This a good description of microSD sourcing based around a bad batch of Kingston cards and survey of a half dozen other cards. The author probes their embedded id information and then dissolves their cases to expose the dies revealing the source of their chips.
Great article. This is exactly the sort of thing I want to see on HN, but of course it's buried on the second page, unlikely to ever be seen by many. Sad.
Some microSD cards are (so the article says) driven by little ARM uCs. That suggests hacking opportunities: on-the-fly encryption, hidden partitions, ... -- if the firmware can be tampered with.
Very very interesting. It has me doubting the provenance of a Kingston SD card I bought recently from a third party seller on amazon.co.uk; it has a silk-screened lot code in the same pass as the logo, just like the dodgy one talked about here. (Full D though.)
