Black Hat Cracks Infineon SLE 66 CL PE Security Microcontroller

A presentation at the 2010 BlackHat Conference in Washington D.C. by Christopher Tarnovsky of Flylogic Engineering talked about his 9-month effort to ‘crack’ the Infineon security integrated circuit. A short write-up of the presentation was offered by Dark Reading.

The article discusses generally the methodology used by Tarnovsky to reverse-engineer the security IC.  It includes a painstaking electron microscopic examination of the device (presumably with captured images), followed by insertion of micro-probes into the data busses. The probes were small enough to circumvent protective mesh shielding (described in Infineon literature as ‘ActiveShield’).