Stealth Attacks on PCBs: An Experimental Plausibility Analysis

This paper reports - inspired by the Bloomberg article “The Big Hack” - on experiments researching the possibilities to manipulate Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) and the chances that such a manipulation can and will be detected. We used non-functional devices to showcase manipulations and are providing optical and X-ray pictures to illustrate how good or difficult it is to detect such manipulations. We researched hiding dies in parts of a PCB and under a BGA package. Our experiments clearly show that such manipulations are feasible and extremely hard to detect if done thoroughly.