Hacking Is chip decapping even beneficial at this point?

[TheChield]

I think that decapping is useless at this point.

The purpose of decapping a chip is usefull to know what's in the chip.
What I'm saying here is general for all systems...
We know that today's system have been developed 2-3 years ago.
They are build on arm/ppc/ ix86 systems with x cores.
The only things that a decapping can tell you is what's in the die, proc, mem (and their size), cores and theirs types, and how they're linked...
So (for example) you can see that there's an arm in the Wii die. You see that it matched a common arm used in many apps that you mastered...
so you can dev some apps based it to dump some useful registers, if they are writable or not an dump the result to a file...
Then you try to attack the system and your only purpose it to find a way to run you apps, overflow (quiet useless by our days...), HW glitch to corrupt memory and replace it to run your app, or HW hack.
(So every people proud of crashing the 3DS without having soft to run are dumb ass...)

But In the end you might find the door !

Once you found it, you have a lots of work to find how to run the same thing on a regular device...Dump memory, dump nand, dump every HW mem to reverse it by disassemble it... For all of you who know what I'm talking about, you have scripts that allow you to find every "jump" that check that they're safe (or not)

So decapping is useless regarding the fact that we're in and people who knows it knows also what they have to do... But don't find or don't want to tell !

 

[JMa]

We can tell 'the functions of the chip' just by looking at public docs.

Based on my experience, I tend to agree with this gentleman here (WulfyStyles). I believe there is very little to be gleaned from viewing the physical layout of the 3DS chip that could not already be surmised from official Nintendo documentation. And that stuff should be out in the wild for developers and etc.

Just curious. Is that chip documentation available to the public??
Btw, I think looking a layout is even harder than looking at the assembler code (maybe similar to the binary code). It would require too many (and skilled) people. But if the OP does it, it'll be very much welcome just for my engineering interest

 

[Drenn]

I can think of at least one reason chip decapping would be beneficial. If the boot ROM can be dumped this way, we'll have the initial values of the keys. This will let us fix 6.x savegames, and new 7.x eshop apps like the pokebank and youtube, when played via rednand. This will be important if 7.x is never hacked...

 

[dubbz82]

Yes, it'd still be beneficial at this point, although only for the somewhat simpler reasons such as what Drenn listed. The sheer complexity of more modern systems would make chip decapping a lot less useful than a few console generations ago....there's just so much more to some of the chips now, that it'd take an unreasonable amount of time to work out the exact functionality of some of them.

 

[naxil]

ndev site is down now.. why?

 

[Mr_Pichu]

Techinsights decapped the chip when the 3DS first came out:

http://m.eet.com/media/1114759/nintendo_3ds_teardown8.jpg

Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to buy a report from them?

 

[kalimero]

Is this $200 Die Photo enough?
https://chipworks.secure.force.com/catalog/ProductDetails?sku=NIN-1048 0H ARM&viewState=DetailView

 

[JMa]

I don't think so. That photo will provide you as much info as my dog's photo