Reassembling the Device

In order to boot the device as if it were still fully functional, it had to be reassembled. This means that the static RAM chip had to be soldered back onto the board and the four PCBs had to be reconnected. In addition, the CPU had to be soldered to in order to perform our man-in-the-middle attack to capture the data between the static RAM chip and the CPU.

First, we soldered wires to the CPU. We soldered to the pins previously identified as the pins connected to the static RAM chip's Input/Output pins, which were the Dx pins on the CPU. There were sixteen of these pins. We also soldered to a Vcc (voltage) and a Vss (ground) pin.

These wires had to be soldered to avoid the connector above (or in the provided picture, to the left of) the chip, since that connector is used to link PCBs. Next, the static RAM chip was resoldered on. First, it was "reballed". This entailed covering the chip with flux and attaching small, uniform amounts of lead solder to each pin. Since the chip has been cleaned and soldered to, it needed fresh solder to reattach to the PCB.

Once the chip was reballed, the rest of the PCB was covered with heat-resistant tape to prevent other chips from being affected. Then, the spot where the static RAM chip was originally was covered with flux and heated with a hot air gun. Then, the chip was reset onto that spot and heated with the hot air gun until it had set completely.

Finally, the device was reassembled. Each PCB had connectors to the other boards, and those connectors were snapped back together.