Hardware attacks are often overlooked since they are generally considered to be complex and resource intensive. However certain industries, such as pay TV, are plagued by piracy and hardware counterfeits. The threat of piracy was so great that pay TV manufacturers were forced to create extensive countermeasures to protect their smartcards in the field.
One of the most effective countermeasures is to implement parts or all of their proprietary algorithms in hardware. To analyze proprietary hardware implementations additional analysis techniques are necessary. It is no longer sufficient to follow individual signals on the chip. Instead, full extraction and analysis of the device's netlist is necessary.This talk will focus on a case study of a widely-used pay TV smartcard. The card includes extensive custom hardware functions and has yet to be compromised after over 5 years in the field.This talk will demonstrate the tools and techniques necessary for successfully performing the analysis of such a target. The research highlights the capabilities of advanced analysis techniques. Such techniques also make analysis significantly more efficient, reducing the time required for a study from many months to a few weeks.