Good afternoon, everybody at DEF CON. Thank you for coming. I'd like to take this time to introduce myself really quick. My name is Christopher Donovsky. I was the principal at FlyLogic. However, as of yesterday, it was announced that FlyLogic has now been acquired by IOActive. Thus, we will become FlyOactive. So, anyway, with all that said, you can expect to see lots of good stuff coming from us as a team. Going to have some people working with me now, I won't just be myself, make things a lot easier, more productive, which benefits the customer, which is maybe you guys. So, what I'm going to do today is basically walk through basically a look into my world, the way I see things, so to speak, compared to the way many of you might see it in regards to chips. And so, in 2010, February, I reverse engineered the Infineon 66 PE TPM. Is anyone familiar with this? Okay. So, now I started to reverse engineer ST Microelectronics version of their TPM. I speak really, really fast and I'm really wound up today. I have a lot of friends in the audience. So, if I speak too quick or you have a question, raise your hand, get my attention and we'll pause and I'll take your question. Otherwise, I'll just continue and never stop. So, these chips are put into your motherboards or your computers, depending what kind of motherboard you have. You're supposed to trust them, put all your key material in there and everything. Windows can use it in BitLocker and so forth. But these chips are not really that secure. And I'm baffled and cannot understand how Infineon and ST and AppMal as well can take the same processor families that they use for their smart cards and then just put some band-aids on to it and sell it to you as a trusted platform module. Remember, this chip is going to sit in your motherboard for years. So, you know, this legacy, you're only as strong as your legacy products were. And they're not that strong in most cases. So, who here is familiar with ST smart cards? Okay, so let's go back in time a little bit. I want to make sure that everybody understands today the principles. This is all about the principles. You can shrink to 90 nanometers, for example, the ST23 today. And you can get your EAL 6 plus rating for common criteria. But honestly, it doesn't mean anything.  You find out that it's really not that complicated when you break it down into simple terms. So, everything that ST makes today in their smart card field that is 6805 variant, it's all based on their past. And that's why I always like to say you're only as strong as your past.  Not much has changed. In 1998, they came out with the first 19 series. And it was a 600 nanometer process. And it had three metal layers of aluminum. It had an 8-bit bus internally for the core. And everything basically was 8-bits. The ROM, the RAM, the EEPROM. It was a micro-coded based design. So they had some tables of 1s and 0s that represented how to dispatch the instructions and so forth. And it was based on an even older version of their smart card families known as the ST16. So then, in about 2001, ST starts to come out with this X series platform. So the X, there was an XL series, there was an XT series. These now went smaller in feature size. They went from a 600 nanometer 3-metal. They went to a 350 nanometer 4-metal. Still aluminum process. The ROM and all the other output buses of memories accept the EEPROM. It's an 8-bit internal bus still. The micro-code tables got removed. And basically, it became this nest of glue logic. Who here does, anybody do layout in here? No? Okay, good, good, good. So we'll get into that. That will be the last thing we get into. So we're going to go through all my slides and then I'm going to put you into Photoshop. And we'll have some fun in Photoshop. So they added some additional instructions as well. So then they came out with what they call the W series, which is what my target is, my WP18. The 18 means 18 kilobytes of WEPROM. So now they shrunk from 300, so 600, 350. Now they're down to a 180 process and it still has 4-metal layers. The ROM bus output became 16 bits, but then what happens, it goes through a little block of logic and it gets deduced to the actual true 8-bit value that this chip speaks internally. So it was a shrink and it was, like I'm saying here, a typical, it was just bandated together on top of the old stuff. They add a little bit of new stuff and then, uh-oh, we ran out of room so we have to get rid of the active shielding in an area to fit our changes into place. Because of what they did on this TPM chip, they actually made it weaker than any other ST19 that I've ever seen because the mesh does not consistently cover the entire surface anymore. In this hole that I'll show you, I found three or four different clock signals that I can use to e-strap the data bus because these chips run on their own internal clock. They can switch to the outside world if software allows, but they power up on the internal clock and they may never switch to the outside world. For example, XM satellite radio. They used a 19 AF08, it never ran on the outside world clock. So this makes the WP-18 weaker than the Infineon TPM by far and I've never seen the 19 WP-18 in the field in use. I've found them on the surplus markets. So they start to take a look at this just so everybody can understand. I did a real quick cross-section into the WP-18 just to kind of give everybody an understanding of what we're going, what we're, what I'm trying to talk about today because you'll hear me talk about M1, M2, M3, M4 which really means metal one, metal two, metal three, metal four or you might hear me talk about the poly. And so you can see here in the picture, I milled away a staircase into the chip and then tilted it and imaged it.  Okay, my mouse. Then I drew these blue lines for a show, but then you can see metal three was under there and then we can see there's a, there's a via right here and there's a via right there. There's a one more via here that I didn't put an arrow to. And then there's your metal two. And then finally metal one. I should have probably did a little bit longer cross-section. But, and then you can see the poly or the actual, where they designed their transistor down in the bottom a little bit. Anybody have questions yet? Okay.  So they've, they've code named this particular device Longhorn. I have no idea why, but I just thought it was interesting to show you. So before we even, there's an active shield over the whole 99% of this entire surface area. There's an active shielding that they place down. If you, you have a fingers of ground and then you have, going at 45 degrees and then you have a single serpentine wire going, going in between them. If you break this line or ground it out in any way, it'll pull down the ground. If you cut it, if it ever sees zero, the chip will bulk erase it's, it's e-prom. And it will, it will, it's a sanity check on power up that it will never boot again. But you can see what I have to do to polish these chips down. I have to, well, I could polish off this layer with a, a lapping machine, but it's very time consuming. So I, I, I tend to cheat. Use the quickest way possible to get the task accomplished reliably. And so here, this image you can see, I've removed the shield by dipping it in, in hydrofluoric acid for about two minutes. As soon as it came off, I rinsed it, cleaned it, and now you can still see the oxide residue of where the shield used to live. Can everybody see the, the, the, the ripples in the, in the, uh, like the, the orange area? So it looks pretty ugly though. So do you see, you cannot, you can't really see anything down deep. It just looks like fog, fog layers on top of it. But once we start to, now once we start to polish the chip, now it can, it to completely change it. And that's what we end up with once that, that oxide layer has been polished off. So this, so this is the TPM chip with its active shield stripped off and polished clean, till it was nice and, nice and shiny for, you know, and then a quick image was made. Um, you can see here we've got eight, we've got a ROM right here. This is, uh-oh, hold on. Okay, this is the ROM, uh, the read-only memory. This is where the CPU will always boot up first. You've got 18 kilobytes of EEPROM in here. You've got, I don't recall, I think this is four kilobytes of static RAM down here. You have two tables up in this upper, the upper right quadrant, if you can see my mouse here, which are firewall access rules. Where are you coming from? Where do you want to go to? Can you read? Can you write from there? And so forth, execute. Uh, you've got a two kilobyte RAM that they added in, uh, under the word metal. There's a 2K RAM right there. They talk about this in the, in the product quick spec that you can find online. And then if you look to the, below my mouse, just to the left of the M in metal three, there's a little black spot. There's a little black box. Can everybody see that black box? That black box is, is where metal four had to be used to, to finish their modeling of the, of their additional logic that they added into this. The CPU and this chip is all contained to the left of the RAM near this, this metal four area that I would, I continue to refer to. Everything else pretty much is something to do with cryptography, hardware crypto units, the SHA-1, RSA, triple DES and so forth. Um, polish again. So when I'm polishing a chip, I don't polish one chip. I'll polish four or five of them. So here's one chip. I'll take them all to metal three, let's say, and then whoever's the best stays at metal three. Then I'll take the rest and I'll go to metal two. Whoever's the best, he stays in metal two. And I don't need the chip to be perfectly smooth. I need the chip to be perfectly, uh, smooth in the area of my interest. So it's, it's very normal for me to, to not have it a hundred percent even in Planner.  So here's the metal two. So you can see metal, there's metal three, go back to metal two.  Then we've got metal, metal one. So you got metal, metal three, metal two, metal one, metal four, we don't care about because that was the mesh, the shielding. The only reason I would care about metal four is for that unprotected area where, where I was talking about that they left, that they had to re, um, where there's tracks being, there's routing there. Um, some metal one is where you're going to have all your gates created, metal, poly metal one, metal two, three, and in this case part of four, it's all routing. It's all routing to get your, your NAND to your, to your OR, to your OR, to your MUX, um, you know, to your flip flop, whatever, make, to make the state machine, uh, run. That small section you can see in this picture from the fib. Uh, so I went in on, does everybody know what a focused on being workstation is? So it's a machine that'll basically, it's a nuclear weapon to a terrorist kind of. So this machine will let me, uh, deposit metals, um, deposit insulator, millaway material and so forth. So I can totally change the behavior of circuits.  I was going to do some, this is where I did the cross section that you saw earlier. And so I, I've sputter coat with some tungsten to, to make the area visible. Otherwise you would see black everywhere because it's insulated by the oxide layer on the surface. Um, so again, I, this is, this is unacceptable for a device that's EAL5 certified. And I have no clue who certifies these chips, but there, there, Chroma Criteria doesn't mean anything to someone like myself going in out, you know, if it's a target. So here's just, in that logic zone on metal four, here's a random shot I took in the, in the fib again at 15,000 magnification. Um, the fib can go up to about 800,000. It can go up to 800,000. I've only ever been as high as 200,000 mag though. And it's, just depends how small the device was to begin with. So here you can see another, another shot of, of the, of the shield, the active shield to the left is ending. And to the right, you can see the metal four, uh, routing that they, that they placed. This is such a big boo boo. Because you know, in this area, I guarantee you the data bus is in there. There's eight lines that'll have the data going back and forth on it. It's going to be mangled. It'll be encrypted with an XOR, but X, exclusive or on, on data is when you know what the data should have been in the clear, isn't hard to figure out. Um, and then, and there, of course, there'll be a clock in here. So what do I need as an attacker? I need the, the data bus or maybe the instruction registers. That way I can induce glitches to change the behavior of an instruction being executed and I need a clock because I have to synchronize with the chip's internal, internal operations. So here, that same area, I started playing around milling and I just, I just milled and there was an open space in that cavity right there. And so I, I milled till I hit metal three, metal three, um, excuse me. And, uh, it's nothing significant in the picture, just, just a show. The ROM on this super, super trustable chip that you would put your secrets in, um, isn't even encrypted very hard because you can see these spots. You can see the, the checkerboard pattern. Do you see the checkerboard pattern? This is giving away the key that they're using the XOR, the ROM material with. So where we see these XOR patterns, it's clearly FFs right there or zeros. Um, and it's, but it's been encrypt, it's been, I'd like to say mangled or scrambled with an XOR. And the XOR is based on a mix of high and low address. Just going to stay on that image for one second. The scariest thing about this whole thing is that this, this is the metal one layer of, um, where they laid their mask, their mask ROM. That's only a 20 X objective that I took this picture with. And you can make out little things. Just imagine it, you don't even have to have high tech equipment to, to image this ROM. And I think the best example of, of this in, in real life are the people who hack Nogger vision in satellite TV. Because these guys study optically read this ROM out for, for Nogger 2. And we're able to figure it out and produce everything and, and, and glitch into it. Every chip that ST's ever made has been broken just for the record. Here's the same, those same ROM bits, um, metal one again, but now I've zoomed in to the, to the max I can go opt, optically. So the maximum my Zeiss can do optically is 1,500 power. And so just, they just give you, I mean, that's a beautiful shot. You can see the bits clear as day. And, um, I mean it's, it's not game over because the ROM is like this, but it's, you can clearly see that the ROM is not encrypted at all. It's some type of very, very weak scrambling. So ST likes to play this game. They like to have a bunch of different areas of memory. And everybody basically, if you're not driving the bus, you're tri-stated. They don't believe, this is kind of like a 1980s MUX in my opinion. So rather than, rather than using a true, um, multiplexer, they, they basically have these tri-statable drivers everywhere around the chip. And this explains why they're only capable of about 15 megahertz, uh, compared to an Infineon running at 33, Renaissance is running at 30ish, uh, EM microelectronic hits 60 megahertz. Those guys, they do it right. And ST, I think they have a lot to learn. Um, this is a, in this picture you can see metal, the metal one layer which makes the actual, it, it completes that this, these gates, these, there's two gates here. You've got a buffer or I'm sorry, a driver, uh, a high output driver. And then you've got the trend, the tri-statable, uh, area to the left. It almost acts like a 74-126, uh, if everybody, uh, does electronics. And then you can see the polysilicon below that. So the, the WP-18, here we go again. Same exact tri-state, uh, tri-state drivers, just, it's a shrink. It's, this was the 350 nanometer design of the driver. This is the 180 nanometer design of the driver. Same crap, different day. I mean, it's, I don't understand. They just shrink. That's it. Size doesn't matter either because this is from their latest generation, ST23. That's a 90 nanometer process that I did in the SEM. So you can see clearly here, there again is your poly and then above it, there, that's actually, there's two tri-state drivers in this image. So even one on the left, one on the right. And those, those had been overlaid and then I cropped it and I, um, separated them and put them into the slide deck. Does anybody have any questions? Cause I'm moving really fast. No? Okay. Yes. They, you, what? We have, that, I had, that's a very good question. That's what I was saying. This is like a 1980s design.  Um, it's, it's a very, I don't know why. Every other manufacturer that I've ever looked at uses a true MUX, a multiplexer. I can't, I can't, I can't hear you. Okay. Move on. Okay. Um, so we can learn a lot by studying their past. So the, the WPs, it's fairly small. It's 180 nano. You're getting, you're pushing the optic limits almost. 140 you're really at your optical limits for seeing what, you know, the, the metal one and the poly area. Um, but, um, going back to their past, which is, um, which I've shown two different chips above, um, you can learn a lot. So, um, these are two 350 nanometer versions of their chips. But remember, so remember what I just said five minutes ago. There's nothing different about the 23 or the W series or the N series. They still, the, the only differences are the ROM outputs. They fetched 16 bits wide or they fetched 34 bits, you know, 32 plus two bit parity. But as soon as they're done with their, their little cypher block, um, they, they end up with an 8 bit bus again internally with the tri-states. Looking at the 350 nanometer, uh, chip, I did some extensive work on this a few months ago. Um, you can see here in the, in the middle of the CPU, which we'll get to that after the slide deck's finished, you can see that metal one, metal two, sorry, metal three, metal two, metal one. You can see that the three, the three, uh, these had been overlaid on top of each other. And then I, I separated them and put them into the picture. Those are, those are the eight driver, tri-stable drivers for the ROM output, the decrypted ROM fetch. So this is a, a fib picture where from my reference, excuse me, or my reference point, I went over on the X axis, 900, 1925 microns, and then went up 1500 microns. And then I milled a little arrow into the, into the chip with, well I deposited an arrow with platinum, uh, down, down here in the bottom, but you can barely see it because of the, uh, slideshow. So in summary, um, this chip really doesn't come as a shocker to me. They, there were a lot of exposed and unprotected areas in that one, in that, that block on metal four that I was showing you. Clock signals are present. I have to finish all my tracing and I, I'm not done imaging on my imaging of the lower layers of the, of the WP. Um, but so far from what I found, it's there on the same road as the other chips, as their other variants have been, uh, for, uh, failure. Um, you know, it's, it's, again, it's based on the same, it's the same, same, uh, device as the past, except it shrunk and they added some extra things to it. So who wants to go into Photoshop? Okay. So, thank you. Then, so this is the end of my slide deck. Um, so be sure and fill out the DEFCON card, please. Um, if they have, if they have one. So, does anybody know how to make photo, the Photoshop, uh, screenshot on, on there? Any Mac guys here that knows how to make my screen become active here? It's not showing me. Mirror. No, it's not going. Okay. Okay. So now, uh, can everybody see it? I can't tell from here. Okay. So, this is actually a nice spot, wherever we are. I have no clue where we are. Um, because it's all offset now. Everything's changed on my side too. Um, so ST likes to do a lot of funny things. A lot of weird things. A lot of things that I have no idea why, because I don't work with them.  And I, I don't know why they do it. It's, it's almost as if they think that, that, that they'll scare you off if you're, if you're going to try to polish them down or something. So they leave these, these gates that, that are actually strapped off, tied to the ground fingers of the mesh that, that's now been removed. So if, in theory, if you're an attacker, I suppose, and you don't know anything, you'll think, uh-oh, you know, the chip can never run like this because there was a, there was a signal tied to the mesh's ground finger. And I, and I've just cut this finger off. But it's not true. It's not true at all. It's completely bogus. Um, so let's see. So this, in, in this picture, in, in the middle of the view right here where my mouse is, uh, this, that is an example of a bogus gate. This thing has, this gate has no purpose in life whatsoever. Uh, let's, I don't even know what it is. Let's look at, see what it is. Um, so we can see like there was one, uh, that this right here used to come to the surface, to the finger of ground. That little black dot is what's left of the via that had been there before I polished. So this has been polished until the aluminum became nice and white. This way I didn't have, I don't have to sputter coat it if I put it in, in a, in a SEM or a focused on the workstation. You should sputter coat, but I'm lazy. And so I didn't, but I could have. Anyhow. And I should have. So, okay. This, this work has all been hobby. It's not a job. So that's why I'm, I'm saying I'm lazy about it. But if this had been a job, I'd do it from eight steps A to Z and be done. So now we can see that that had gone to here. And then it went down.  Uh, some of it's auto, auto placed and routed and some of it's not. Some of it you can surely, you can, you can certainly tell it's been, um, manually, uh, put in. And so then it went to this and then you guys are like, what's that? But look right here. Look at this is, this is one of the power rails. Now knowing ST, this is ground. It has to be ground because they're not going to tie one input to ground and the other input to, to, to a one, to VDD. Um, you know, VDD being, being let's whatever their internal core voltage is. They're, they're not going to do that. They're going to just strap the gates off, which is grounding them. Strap them the same I should say. So I know that this connects to there. It can't go anywhere else. And so we turned back on metal too and it did. Now the picture's slightly out of alignment right here. But it's such a large chip. You can get away with it being out of alignment. I don't have to have it perfectly aligned. But if I had taken some more time, I could have aligned it. Like, it's all rotational alignment. So, so this gate, we just, we, here we can see here, this is A, hypothetically, and then, and then this is B. And then this would have been Y, but it doesn't, it's not, it's no via nothing. It's just completing the gate. So, and they're, they're not spares. These are not like spare nans or nores. And let's see what it is though, because I don't know what it is. So, given that this was our ground rail right here, given that this, this is our ground rail here, oops, well, it's a little big, but you get the point. Well, let me kill that though. So if ground went across here, wrong color. Okay, so ground went over across here. A and B are in series with each other. Who can tell me what this gate is? You have two n-fets to the ground in series. Anybody? Thank you. It's a nand. It's a dead nand. So why they do it? I have no clue. You can, you can see a lot of other, other gates to the right that are really functional. The pictures don't lie. That's what I always tell everybody.  When we first, when we first came into the chip, it looked pretty scary. Let me zoom out. So you're looking, you look at the chip. And also, does everybody notice that I didn't image the whole chip? This is at a thousand power, optically. But I didn't image the whole chip. I only image my region of interest. I don't need to, I don't need to image the whole chip.  And then where's it going to decode to? It's going to fan out all around in a 360? No, it's not. It's going to be somewhere towards the side. And then it'll fan out to the right or it'll fan out to the left or up or down. But it's not going to be in the center of this whole nest. I suppose it could be. But I've never seen one. And I, I could show you app malls and everything at Infineon. And the instruction registers are always somewhere near the edge. So in this case, we've got in the middle of here with all my drawings, we have a whole bunch of little blocks and things that I highlighted. You can see here in this image. So these are those drivers that we were talking about. So how do I get here? Who has a good idea? Who has an idea? How do I find this in the middle of all this logic? How do I find this? Anybody? Where the chip power up first? Powered up in its ROM. If these chips have any type of ROM on them, it has to power up there because it's the only place where the CPU knows that it's got static code set. Same with, same with anything.  Take care of baseband processor in a phone. It has a boot ROM inside. The boot ROM powers up to some checks, determines is the flash loaded, etc. You know, what motor we in, this type of thing. It's the same with a smart card or any other type of device that fits this, this, this mold. And so by following the ROM, which was to our left, the ROM was to the left in this image. Here, let me, the ROM was over here. Now I've cropped this image. So because this image got cropped, and you can see here, I didn't even image this spot right here. It's missing. Because this is the, this is part of the math coprocessor. So this, this chip has math coprocessor. It can do SHA1, it can do RSA, DES, and a bunch of things. I don't even know what some of the functions it has besides those. But I don't, so I knew I didn't need that very bottom area. And I took it on, I actually went in more than I needed to in the left section. So if we look here, you can see, I've been drawing here. If I turn off all the layers for a second, it's really slow. One second. So now you can see my eight, the ROM bits. So the ROM's output drivers were to our left. They're out of view. We don't, we don't need them, just trust me, they were there.   They're going to weave their way through memory. And so you really do need to image. You need to image from the ROM and then figure out which way did it go. And then some of them went up. So they play this game. You know, he went up and she went over this way. But they all meet again, you know, a few hundred micrometers to the right. They all meet right there. And let's take it there right now. Anybody, is everybody following? Okay. So we, just following the wires without turning on metal three. Metal three, it's not so easy to see it. We can see, boom. And then I even have some notes here still. So ST has this little thing they're doing. And it's, it's funny because Dr. Karstenow and I have a back going right now to see who's right. I tell, I say that XOR1 is decrypting the ROM fetch and XOR2 is re-encrypting the decrypted ROM fetch before it goes out on the open data bus. This way, if you eavesdrop the open data bus, you, you'll see scrambled data, basically. But this is yet to be proven, so I haven't finished probing right now. I'm in the middle of it, but again, this has been a hobby, you know, it's a side project. It's not work. So if we take a given bit, well, number four, ROM trace number four, it came, it came in on metal three. Let's see. You can see right here, if it paints one second, it will not paint. Okay. So, so can everybody see ROM trace with a little arrow? I drew a little arrow? Okay. So this came in on metal three. So we, now it vias down. So now we undo that. And now we look. And then, and then again it vias down very shortly after. And then boom, and it goes. And then, and then, you know, we have this weird looking gate here. And so it, as I said before, the images don't lie. So metal one, as you can see here, and the poly, we can see clearly that this is an exclusive or. So it's, it's, I'm not going to get into how you make an XOR or NAND and NAND, but there's many of you in here, it sounds like that know, that understand this. So does anybody have questions? So the output of XOR one feeds into what I call XOR two. These both of XOR one and XOR two could be turned off if they wanted to. ST could turn it off depending what's going on in the system. I, I don't know why they would but they could in theory. Maybe during test mode, maybe in the factory they don't want to scramble that main central core. Or maybe when certain operations are happening to the crypto unit or something, maybe it's turned off for there. I'll be able to answer these, I'll actually blog about this in a few weeks once I, I'll finish these tests. I have found the instruction registers though, which is even more important. But so I can probe later. So the output of XOR two came over and it plugs in, it plugged into, into this, this here, I have it labeled number four. My mouse, where my mouse is, this box. And I can turn the boxes off but I think they actually help. Is it easier with the boxes lit up or with them off? Okay, I'll leave them on. So when we shrink down, actually I'll turn them off because you can't see now. So the decrypted value with it re-encrypted again feeds into this tri-state that I labeled number four. And I, I don't know if this is truly bit four or not, but I have to label them. I've got to label them in some order that I can deduce, you know, that I can tell the difference for, for that, for now. And then you, here's that game I was talking about. So look at the plate on number four right here. Number four's plate. It's getting a little fuzzy. I'm too zoomed in, but you can see there was a via where my mouse is here that went up. And then there was a via here and then it went down. And so if we follow this blue wire right here. And, and I don't want to turn the layers on and off because it'll get, it gets confusing to everybody. But the blue wire is following where the, the routing had gone. And then boom, look at that, it connects into another one. So this is what I was saying before. Now you've seen two different tri-state of output drivers for bit four, my pseudo bit four, to be determined. I found 14 or 15 of these. So this, and again it viaed, it viaed right to the right where my, where the, where my point more of my hand is. There's another via right there. So that tri-state keeps going. It's just, it's, it's really a strange idea. The SC-23 is still following this procedure in a 90 nanometer shrink. And the ST-19WP is doing the same things. So you can see here's, here's eight more. So, so here's, you know, two, four, six, eight. And then I changed the color. And this is the, this is coming from EEPROM. The EEPROM comes down and it gets latched into these next set of red boxes.  Only ones ever on, of course. The NANDs can, so when the NANDs turn off the, or the NANDs, the NANDs are NANDs, I forget which, which one they were. But when they, in order to turn off the XOR, they basically output zero. And then, you know, one XOR zero is one.  So following these lines led me over here to these beautiful blue boxes. These beautiful blue blocks, blue boxes, there's only two spots in this whole ship, just stepping back for a second. That were, that were these lines went to the inputs. Every other place these lines went to were tri-stateable outputs. So out of 16 places I traced it to, two were inputs and one, and the 14 were output, were only output, you know, capable. So this is, you know, because this is a unidirectional bus. This is the, this is basically the TX side, let's say, and the RX side, I don't care about it. Because, you know, I want to care about change, latching an instruction into the CPU core and making it walk through time forever. Will I listen with my needles? So this is the only side that could possibly be the instruction registers. We have 24 flip-flops, they're daisy-chained, you know, eight that can feed again into eight, that can feed again into eight, which makes sense because anybody who knows the ST-19 architecture knows that there are three levels of instructions. There's a, there's a few instructions that are three op codes long and to dispatch like another, another set of 256 possibly. And so this would make perfect sense of why it should be the flip, the instruction register. Also, these are, these are sets of eight flip-flops that are all the same type of flip-flop, they're not different types of flip-flops. The other set, the other input, they didn't all go to the same kind of flip-flops and they didn't all go to flip-flops actually. So that would make more sense to me that that would be where the upper end is being latched, not latched but, you know, being looked at and analyzed, potentially latched. It just depends how they interpret. Is everybody lost? You're here, I see. But anybody have any questions? No? I have nine minutes. Okay. Sorry? Oh, I've looked at everybody. Renaissance, ST, Infineon, Atmel. I have some cool pictures from Atmel. They just happen to be on my desktop. Atmel is another company that's lost. Atmel likes to use a specific kind of flip-flop for their instruction registers. But you like, here's an Atmel. This is a security VR from an Atmel. It's an older one. It was, I was going to use it as a training tool. So it's a 350 nanometer chip as well. And so you can see, it's, it polishes very nicely. So I can see, here's a flip-flop. And you can even see like this. Here's a clock to a flip-flop. It's chained to this flip-flop. I have no idea what the area this is. These were random tiles that I pulled to show somebody. But I also have the Atmel stuff polished, overlaid. Same thing. It's always the same thing no matter who the manufacturer is. And that's what I was trying to explain before. It looks like, you know, it looks real scary. You know, when you look at it from a distance.  Like, look at there. Follow your output, follow your ROM. Or this Atmel here, for example, it only has flash. So follow your flash data bus outputs. What you'll find is it goes through some combinatorial logic and then it latches into the flip-flop. You can't, you cannot latch something into a flip-flop to like hold it for being decrypted. And then, and then latch again. Because now you've created a two-clock penalty. So that means the CPU would be crawling on its knees to execute. So, you know, from the output stage of the ROM or the flash, wherever it boots from, it's going to trickle through some combinatorial logic, propagate down. And that, and then the first flip-flop you hit, it's either a key holding register of something for maybe like a cypher feedback chaining or like a cypher block chaining type thing. Or it's an instruction register. But it can't be anything, it cannot be anything else. And then you have the fun part of figuring out the order. That's always, on app Mali VR's, there's 16 bits.  So, anybody else have questions? Yes. No, no, but that is why I believe XR2 is in place. There are more things I could have shown you on that layout that I just had open. Because they do some wild things with what I call XR3 and XR4. And they have the same key bit material coming into them.  And I believe that that's for DPA. You know, so that main common bus is every reset, it's randomized. Yes. The Infineon TPMs, yes. Okay, thank you. He asked if I've successfully recovered the key material from this particular chip. Not, I've successfully recovered the Infineon TPMs, which was much stronger than this one. I'm not finished with this work. So this is, that's why I said it's a look into it. I'm still, I'm probably three months if I keep it as a hobby project to actually put needles on the WP. To get, to get to the, so to follow the ROM, to get into that, where I showed you those tri-states, took an hour and a half. Yes, sir. I can't hear you, sir. No, I've wrote some tools on my own and I use Panavu image assembler to image, to stitch my images together. He asked me if there's any special software. I'm sorry. The only special software really is my probing board that I stimulate the chips with. It's an FPGA-based design that's all my custom logic. Anyone else? Yes. This TPM, if I really worked on it, I could have it finished in about two weeks. If it was... I can barely... Okay. So once I'm finished and I've extracted an image, which is the primary of a particular chip, the gentleman wants to know how much long, what's the time to do another one, to kind of repeat the process. On the Infineon chips, it took me six hours. On the ST, it would be significantly less because of their mesh concept, their concept. Their shielding is the weakest in the market.  They have a one micrometer spacing on their new stuff between mesh tracks, which is absurd. I mean, I can put... I love millen 40 by 0.4 by 0.4 holes and that's large. And so one micron space is sad. But remember, the fingers, I can turn off the finger and it's dead metal and then I can use it as... I can actually use it as a conductor if I wanted to, or I can mill it completely away. And the main active mesh signal, I just have to mill down to VDD and then strap it and then I can cut it. I also... I can do selective wet etching on the ST chips. I can't do that on the Infineons. So left the wet etching, you can see my video from Wired, where I use nail polish to make a mask and then I use hydrofluoric acid, very selective time detches. So the ST chip would be maybe an hour and a half prep and then put needles on it. Anyone else? Yes. Sorry? The layout of the chip was very standard. Yes. And it almost all would... It would have been harder, but it's not that hard to identify where the actual core is because there's so many crypto blocks inside and what you'll see, you see a lot of register logic. You know, a lot of chain register logic and shift networks and stuff like this. So you know, if you isolate all of that out of the picture, which is what I did on that one Photoshop image that you saw, it's pretty much game over. You can start line tracing and things. It's more of how many... The smaller you are and the more layers you have, the harder you would make my life in a nutshell. Yes. There are a lot of things they could have done to obfuscate the surface and make it a little bit harder, but they didn't do it and I'm not going to voluntarily give them, you know, ways of slowing me down. Yes. 45 nanometer. Yes. Once I've done my... I have over 400 samples of this chip. They were like 20 cents on Hong Kong inventory surplus. So once I burned through whatever I need to do my initial analysis, my success rate is going to be 100%. Unless something catastrophic happened, like I wasn't... I wasn't eccentrically level in the fib and I stick the needle in and it's... Oops, it wasn't under microns above the surface and you know, and I scratch it. Otherwise, it's almost a zero risk because remember, if I break... If I did damage it in any way, it would be like maybe I sever a track with my needle. But on the ST chip, I can drop platinum everywhere because of it's... the mesh is inferior to most of the stuff I'm up against today. Okay. One more question please. Anybody? No? Okay. Thank you very much.


Aloha and welcome to Business in Hawai'i with Reg Baker. We broadcast live every Thursday at 2 o'clock from 2 to 2.30 from the Think Tech Studios in downtown Halalulu in the Pioneer Plaza in beautiful Halalulu, Hawai'i, especially this time of the year when the mainland is suffering from some very cold weather. This is a show that focuses on success stories of businesses in Hawai'i. We've all heard the challenges. We know that there's some issues, but there are companies that have gotten around these challenges and have made it successful. Today we have a company that's known as an acronym PAU or POW. It helps companies level the playing field a little bit. They're able to save some companies some costs. They're able to make things more efficient and to maybe allow the owners to focus a little bit more on the businesses that they are actually trying to manage. PAU, we have the co-founder Fred Parr who is here today and then we have one of the key office managers, implementation manager and operations guru for PAU, Nick Leong. They're going to be here today to tell us a little bit about what PAU is and how they can help businesses in Hawai'i. Welcome to the show today. Thanks for having us. Fred, since you're the senior guy to my left, can you start out a little bit and just kind of tell us a little bit about yourself and where you're from and how you got to where you're at today? Sure. I was originally born in Japan many years ago and I grew up most of my life in Tokyo going to American school there and I finished my high school in California and went to university there. Whereabouts in California? In Newport Beach area. Oh nice. And then college was in Long Beach, Cal State Long Beach and from there I joined the banking industry and I was out in Wall Street a little bit. In New York? Yes. So that was a good time. Good markets right before the crash. That's a good time to be there. So then my career changed over. Because of my language I could speak Japanese. I was sent over to Japan. Who sent you to Japan? Well I went originally with which is now Bank of America right now but it was called Security Pacific and back then gets into a little long story but there's a Glass-Steagall Act which broke apart and then we were able to do securities business with the banks. As they say the Chinese wall fell. Yes absolutely. So I was there for about four years then I moved on to Hong Kong and I was starting trading equities Asian equities along with Japanese equities and then I moved back with another firm called Solomon Smith Barney. Oh yeah. I ran their desk for several years. Do you know Kenny Wong by any chance? I do know of them. Yes. But I was mostly on the institutional side. Okay. And then I moved back to Japan once again with another investment bank. I was head on it which was the ABN Amber which is a Dutch outfit and I ran their equities and futures and options. So most of my background is in banking. Well banking, securities, risk management, you know. And then I met my wife actually when I was going to Long Beach and she's originally born and raised in Hawaii. A windward girl, kind of early girl. So that's how my roots got embedded in Hawaii. And after banking about four years ago I left investment banking. I came back to Hawaii and that's how I got into Pacific Advantage with my other partners. Very good. That's a very interesting history and background. You know a lot of a lot of international travel. It's very fun. Nick, how about yourself? Born and raised here in Hawaii. I went to school up on a whole. And then a whole guy. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. And then I went to California to go to college. I went to Santa Clara University up by San Jose. A little chilly. Yeah. Yeah. And you know I ended up missing the food and the people and going to the beach.  And I went into the family business which is actually in parking management. So I did that for a few years and then decided that I wanted to give being an entrepreneur a shot. So me and my girlfriend opened up a small retail store. We ran that for a few years. Decided it was way more work than we were willing to put into it. Retail is tough. Yeah. Retail is the hours. Our nuts and yeah it was a lot of work. Great learning experience though. Then I decided to, at the same time I was working at Apple as a side job and that kind of got me into the tech world. And then from there I slowly drifted into what kind of what we're going to talk about today, the PEO companies. And I met Frank and Fred, had a great opportunity to sit down with them. And here I am today. Very good. Now I can't help but asking, but if I ever have any problems with my iPhone you can help me with this. I'll give you a discount on my rate. Very good. Well very diversified backgrounds which is really good because both of you bring something to the table that can help a variety of different businesses out there. Retail and I know one of the other co-founders is Frank, Frank Felix. He's got construction connections. That's great. And so there's a lot that's out there that you guys bring to the table that can really help businesses make things work here and why. Now tell me a little bit about PAU. What is PAU? Well PAU is the acronym for Pacific Advantage Unlimited and we're in the PEO business. So PEO is also an acronym for professional employee organization. So what we do is we help, well we give added value and we help, you know, smaller companies which is Hawaii's consists of mainly of small companies. So we're able to give them payroll services. Also I provide them with medical workers comp and other insurances which is necessary for our business to thrive and also to be compliant. Now the definition of a small business is what? Less than 100 employees? Less. As of this year it's 50 employees and with ACA or Obamacare it is going to be from 2017 100 employees. So that's a large company. Well for Hawaii. Yeah I think what is about 97% of all the businesses in Hawaii are considered to be small businesses and so that's the majority of businesses. Yeah and so alright so whether it be 50 or 100 if there's a company that's got less than that number they come to you and you can help them do what? You know basically a small company can come to us and get support for HR needs so if they need help hiring people or let's say a small business doesn't know how to how to create a company handbook we can assist them with things like that on the HR side as well as you know a big part is to keep them compliant you know with with all the changes in medical it's easy to you know to not understand it fully and we can help everyone stay compliant and as well with payroll and your insurances. Well just labor loss I mean the compliance area and the labor laws with wages and that's what I think it'd be a big challenge for folks. You know but I guess just as importantly as maintaining compliance and helping take some of that work off the owner's plate there's also potentially some opportunity for doing things that may be a more competitive price you know I mean you you actually put these employees on your payroll and then there can take advantage of maybe some of the group benefits that you've got is that how that works? Yeah yeah you know the way that these PEO companies work is generally we're co-employers with the the client company and we hire their employees under our our tax numbers and we go to carriers and to like health health carriers and insurance carriers as a big group and because we have greater numbers you know it's economy of scales and we can sometimes get better pricing for different clients. Right I mean there's no guarantees but if the company went and they had 25 employees as opposed to you going with say four or five hundred employees you have a little bit more leverage you might be able to get some better more competitive pricing than they could with only 25 as opposed to 500. Sure yeah yeah and that's gonna work in a lot of different areas I mean does that include like I guess workers comp and that kind of area too? Yes workers comp as I mentioned before medical we could pass on the large what we call block business the discount that we obtained from that from health carriers workers comp carriers and pass that on to the clients so it saves the bottom line once again some company that has only five or 25 people will get probably a less competitive rate than what we will get at a large group. Right right you know especially if it's a new company who doesn't really have a lot of history you know it's hard for them to you know go in and get some very competitive pricing for some of these you know employee benefits when there's no history that they can look at you know they got to almost take like a worst-case scenario and price it accordingly. That's correct. Now what else you know I guess PEU and I'm not going to distinguish between the two but PAU and PEO basically you do PEO services and that's where the employee actually goes on to your federal ID numbers and your process as a group but they don't lose their individuality I mean there's the company still have their employees they're still working for them they get their W-2s based on you know the the hours that they work for that company and and there's employee handbooks that can be created and so the the owners of the company and the managers of the company don't really lose control of the employees all it is it's simply a processing a back office function right. Absolutely you know they'll still maintain you know they'll still maintain the scheduling they'll you know hire and manage their employees where there are more for support and and to help advise so you know maybe whereas before if you're the owner you have to make the decision all on your own hey what are we you know what's the best way to handle this situation you know now you can tap into us and we have people who specialize their whole careers in HR or payroll and they can be you know give you a career worth of knowledge to help you make the decision but the decision is still yours to make as the owner. Right I mean you still have responsibility for that employee yeah and you need to have all the proper procedures in place you know job descriptions and management oversight and that sort of thing the employer doesn't lose that that still has to be maintained by the employer. So we like Nick just mentioned we had put added value on the HR aspect team specialized in that but also on the payroll side where a regular accountant and a firm could relinquish the payrolls aspect of it taxes 940 941s so there's a lot of moving parts that if that person were to take care of it at a small company there's a lot of things to you know applications and reportings that they would have to do which we will be able to take care of that off the plate and then they could concentrate on their business like sending out invoices or things of that sort. Generating revenue yeah exactly you know and it's you know in that piece that compliance piece of the timely filing and the timely payment I mean that's critical because sometimes you make one little mistake and you're late it can be expensive. Sure yeah you know I mean I've seen some of the the late fees it can climb pretty quickly in there calculated sometimes on a daily basis you know so it's something you really have to be paying attention to and be comfortable with in order to stay on top of it. You know there's other services I guess there's a way for them to call in if they have like labor issues or questions or that there do you have a group that you work with that can help answer some of those questions. Yeah sure we you know we partner with with a couple different vendors one you know for Vantaju HR they're great on HR support they help us you know they specialize in that labor issues and any type of HR issues you know they'd be the first people that we talked to and we really get them we really get a lot of support from them. Well let's hold that thought for just a second no no no it's alright and we're gonna come back and take quick break and come back in about one minute and maybe we can talk a little bit about that some more but this is business in Hawaii with Reg Baker I'm here today talking to two of the key players over the company called PAU Powell which is a PEO here in Hawaii we're gonna take a short break and we'll be right back. Aloha my name is John Wahee and I used to be a part of all the things that you might be angry at. I served in government here and may have made decisions that affects you so I want to invite you in I want to invite you in to talk story with me and some very special guests every other Monday here at Talk Story with John Wahee come on in join us express your opinion learn more about your state and then do something about it Aloha. Aloha and welcome to business in why would Reg Baker we just finished our quick break and we're gonna get right back into discussing a little bit about some of the other services that PAU offers to their customers and one that is very important is going to be some of the HR consulting piece that when somebody has an HR issue they actually have a number that they can call and you can or your affiliate company can help them through the process and that company is Vantageo. Correct yeah Vantageo HR yeah like like you said you know they they they're really the experts for us they help you know guide us through through different issues and they have a 24-hour hotline and you know their presence a presence here in Hawaii an office here and California New York so you know they span a wide gamut of different areas so they have a lot of knowledge for us to top into and our clients to top into. Right and I know a couple of the principles over there you know Lorraine of Bufuco and then also Kara and Kara is on the local board of directors for SHRM and Lorraine I know has been a frequent speaker at the National SHRM conferences which I'm not sure what SHRM I think is a society of human resource managers sounds right and so they're they're very connected they're into that part of the industry that that focuses on HR issues and laws and compliance and that sort of thing and so it's a great resource to have available and there's a 24-hour hotline so we need to test it some day and see if they answer. But what else did there's other affiliates that you work with too? Yes also mind you that the handbook is a very big thing for small businesses because every business should have some kind of a handbook it could be catered or made out to that specific company whichever field they're in if they may be in a restaurant business or construction or whatnot so that's a I wanted to add that in there. Well that's an important part because I think the employee handbook we could actually have a whole show on that because you know one of the first if you do have a labor issue one of the first things that come up is you know what are the rules what what what are written what's been communicated what is the employee supposed to do is it consistent with the handbook is it consistent with the job description having all that in place is very important should any issue come up and having somebody help a company walk through that make sure that they're in compliance and they have all that there I think is invaluable now how much does that cost if somebody needed to have that as part of you know PAU? Well it's a standard cause it's included in our fees but if it needs to be really catered and written up for them then Vantaggio HR will take care of that and then there'll be an agreement but but basically the basic document itself is free yes yes you know and so that comes with doing business with PAU and we've done our homework with Vantaggio and so the handbook that comes with PAU that you're mentioning is you know compliant with all the state and labor law you know requirements for Hawaii and they've been in Hawaii for a number of years so I'm sure they're pretty familiar with what's going on that that's a great benefit and additional you know value-added service that PAU offers you know and then there's also some other opportunities that they can take advantage of yes on the bookkeeping accounting side we part we have another partner Bernice is the owner Bernice Parsons the name of the company is Vered Account they're very accounting like I said in the bookkeeping side they're adverse and then they could take care of the needs of you know small things from entries journal entries things of that sort on the accounting side you know I I've been doing CPA stuff and bookkeeping in Hawaii for a long time and I've had an opportunity to work with a lot of different services and I've had the opportunity to work with Verd account and other bookkeeping accounting services and you know I've been pretty impressed with what Verd account does you know they're quick they're they've got some pretty talented people they get things done on a timely basis now the client has to provide the information on a timely basis to in order for them to process and assuming that that's done I mean I've seen them crank out some good financial statements you know within a few days after the end of the month so that's a great service so you know it sounds almost like you guys are becoming like a one-stop shop for a small business to outsource a lot of their back office you know the administrative pieces the ones that maybe they don't have a lot of comfort with that they have to do because they are in business but they can actually contract that out and they have the payroll and the HR and the bookkeeping all of that done through you guys yeah that's that's exactly right you know and coming pulling from my own experience when you know me and my girlfriend and I had that little retail store you know we were the best resources we had you know we those before I knew what a PEO company was and you know we didn't even know what questions to ask you know and you don't know what you don't know exactly you know and then you can you can Google stuff and and but I mean your time is so precious when you're trying to run a business you know and to have someone to bounce ideas or to keep you in compliance I think is as well worth it especially when you're you know a one or two-man operation or a five-man operation your time is really precious to your operation well and what's interesting is that you know sometimes a two-man operation you know if you're one of the two people there you can always find time to do something and it may not be the best use of your time but when you start adding employees complexity start increasing pretty quick because not only do you have customers to deal with and all the compliance issues and getting the work done but then you also have to manage the employees and that starts complicating things even more so it's my opinion is it's best to get this set up right right out of the gates you know and this can help you grow in a controlled sort of way you don't have to make anything up as you go along I mean I don't know about you but I've had clients that try to do it they give it a good shot they may get about 80% of it done but the rest of it you know they're just making things up and they're trying to process it and they end up that maybe it wasn't quite exactly the way it should have been yeah yeah exactly like you said you don't know what you don't know right you don't know the questions to ask and and there's a lot of stuff I mean enough for us to keep us busy studying all the labor laws and the payroll laws and everything to so you know it companies can can let us worry about that stuff and they can focus on what makes some money oh yeah well that's that's where they need to be focusing you can't make a lot of money becoming an expert on payroll if you're not selling the service you know but you can make a lot of money focusing on selling product to customers you know and that's that's what I always try to encourage my my clients to do now just to kind of give the audience a little bit of an explanation on how this would work let's just say that there's a company out there that they've been kind of struggling with trying to deal with all this stuff businesses is fairly good they're they've got some good sales growth coming in but they're just not able to take care of the customers the way they like and they need to try to find some time to free themselves up to focus on this so they come to you and they go you know I've got I need some help and I need to get some of this back office stuff off my table off my desk how do you go about going through that process you know from from soup to nuts real quick how did how did they do they have to fill out an application they got to give you some information you begin the onboarding process I mean how does that work yeah generally I mean what we sit down with them and and you know discuss kind of what our services are and if they're interested we come up with with a quote for them you know and assuming we get the green light on that we go through what's called an implementation phase and that'll include everything from you know what we'll get a contract to them once they sign it we have paperwork for the employees to fill out to hire them on to our federal tax numbers like you said and then well so we'll go out we'll meet the clients you know at their convenience and their employees have them fill out some paperwork and then that's that's pretty much all the onboarding that needs to take place and then from there we might sit down with the client for a meeting or two just to make sure that we have all of their their payroll nuances understood and we're prepared to process their payroll and then from there it's it's like just kind of handing everything over to us and letting us be be the experts and helping you you know we'll cut the checks and mail them out to your employees for payroll can you do direct deposit to we can do direct deposit yeah easy and but they're not completely cut out of the process they still need to have a communication link with you to I mean for example some people are gonna be on hourly you know work weeks so how do they communicate that to you there's actually we have a web page where they can go and click on each employee will set up their own web portal for them and they can go in there and enter in the the hours for payroll each week or or bi-weekly or semi-monthly however they pay and so they'll just go down the list it's almost like an Excel spreadsheet how long how many hours and then we'll take care of the taxes make sure that that all adds up and everything you do the filing and and do all that if anybody calls with a nasty question you can answer that too yeah we can be the experts for their employees who they may have a question on their taxes how come I got charges amount and we can answer those up for you super now we're gonna wrap up here in just a minute or so but you know I heard these stories about some PEOs having these really nasty contracts that once you get into them you can't get out of them and there's big issues with it I mean yours is pretty straightforward right yes we signed we both mutually agree we have a contract that signed and then as long as there's 30 days notice if we if you're not unhappy with anything you could terminate to contract see that to me that's a important selling point because if there's a 30-day clause for you to transition out that means you must be pretty confident that you're gonna be doing a good job if you try to lock somebody in for a year that's telling me that that's a warning flag that's something you got to be careful with this well I think you know we're we're really trying to develop true partnerships and that means we have to hold up our another bargain too so hopefully you know there's no reason for for them to for a client to be unhappy with our services exactly we owe them that when you know when they sign the contract with us after all you know service we're service oriented we've always modelled our company on that we've been in business for eight years now and that's our core servicing our clients the small and midsize companies very good I want to keep I wish we had more time to talk but we're kind of out of time you've got about 10 15 seconds each is there any final words you want to do we're looking forward to the new year we got a lot of things that we want to implement I think Pacific advantage will reach out to small and midsize and the community of Hawaii and we'll keep growing and we'll help companies in Hawaii super Nick I just want to say hi to my family and and to my fiance oh fiance so girlfriend to fiance just recently all right congratulations all right well what's the day I want to say Merry Christmas well it's fast but happy holidays and my daughter Jackie and my son Carson all right very good well happy new year everybody this is Reg Baker a host of business in Hawaii we broadcast live every Thursday at 2 o'clock from 2 to 2 30 and we highlight businesses in Hawaii that are successful and we try to share some of the insight on how they made that happen until next week aloha and happy new year