← Back to context

Comment by stackghost

17 hours ago

> The attack requires physical access, destructive preparation, and approximately $250,000 of laboratory equipment.

Not super practical, but neat attack

250k is not a bad investment for a company doing "reverse engineering as a service" - say 1k a pop to extract the firmware. Naturally, a good business idea for somewhere in the world with less regulations...

That is peanuts for a nation-state actor.

  • Sure, but if you’re defending against a nation state actor hopefully you aren’t expecting a raspberry pi to keep you secure.

    • > Sure, but if you’re defending against a nation state actor hopefully you aren’t expecting a raspberry pi to keep you secure.

      Is there anything about these techniques that are raspberry pi specific? It seems like they're using lasers to identify and flip particular bits in registers.

      16 replies →

    • The RP2350 is an inexpensive microcontroller IC with reasonable performance and some very useful (and somewhat unusual) features in its PIO blocks.

      Why wouldn't a person build that into the heart of something important?

      5 replies →

It reads as impressive defense. Meaning that it's presumably not possible to get root with physical access on a live 50$ device without 250k capital

  • This is for a $1 microcontroller. I'm assuming you're talking about the Raspberry Pi computers based on the $50 cost and root.