[bigiain]

Sure - but people _are_ doing this at home with stuff they buy off eBay right now: http://zacsblog.aperturelabs.com/2013/02/decapping-integrate...

And as for "far beyond average hardware hacking skill", I suspect if you got Bunny Huang, Michael Ossmann, and Travis Goodspeed together and curious - this might well be broken in a single weekend! ;-)

[blackguardx]

Your link just describes decapping and reading the state of mask programmable PROM. Reverse engineering a secure IC and coming up with an exploit is several orders (like 10) of magnitude more involved.

[kolinko]

So if the first takes a day, the latter - 10 million days?

[blackguardx]

But seriously, difficulty also implies required skill and equipment.