PCBs Layer data in Gerber format

Sensitive PCBs may end up at an adversarial e-waste location with the exile of any susceptible component to cement its intelligence and security. We introduce an original threat that can break the intelligence and explicate the vulnerabilities of that measurement.In this work we developed an automatic tool for printed circuit board reverse engineering (PCB-RE) in which it is assumed that the PCBs are devoid of any components or silkscreens, with only the wiring traces being accessible on the various layers. This models the scenario where the PCBs are damaged and/or discarded. In the latter case, sensitive PCBs may end up at an adversarial e-waste location. We demonstrate that our PCB RE tool extracts the correct bill of materials (BOM) for 10 different PCs by analyzing only the metal layers. We demonstrate that the proposed RE method can detect any integrated circuit (IC) on the PCB with no false positives and false negatives. This scheme also identifies passive components, such as resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Thus, we show that PCB security can be annihilated simply by metal trace analysis.