Wireshark analysis of wireless protocols

FreakLabs has an interesting project designed to conduct sniffing of protocols that ride on top of 802.15.4 such as Zigbee and 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over 802.15.4). The project utilizes their FreakDuino platform which contains an Arduino integrated with a wireless radio. The tutorial assumes that Wireshark is installed on your computer, the Chibi or chibiArduino release supporting promiscuous mode has been downloaded to the board, and that you’re using hardware that supports the protocol stacks.

While not a project for the beginner, this certainly looks interesting for the advanced Arduino hacker.
Via Hack a Day.

Dynamic radio spectrum utilization


Here’s an interesting paper from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia detailing Dynamic Spectrum Access Management using Cognitive Radio System. The concepts highlighted in this presentation will become increasingly important as regulators in the US and throughout the world deal with competing needs for radio spectrum, with a corresponding impact on developers and users of RF devices.

Digilent Electronics Explorer board

Digilent has come out with an electronics design workbench they call the Electronics Explorer Board.

*  All-in-one circuit design station
* 4-channel, 40MSa Oscilloscope
* 4-channel voltmeter
* 2 programmable reference voltages
* 2-channel Arbitrary Waveform Generator
* Triple-Output Power Supply (two programmable)
* 32-Channel Logic Analyzer
* 32-Channel Pattern Generator
* Discrete digital I/O’s (buttons, switches, LEDs, etc)

Via the forum. Thanks IPenguin!

Breaking SSL on embedded devices

Developers use embedded devices all the time, often without implementing security measures. When they do, they often rely on SSL. As revealed by the LittleBlackBox project there exists a collection of thousands of private SSL keys extracted from various embedded devices. These private keys are stored in a database where they are correlated with their public SSL certificates as well as the hardware/firmware that are known to use those SSL keys.

As summarized by Embedded Device Hacking, “That means that if Alice and Bob are both using the same router with the same firmware version, then both of their routers have the same SSL keys. All Eve needs to do in order to decrypt their traffic is to download the firmware from the vendor’s Web site and extract the SSL private key from the firmware image.”

Interesting.

OBDuino: car diagnostics with Arduino


The OBDuino is an in-car real-time display of various information, like speed, RPM, instant fuel consumption or average trip fuel consumption as well as others PIDs supported by the car. It reads the data from the car’s OBD-II connector, interfacing it via a MC33290 chip to the Arduino which processes the CAN data and outputs to a 2×16 LCD.

Chaos Communications Congress live media streams


The 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) is in full swing in Berlin, Germany. This annual four-day conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has presentations on all aspects of technology and hacking, many of which are in English. The conference runs through December 31, 2010. Check out the live audio and video streams now!

Using Bus Pirate to interface a MT3318 GPS receiver

Krishna used the Bus Pirate to interface a MT3318 GPS receiver.

I have used the transparent UART mode of the Bus Pirate to directly access the serial data and send it to other third party softwares to show my location on google maps.

Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors Adafruit, Open Source Control Systems, and eHaJo.

Versaloon programmer


Versaloon is a full-opensource platform for multiple applications, including a programmer, debugger, logic tester, logic analyzer and simple oscilloscope. It’s based on generic USB_TO_XXX protocol, which can support more than 10 kinds of interfaces including JTAG, SWD, SPI, IIC and so on.

USB_TO_XXX is not only used to control these interfaces, but also it can play in one command a complex timing on multiple interfaces with some high-level functions(accurate time control, polling, nesting, compare/verify and so on).

Seeed Studios’ electronic pet

Clearing out old posts before the new year, some of these might seem ancient.

Seeed Studio designed thier own electronic pet:

It is a platform for the newbie engineers to be familiar with our company’s products and practice. Every newbie engineer will be added some new ideas or elements on the SEEED PET.