Reversing embedded systems
 

Hi, this is a little bit off topic/forum, but I didn't know exactly to post this.

Does anybody know any good reversing forums specialized in hacking/reverse engineering embedded systems.

Reason for asking is that I have a controller board, containing an Atmega 1280 MCU, which is bricked. I would like to extract the firmware from the MCU flash, but the LB1 or LB2 lock-bits are set, which prevents programming/reading/verifying flash & EEPROM contents.
Apparently the only way to reset the lock-bits is to completely erase the chip, which of course is not a viable option for me. Would be interesting to see if somebody managed to rest the 2 bits without erasing the flash & EEPROM

I cannot help you on this specific situation; unfortunately!

What about the famous "chip-off" way? Is it possible for you?

Unfortunately that is not possible, because I don't own the million dollar equipment required to perform this type of operations

I feel you bro :( Don't you have any debug or JTAG pins to move on?

Yes the board has a 6pin SPI header & 10 pin JTAG header, and I can read the chip with SPI, but JTAG access, debugging, and verifying memory contents has been disabled, and the the LB1 and LB2 lock-bits have been set, so its not possible anymore to change any fuse settings, unless you completly erase the chip first. Reading the flash & eeprom contents with the current settings returns garbage (i.e FFFF FFFF )for the complete memory contents

Introduction to Embedded Systems Security and Reverse Engineering (Chinese)
 

Introduction to Embedded Systems Security and Reverse Engineering (Chinese)

O.K. I will check this out

This is generally a very, very interesting topic!
But the page hxxps://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/49831082 is a bit too *Chinese" for me (purely linguistically).
Can someone translate it into English?
(I have problems with the translation and probably not only me)
Would be worth a new entry in the "General" category of Exetools ?
Example: "Reversing embedded systems" (Little hint for the admins)
Would surely enrich the forum ?
(Maybe we could vote on it, if the topic would be desired)

I have the same problem with translation, also without registering it seems that you cannot query anything.

I know that exetools is the lead forum for software hacking/reversing, and in general not geared towards hardware hacking/reversing, but it would be nice if this could be added/implemented, because there are a lot of very knowledgeable members on this forum who could assist/help less skilled members

to be honest, I am thinking about this too, but we need to know how many people are interest in this topic so we can open it.

Interesting article on a real world example:

i guess, maybe the most recent tech i know is decap. there is also glitch based exploit, but that is very rare information.

Attached you can find an english-translated version (google).
Hope this helps.

P.S. Apologies if you weren't meaning you need a translated page.

pdf converted in case...

I do not have download permissions, so I cannot know what was already posted as the translated version. Maybe my version is worse than the posted one.
But this is my humble contribution of the PDF translated version to the forum.
Hope this helps someone.

Reversing Embedded Device BootLoader (IoT Hacking)
 

Reversing embedded device bootloader (U-Boot) (Part 1)
Reversing embedded device bootloader (U-Boot) (Part 2)
IoT Hacking (Qiling + Shielder)

That is a really interesting and amazing story.
Poor Thomas must have nightmares about his locked-away fortune

I would love this, as well.

What's odd is how he ignores the very ones who have cracked it. I suspect this motivation may be financial: if they can do it, surely others out there can do it too ...and for cheaper cost.

Maybe this book can help:

IoT Penetration Testing Cookbook
By : Aaron Guzman, Aditya Gupta