Category Archives: hacks

Shmoocon 2011: intercepting FHSS radio signals

Q, Atlas and Cutaway gave a presentation at the Shmoocon 2011 conference held recently in Washington, DC, concerning interception techniques for Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) radio signals. They demonstrate the use of low-cost, easily obtained hardware/software to conduct predictive channel hopping analysis coupled with crude spectrum analysis and ultimately identify any given hopping pattern […]

Shmoocon 2011: Linux autorun USB attacks

Many of us use Linux on a regular basis, and some users mistakenly believe that it’s immune to many of the hack attacks commonly used against Windows machines. In this talk presented at the Shmoocon 2011 conference which recently concluded in Washington, DC, Jon Larimer demonstrates how the development of common windows features in Linux, […]

Shmoocon 2011: Custom Bluetooth hardware attacks

Here’s a summary by Hak5 of Bluetooth hardware attacks presented at the recent Shmoocon 2011 conference held in Washington, DC. Here the Hak5 gang interviews Michael Ossmann about project Ubertooth – a custom hardware device for sniffing and injecting Bluetooth packets. This brings monitor mode to Bluetooth, making for some interesting RF activities. The complete […]

Teflon insulated wire trivia

AkosL writes in with a prototyping tip: Try teflon insulated wires. (Or other heat/wear resistant insulation materials).  Why? The insulation is very resistant compared to “common” insulator materials. Both mechanically, and heat resistant (the one right in front of me is rated to temperatures between -60°C to +200°C). You could solder just few millimeters from […]

Wireless sniffing and jamming

Recently Travis Goodspeed posted an article about using goodfet.cc to sniff radio traffic from the Chronos watch by TI and the iClicker handheld classroom remote. In addition to the sniffing capabilities, the project can also be used to jam RF signals as well using the IM-ME device illustrated above. Via Hack a Day.

Portable Hackintosh on a USB thumb drive

People put linux on their flash drives all the time. They also get hackintosh on their hard drives quite often. However, it’d be nice to be able to get the same live experience we get with Linux using OS X. With a distribution of OS X 10.6.2 called iPortable Snow, we can. Will Fancher at […]

DEFCON 16: hardware trojans using FPGA

At the DEFCON 16 hacker conference, Fouad Kiamilev and Ryan Hoover gave a presentation on the security threat presented by hardware Trojans, extra circuitry illicitly added to hardware during its manufacture. When triggered, the hardware Trojan performs an illicit action such as leaking secret information, allowing attackers clandestine access or control, or disabling or reducing […]

Hacking passive automotive entry/starting systems

The Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich presents a paper documenting hacking techniques on Passive Keyless Entry and Start Systems (PKES). The hardware setup seems simple enough. The group states: The cable relay was performed with off-the-shelf coaxial cables. We built two 30 m cables that we combined for the 60 m relay tests. […]

Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile

The Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security (CAESS) published a very detailed paper outlining the use, and potential for abuse of modern automotive embedded electronic control systems. Central to their work was the development of Carshark, a software tool for hacking the CAN bus on modern vehicles. (No, we do not know of site where […]

HACK: Open source USB stack on MCP2200

Microchip has a new USB->serial converter chip called the MCP2200. We suspected they made this chip from a 20-pin PIC. The MCP2200 pinout is like other PIC uCs, and it has similar reset pin and internal voltage regulator circuits. We hooked up our trusty PICKIT3 and read the device ID. The MCP2200 was recognized as a […]

Vsprog SWD working on STM8 and STM32VL embedded debugger

Serial Wire Debug is a new two-wire JTAG debugging protocol used by several low pin-count LPC and STM32 ARM chips. Adaptation of SWD by open source debuggers like OpenOCD has been slow. Bingo succeeded in adapting the open source Versaloon firmware to do SWD programming on the cheap STM8S-Discovery and STM32VL-Discovery boards. Congratulations! We hope […]

Real-Time audio spectrum analyser

Here’s an application using FFT on an PIC18F4550 8-bit microcontroller: This project implements a real-time audio spectrum analyser using a PIC18F4550 8-bit microcontroller. The spectrum frequency analysis is performed by a highly optimised 16-bit Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) routine coded entirely in C. The output from the FFT is displayed using a 128×64 graphical LCD […]

Hacking toy RC cars

Project Lab provides the details on how to produce a wireless robotics platform using a cheap RC toy vehicle, Arduino, XBee and Processing. The vehicle is completely controlled by the code running on the remote computer which allows very rapid prototyping of the code to tell the vehicle what to do and how to react […]

Map proprietary connectors

Dan Reetz shows how to map proprietary connectors: I love the Casio EX-FH100. I hate proprietary bullshit. It’s tremendously aggravating when a manufacturer arbitrarily makes up a new connector — especially when we have perfectly good standard connectors already. Proprietary bullshit stokes my rebel spirit, makes me fighty, makes me hack. Via Makezine.

Analyzing a modern cryptographic RFID system

Henryk Plötz and Milosch Meriac gave a presentation at the recent 27C3 Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin, Germany, in which they demystified the HID iClass. One of the challenges of breaking iCLASS RFID readers was to extract the firmware and the security keys of RW400 readers without leaving visible traces like breaking the case open. […]