Learning To Take Apart A Phone — Reverse Engineering Hardware
I am WittsEnd2 — Founder of Ragnar Security. My mission is to give everyone to make complex cybersecurity topics easier to learn. Particularly, I focus on teaching Binary Exploitation and Reverse Engineering.
One weekend, bored because COVID decided to shut everything down, my friend and I decided to take apart a couple of phones for the fun of it. The phones that we took apart were the Motorolla E (2nd Generation). Our goal was to see the internals of the phone and determine whether we could put them back together.
Taking Apart the Motorola E
The approach we decided to take to take apart the Motorolla E because it was broken already, and then take apart the Samsung Galaxy S6. We had over 10 Motorolla E’s with more than half of them having broken screens. The Samsung Galaxy S6 was newer and seemed like it wasn’t broken, but it wouldn’t turn on.
Since it was nearly going to be impossible to preserve the screen, we decided to take it off with a scalper. It cracked into further pieces; however, it was extremely fast (especially if you use a hairdryer to warm up the adhesive). Once…
