Just because you can and have.overcome this method doesn't mean it didn't meet the objectives of the originator.  Which might have been something as simple as a few days advantage in time to market

--- End quote ---

It motivates me to reverse engineer something. On more than one occasion I have taken the effort to reverse engineer a device only because someone had ground the numbers off the ICs, if not for that I wouldn't have bothered but I took it as a challenge. The amount of "protection" that method provides is absolutely trivial, all it really does is make it more difficult for a novice to repair.

CatalinaWOW:

--- Quote from: james_s on October 15, 2022, 10:09:26 pm ---
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on October 15, 2022, 10:06:48 pm ---There is no method for anti-tampering which stops reverse engineering.  Grinding numbers off of chips makes enough trouble to stop the only slightly motivated.  It may add an increment of cost or time to the cost of copying devices with other means of protection.

Just because you can and have.overcome this method doesn't mean it didn't meet the objectives of the originator.  Which might have been something as simple as a few days advantage in time to market

--- End quote ---

It motivates me to reverse engineer something. On more than one occasion I have taken the effort to reverse engineer a device only because someone had ground the numbers off the ICs, if not for that I wouldn't have bothered but I took it as a challenge. The amount of "protection" that method provides is absolutely trivial, all it really does is make it more difficult for a novice to repair.

--- End quote ---

You have mentioned that a couple of times.  Unless you publish your results it is irrelevant to the originators goals.  And if it took you more than a few hours to figure out it might have met their goals even if you published.  Finally, knowing your proclivities a sophisticated anti-tamper person might strew a few ground chip designs around to distract you from more important and more discretely protected devices.

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