alt Hacker NewsHi HN, I recently solved the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge [0], and I wrote a blog post on how I reached the answer.
It's a moderately technical and (hopefully) entertaining run through of the process. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed doing the challenge (though, as you'll read, it was also quite a frustrating process). My github is on the post if you were interested in seeing a bit more in detail what my solution looked like, though I intend to write some follow up posts that are a bit more in the weeds of the solution. And frankly, the code I used is pretty ugly but it got the job done.
This is my first blog post, so if you have any feedback please let me know. All the writing, all the code was done by me, by hand, in vim.
[0] https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic...
Replies
I really enjoyed the writing, cheers. And yes, you may have done it the hard way, but you probably learnt 10x more by doing that.
As for what to do next, I used to spend way too much of my late-2000s time on puzzle hunts (particularly the Melbourne Uni one [1]) and this tickled the same part of my brain. Unfortunately they're no longer a thing, but it definitely sounds like you'd enjoy something similar.
Incredible amount of determination, but you really did make it hard for yourself!
You can install librelane to get the whole open silicon tool suite and the sky130 PDK. Circuit extraction can be done with magic. Going from a spice netlist to verilog netlist is pretty mechanical and not a hard transform to write. You almost immediately have something that can be simulated and a good baseline for further reversing.
> It turns out that this ‘sky130’ thing is like a … standard? Or something for making chips.
Very cool seeing someone completely naive going into this :)
If you want to read more about a bit more... cheaty way to do this, I have written about using formal verification machinery to straight up force the solution out of the netlist here: https://atx.name/electronics/asic-re/ . Could be a bit of an infohazard, but I think journey is the goal and yours was certainly more educational :)