Reverse engineering of integrated circuits

Patent Granted Reverse engineering is an invasive and destructive form of analyzing a smart card. The attacker grinds away layer after layer of the smart card and takes pictures with an electron microscope. With this technique, it is possible to reveal the complete hardware and software part of the smart card. The major problem for the attacker is to bring everything into the right order to find out how everything works. The makers of the card try to hide keys and operations by mixing up memory positions, for example, bus scrambling.