Arpad Toth has released the results of three years of research on the Universal Powerline Bus (UPB) home automation system. This system is widely used in Europe for control of home lighting and other applicances and appears similar to the X10 systems. Arpad’s article titled “Cloning the UPB home automation system” details the reverse engineering […]
Category Archives: reversed
28C3: Reverse engineering a Qualcomm baseband
At the recently concluded Chaos Communication Congress 28C3 “behind enemy lines” conference in Berlin, Germany, Guillaume Delugré presented this talk on reverse-engineering a Qualcomm baseband. Despite their wide presence in our lives, baseband chips are still nowadays poorly known and understood from a system point of view. Some presentations have highlighted vulnerabilities in GSM stacks […]
CVSD audio compression codec in an FPGA
In this video Jeri Ellsworth demonstrates her design of a Continuously Variable Slope Delta (CVSD) audio compression codec in an FPGA. She was in need of a replacement for a damaged HC-55564 IC from (where else) a pinall machine and reverse engineered the chip, coding up a replacement in a Xilinx FPGA on a Papilio […]
Nike+iPod reverse engineering (protocol too)
Dmitry Grinberg informs us of his latest project reverse engineering the Nike + iPod protocol. Basically this is a wireless protocol used by Nike to communicate data from certain shoe products to programs running on an iPod or iPhone. He says: “Nike+iPod is a very interesting piece of hardware for all kinds of reasons, not […]
Radare2 open source reverse engineering software
Radare2 is an open source tool to disassemble, debug, analyze and manipulate binary files. Edd at Canthack has posted a detailed example demonstrating use of Radare2 to reverse shellcode. You may also want to check out the Radare talks and docs pages for more information on this tool. They have a 152 page book covering […]
The US wants YOU to help verify chip integrity
The US government’s intelligence community research arm, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency or IARPA, is responsible for verifying the integrity of chips procured by the government and destined for mission critical national security applications. They are well aware that foreign suppliers can adulterate the supply of mission critical chips in various ways, including designing […]
Hacking the PIC 18F1320
Andrew “Bunnie” Huang is well known for his Xbox hacks. He wanted to try out some reversing techniques on programmed PIC 18F1320 chips he acquired in order to read the secured FLASH memory. After having the PICs commercially decapped, he analyzed the silicon under an electron microscope revealing the location of security bits relative to […]
Practical MC13224 firmware extraction
Travis Goodspeed wrote this article on his blog detailing his extraction of firmware from the MC13224 that had been read protected. This is the same MCU used in the Defcon 18 badge and the Redwire Econotag. He presents two methods. In one he decaps the SPI flash memory chip using nitric acid, then removes and […]
Reverse engineering large 7-segment LED displays
arhi wrote a mini-datasheet for a large 7-segment display he plans to use in a clock: I ordered bunch of 7seg modules from Sure and I noticed on the product page lot of ppl complained about lack on info on how to drive them. As I plan to use them I spent few moments to […]
Degate reverse engineering tool
Degate is a graphical reverse engineering tool for Ubuntu and OS X. Degates’ purpose is to aid reverse engineering of digital electronics in integrated circuits (ICs). Degate helps you to explore images from ICs. It matches logic gates on the imagery given by graphical templates and it assists you in tracing circuit paths. Degate is […]
Reverse engineering the HRD remote serial protocol
Sivan Toledo likes to use Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD), a free program that serves as a user interface to radio transceivers. Modern transceivers can be controlled either from their front panel controls (if they have a front panel), or from a computer through a serial or USB connection. He writes: One cool and useful feature […]
AVR decapping
Here are some examples by manekinen of what can happen when an apparently high reverse voltage is applied to several AVRs. Via Hack a Day.
Intro to reverse engineering software
In his article, Discrete Cosine presents some basic information on reverse engineering hex files. A quick primer highlighting simple concepts about file analysis. If you’ve hacked hardware and wondered where to start with software, check this out.
27C3: Building Custom Disassemblers
FX of Phenoelit recently presented a talk at the 27C3 CCC in Berlin, Germany on the topic of instruction set reverse engineering. Topics include obtaining byte code, analyzing it for basic properties, finding addressing modes, and implementing an IDA Pro processor module. The primary focus is on the transformation of byte code back into mnemonic […]
27C3: File – Print – Electronics
In this presentation from the 27C3 conference held recently in Berlin, Germany, Jeff Gough demonstrates the next step in hardware development, the circuit board printer. As an alternative to dependence on prefab dev boards and kits, Jeff outlines his efforts in reverse engineering an Epson inkjet printer to build a rapid prototyping machine for circuit […]
27C3: Embedded Reverse Engineering Tools and Techniques
Nathan Fain and Vadik presented at the 27C3 Chaos Communications Congress held recently in Berlin, Germany, on a topic of interest to us all: JTAG/Serial/FLASH/PCB Embedded Reverse Engineering Tools and Techniques. Check out their webpage for full documentation and analysis.
Running your own GSM stack on a phone
Harald Welte and Steve Markgraf presented at 27C3 CCC in Berlin, Germany, on the OsmocomBB project, a Free Software implementation of the GSM protocol stack running on a mobile phone. This provides the security researcher a tool equivalent to an Ethernet card in the TCP/IP protocol world: a simple transceiver that will send arbitrary protocol […]
Reverse engineering a real-world RFID payment system
Harald Welte presented at the 27C3 CCC in Berlin, Germany, demonstrating his efforts at reverse engineering the data format of a real-world RFID based debit card system. His efforts focused on the EasyCard system, which is a popular method of cashless payment in Asia. Slides of the presentation are also available.
27C3: Console hacking
What if you got a game console for Christmas but don’t like playing games? You hack it to make it run your own code of course! This talk presented by bushing at the recent Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin, Germany, talks about the various hacks that you can use to gain control of your hardware […]
27C3: Chip and Pin is broken
Smart cards have gradually replaced magnetic strip cards for point-of-sale and ATM transactions in many countries. Customers authorize a credit or debit card transaction by inserting their card and entering a PIN into a point-of-sale terminal; the PIN is typically verified by the smart card chip, which is in turn authenticated to the terminal by […]