Because the stick supposedly self-destructs after several wrong attempts at keying in the password, we decided to put that feature to the test first. We didn't want to take the risk of rendering all sticks useless, so we decided to take the cautious approach and do what Tweakers do best: unscrew and open the gear. Our fear that the stick would go up in smoke as soon as we opened it proved unfounded: removing one screw turned out to be sufficient to disassemble the whole thing. Peering inside, one of the first things we noticed is that Sipal did not use epoxy to prevent unauthorized tampering with the hardware by creative individuals armed with soldering irons.
Opening the Secustick reveals two easily recognizable elements: a flash controller and a piece of NAND memory, which in this case has been manufactured by Hynix. A little research taught us that this type of controller is a very basic type that doesn't have any specific security features, and although we couldn't find a datasheet of the memory module, we did discover one from a similar model on the internet, and learned that it has a special pin that allows or denies writing to the chip, based on its voltage. The stick is also fitted with a button to regulate access, but it is attached to the controller instead of the memory chip, which means that it is up to the controller to decide whether or not writing is permitted. By soldering a wire between the special pin and the earth we could be sure that no data on the chip could be altered
When we re-inserted the stick into the PC and deliberately typed a wrong password, the screen read: 'Wrong password, 6 attempts left'. So we tried again, and the message on the screen read 'Wrong password, 6 attempts left' once again. Goody! The stick left unable to store the number of password attempts, we could now try out passwords indefinitely without having to fear that the stick would self-destruct. Time to take a closer look at the software.