When the files on the Titan submersible disaster were published, most people skimmed for drama. Hackers, however, would likely zoom in on the hardware autopsy. [Scott Manley] actually did this. He faced a hacker’s nightmare: three crushed PCs, bent SSDs, and an encrypted SD card from a camera that survived six kilometres under pressure, all sealed in titanium and silence.
[Scott] went all in to resurrect data. First came CT scans: firing 320 kV X-rays through a kilo of mangled electronics to hunt for intact NAND chips. When that failed, he desoldered UFS memory by hand, used custom flash readers, cloned NV-RAMs, and even rebuilt boards…
When the files on the Titan submersible disaster were published, most people skimmed for drama. Hackers, however, would likely zoom in on the hardware autopsy. [Scott Manley] actually did this. He faced a hacker’s nightmare: three crushed PCs, bent SSDs, and an encrypted SD card from a camera that survived six kilometres under pressure, all sealed in titanium and silence.
[Scott] went all in to resurrect data. First came CT scans: firing 320 kV X-rays through a kilo of mangled electronics to hunt for intact NAND chips. When that failed, he desoldered UFS memory by hand, used custom flash readers, cloned NV-RAMs, and even rebuilt boards to boot salvaged firmware. The ultimate test was grafting the recovered chips onto donor hardware in Canada. Like the monster of Frankenstein, the system came to life.
In the end, it partially worked. Twelve stills and nine videos were retrieved, albeit none from the fatal dive. The process itself was a masterclass in deep hardware forensics, here covered in a video worth watching.