Solving the Jane Street Reverse Engineering Challenge
A software engineer recounts their month-long process of reverse engineering an ASIC chip as part of a Jane Street technical challenge. The post details the technical hurdles and the trial-and-error approach used to understand the chip's design files.
Why it matters
Reverse engineering complex hardware is a critical skill in cybersecurity and chip design, demonstrating the depth of technical challenges used to recruit top engineering talent.
Or: Why do I always do things the hard way?
Jane Street periodically puts out challenges, and this one thoroughly nerd-sniped me and sent me down a month-long rabbit hole that I’m only now emerging from. This post is an overview of how I solved it with a combination of hard-headedness and sleep deprivation. It’s going to be decently technical, but in future posts I’ll go over the specifics of each step if people are interested.
For some background I’d recommend looking at the original post on the Jane Street blog here - Can you reverse Engineer an ASIC?
And if you ever want to read the (terrible) code I used for this challenge, you can find it at my github page here
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