We would like to welcome you to our new series “What is it Wednesdays.” We internally started this series based on an internal Will it Scan event where we put random objects into our Northstar X5000 225kV Computed Tomography (CT) scanner and see if our staff can guess what the object is based on the recovered images. The format of this series will consist of us posting evidence packages every Wednesday giving more and more information recovered from the devices. These evidence packages will contain artifacts from CT images, photographic images, bills of materials, recovered firmwares, recovered memory, and more! As we get into more complex devices there may or may not be a prize for the first individuals to correctly identify the device. With that, welcome to Device 1.
Evidence Package 1 (CT Scans)
Artifact
Figures 1 and 2 show raw CT scans that have been converted to PNG images. The board was removed from its production housing for the scans but not modified in any other way. I.e. all of the board components are still populated as they were when the device entered the consumer market. There already exists some tooling in the open source community for automated component, via, and trace recovery, so we will keep these images as raw for this week allowing you all to explore on your own.
Tooling
Northstar X5000 225kV consisting of a multi-axis, high resolution digital x-ray system providing advanced real-time 2D digital radiography (DR), and 3D computed tomography (CT) imagery in multiple formats integrating a powerful CT reconstruction and visualization software that generates user-friendly executables and deliverables. We can scan up to 1um resolution for CT scans on low density parts allowing us to reverse engineer legacy devices with a high degree of non-destructive precision on devices up to a nominal 32 x 48 in [81 x 121 cm] part envelope. Long gone are the days of us using highly toxic chemicals, hours of manual test point and trace mapping, or highly destructive de-layering in order to understand and recover the original electrical schematics.
