Reverse Engineering an Integrated Circuit for Pwn2Win 2017 CTF

Reading blog posts like this this is kind of like listening to Usain Bolt talk about how to run fast. Step 1: be better than anyone else. Step 2: work crazy hard.

I've actually written the intermediate section of that in production code. The DEF netlist format contains a "wire" as a set of rectangles linking an input A to outputs B,C,D...etc, and we wanted to show only those rectanges involved in e.g. the A-D part of a route. The solution was to make a graph and then use standard graph traversal algorithms to select only the needed rectangles.

This reverse engineering challenge is made a lot easier by all the preparatory work of decapping and photographing the layers not being necessary.

If you like this sort of thing, you may like the Visual 6502: http://www.visual6502.org/

This is awesome, nice work!