The problem with security appliances is verifying that they are as good as the marketing has lead you to believe. You need to spend lots of money to buy a unit, or figure out how to obtain it another way; we chose eBay. We now have a hardened, encrypted, AES 256 tape storage unit and a mission, break it every way possible! We're going to dive into the finer points of the pain required to actually evaluate and disassemble a harden security appliance. We'll be delving into such fun topics as epoxy melting, de-soldering, ROM chip reading, FGPA configuration recreation, Verilog decoding, recovering the various key strands that keep the device/data secure, and any other topics we end up straying into.