Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
blog.janestreet.com
Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
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Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#2looks 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
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#3That sounds like a fun challenge. Feels a lot more tractable than the neural net one.
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#4Is there something like an Extract-SPICE tool that takes a circuit and gives you back a text rendering of it ?
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#5people 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
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#6At 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.
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#7In a simplified scenario (not too far from this)? Yeah, we've done that in CTFs almost a decade ago.
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#8At 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.
You can't do that by applying random inputs to any single-chip GPU - it has far too much state. 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.
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#9In 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
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?
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#10people 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
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.