It’s off to the Plaza room for a hardware hacking session that sounds really interesting.
Andrew Huang, or “Bunny” has some suprisingly easy hardware hacks to share. He’s the Hacking the XBox guy. Right now he’s going over the basics of hardware hacking, reverse engineering, and the like. Current slide: Is RE Legal? (Answer: Yes- but IANAL). Hardware hacking and reverse engineering is sort of a a checks and balance system. For example: does that computer indeed have the chipset in there that it says it does.
Watch out for the DMCA, it bites.
Why reverse engineer? Why not? It can be a curiosity. Tweaking and and innovation is another reason to hack or RE. Accountability is another reason. Hacking is balance.
Printer cartridge ink chips suck. Lock in sucks. Hardware hackers can help by reverse engineering the chips and lock in system. Get it out into the public. Tweak your cars. Chip your cars. Why ship an engine but not enable all of its power?
Hardware hacking appears to not be as easy as it used to be, but it’s still pretty darn easy.
Emerging trends: circuit boards and dev boards are really cheap now. They used to be really expensive, but now they’re cheap. The barriers for entry still apear to be high, but are quite lower. No single trend solves the problems of hackers, but several trends are here.
- cheap circuit boards. You can send design files to a company, they make them, send them out without having someone touch the board in the process. Breadboards were great, but these things are better.
- You can get really cheap PCBs which you can program and extend. He has a list of sites up, but my eyesight is pretty bad so I can’t transcribe the URLs. The talk should be online later.
- FPGAs are helping. ASIC: Application Specific Integrated Circuits are great, but really specific and not good for general hacking. FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chips are a hardware hackers friend. They can do all kinds of stuff. They can be really fast.
- Design tools are getting better. For example, WebPack is free.
- Open Source hardware is here. The tools and designs can be open.
- Soldering and desoldering is a lot easier than it appears. ChipQuick has an alloy for easily removing chips from boards.
- Probing boards has gotten better. The leads are really small, but the tools are definitely there. Micrograbbers are less expensive and very efficient for hearing what an individual pin is doing.
- A lot of the stuff that costs $25,00 can be done with much lower tech and a few weeks time.
- IC Analysis is up and coming, getting easier. The tech is a bit above my head, but cool no less.
- Back Doors. It’s all about back doors. Use the back doors, they are your friend.
I was hoping for some more practical hardware hacking, though the book Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks by Scott Fullam should cover a lot of that. I’m excited about lower cost FPGAs and PCBs. I must check in to that some more.