PSP 3000 Hacked

Peripheral manufacturer Datel has been hard at work attempting to crack the PSP 3000 since its release. They’ve developed the Lite Blue Tool battery to force the PSP into service mode so hackers can run any arbitrary code they want. According to MaxConsole, Datel performed a silicon level investigation of the PSP’s chips to determine how to break into service mode. This means they decapsulated the the chips and reverse engineered any cryptographic protections. We’d love to hear exactly what chips were being used since some are fundamentally flawed.

Silicon hacking has always been a favorite topic of ours and we suggest you check out [Chris Tarnovsky]’s decapsulation technique to learn more about it.

Iphone-dev Team 3G Soft Unlock Coming Soon

[vimeo 2291914]

The iphone-dev team has officially stated “all that remains is implementation“. They’ve developed all the pieces they need to perform a software unlock for the iPhone 3G, now it’s just a matter of putting them together in user friendly fashion. They’ve managed to run unsigned code on the baseband, developed custom AT tools, and are now showing injection of a background task. They will combine all of these techniques to override the carrier lock baseband code. As usual, they warn against performing any official firmware updates to the phone.

Augmented Reality In Flash

flashupdate

Digital Pictures Interactive has put together a great augmented reality demo. Unlike many others, it’s entirely Flash based, so there’s no install necessary. Print out the custom symbol and try it out for yourself in your browser. Augmented reality refers to any mashup that combines computer generated content with a live video stream. We see great potential for this technology and the large number of consumer webcams would certainly help consumer adoption. Video demo embedded below. Continue reading “Augmented Reality In Flash”

How-to: The Bus Pirate, Universal Serial Interface

UPDATE: New firmware with JTAG and more

We’re always excited to get a new chip or SIM card to interface, but our enthusiasm is often dampened by the prototyping process. Interfacing any chip usually means breadboarding a circuit, writing code, and hauling out the programmer; maybe even a prototyping PCB.

A few years ago we built the first ‘Bus Pirate’, a universal bus interface that talks to most chips from a PC serial terminal. Several standard serial protocols are supported at 3.3-5volts, including I2C, SPI, and asynchronous serial. Additional ‘raw’ 2- and 3- wire libraries can interface almost any proprietary serial protocols. Since this has been such a useful tool for us, we cleaned up the code, documented the design, and released it here with specs, schematic, and source code.

Continue reading “How-to: The Bus Pirate, Universal Serial Interface”

Clickjacking Webcast Tomorrow

[Jeremiah Grossman] and [Eric Lawrence] will be presenting on clickjacking and browser security in an online seminar tomorrow. Clickjacking allows an attacker to transparently place links exactly where a user would be clicking, essentially forcing the user to perform actions without their knowledge. This method of attack has been known for a few years, but researchers have focused their attention on it lately because they feel the threat has been underestimated. Recently, Adobe patched a vulnerability specifically because of this issue. Tune in tomorrow for more info on the attack.

SGI 10,000 Core Concept

sgi

In a bold move, Silicon Graphics has decided to see how much crap many cores they can shove in one box. The Molecule is 10,000 core rackmount machine designed to leverage low cost consumer CPUs like the Intel Atom. It emphasizes high memory bandwidth and throughput between CPUs. While this sort of space efficiency is interesting it’s certainly going to take some serious cooling to get designs like this off the ground.

[via Hacked Gadgets]