Definitely doable in a home lab for under $25k in equipment, likely under $10k.

Same as my replicating Colin O’Flynn’s BAM BAM attack on a MPC5566 chip, he used a ChipShouter ($5,000) and I used a PicoEMP ($50).

https://youtu.be/URmI1VVilek

There will always be an arms race between safe-crackers and safe-builders. Presumably the lessons learned will help make the next generation tougher to break into.

Does that mean there are four cores on the die? Is there crazy amounts of MUXing going on? Does the extra, semi-unused area give the chip a premium price tag? Or did I misinterpret this?

Not super practical, but neat attack

For one a similar instrument can be constructed from surplus parts for far less. Secondly, it's a single bit flip required. Now knowing the the technique works, a harness could be built that attempts it scattershot without the precise targeting and just has to try a lot of times. Using a different stimulus, e.g. xray it might well be possible without deencapsulating the part.

I have a side question. I looked into the linked Raspberry Pi hacking challenge, and there's something very basic I couldn't figure out: It looks like the relevant script in the repo just writes 0xc0ff 0xffee a few times to the OTP as the "secret" to unlock. But given that $20000 was up for grabs, this can't possibly be the genuine secret being sought to claim the prize. (Indeed, I can't think of a secure way to install a secret from a public GitHub repo unless it involves running on-device code that encrypts something using some other, factory-installed secret key, which is just kicking the can down the road.) And given that the OTP on a brand new RP23550 is initialised to all zeros, it can't be that the genuine secret is programmed in at the factory either.

What am I missing? How does the genuine secret get installed on a person's RP2350?