> It sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that he wants to use the
> 16F84, but the customer is concerned about the cracking, and he's
> trying to
> justify its use to the customer.  It's got nothing to do with actually
> wanting to crack a 16F84.

This is EXACTLY what I mean.  Seems the word CRACK presses the REACTOR
button on some folks.

Having flash capability offers obvious advantages, but when I suggested
this to the customer, they were immediately concerned about protection
of their intellectual property.  They have heard about the procedures
used to extract information from copy protected PICs, and specifically
the 16C84.

I have found cracking procedure for the following chips:

16c54,16c55,16c56,16c57,16c58,16c61,16c62,16c64,16c65,16c71,16c73,
16c74,16c84

The procedure supposedly gives you some bits of the instruction word
and you are left to select one of two possible instructions by context.
Also, the procedures seem to be generic and should work on all 12bit and
14bit chips.

Thus the question boils down to:

Which chips require the most effort to crack?

Also, has anyone built a 'glucker' to take good, well-structured code,
and gluck it up so it is un-maintainable to a would be hacker?


Craig