How do you reverse engineer something?

You just do it. If you don’t know how, then you figure it out. You learn all of the theory and techniques needed to understand how a system works.

If you are going around asking “How do I hack? I wanna be a hacker!” then you’re an idiot. VERY few people qualify as true “hackers”. In order to qualify as such, you must be reverse engineering (and modifying) technical systems, and IT MUST ALL BE YOUR OWN WORK. Following someone else’s tutorial does not make you a hacker, it makes you a n00b. Figure it out yourself. ALL OF IT. Only then might you possibly be able to refer to yourself as a “hacker” (even then, it’s questionable, and ultimately determined by the complexity of the “reverse engineering” that you have performed).

I can’t imagine that HAD would ever attract wannabe hacker n00bs (that are really just nubs looking for tutorials, rather than figuring something out for themselves)… xD

@Jake – Hacking is comprised of a set of skills and knowledge. The best hackers do teach themselves how things work and how to manipulate them, but that does not mean that these skills are useless or trivial for the rest of the populous. I dont think i’ll ever reverse engineer a USB device, but by knowing how (or at least partially), I have a better understanding of how it works. If we treated medicine the way you are approaching hacking, you would hope your doctor gets lucky as he ‘figures out’ how to remove your tonsils on his own.

This work by Lada Ada is out-farking-standing!
There is nothing better than a hack/tutorial that intends to teach. Most of the hacks appear to come from people who take something that was already out there, and then make it look more complicated so they look leet. Maybe that impresses college instructors – though most of them can see through that crap as it’s plainly obvious that most script kiddies these days are better at looking smart than actually being smart.
I don’t know much about USB, never had the time for it, but this new material is exactly what I am looking for.

You don’t have to figure out all of it. *rolleyes*
Hacking is overused though. IMO a hacker is someone who modifies or uses an electrical or computer system in a way it isn’t intended. That means that ‘life hacks’ don’t exist and that website name is retarded.

Excellent article.

Thanks fartface!
I read your step-by-step instructions, laid out carefully by you, and followed them onward to success!

Nice article that spread some light on an area I’m not at all familiar with.

#1 Be interested and willing to put time into it.
#2 Gather as much as existing documentation on the subject and read/understand it.
#3 Summarize what you want to know and what’s still unknown.
#4 Do you hack magic. Find the right formula by trying things out if you will. Write it down in your spell-book :)
#5 Share the knowledge and get credited.

(I hope that’s somewhat correct)

This post is awesome..I wish I had this sort of information available 4 years ago when cypress chips were available as free samples

@jeicrash

problem with trolls is if you feed them they come back. note the infestation of arduino trolls on this site.

You don’t magically have the skills to make heads or tails of reversed engineered data plain and simple. And you wont get it either magically just by keep trying.

@anon they’re everywhere, not just here; jake is just the local town crier.

@jericash

As noted the BusPirate does not do USB, but it was extremely useful on a project I did recently where a USB micro was interfaced to a RF24L01 transceiver via SPI.

The bus pirate enabled me to see what USB writes caused activity on the SPI bus and to work out what it all meant.

You don’t have too have really fancy kit to hack, but sometimes it helps a lot.

I forgot to mention, if you are hooked up to a PC there are various software solutions out there. I’ve used sniffUSB.exe with good success. Its not as fancy as the pay-to-play varieties, but there is some good information out there about what all the numbers mean, it just takes a bit more work to decipher things.
Also I wish there was more information out there like this, I read it last night, was superb work. Thank you, the internet needs more pages like this.

@DesparateBob

I have RE’ed schematics if you want them… lost interest in it.

Thanks everyone for the helpful tips. This kind of stuff always gets my geek side going. Sadly there is not much on HaD to get my bank account going :P

I’ll check into the software stuff, who knows maybe I’ll learn something I can use. Otherwise I’m all for filling up my brain with useless stuff just so I can say I tried to learn it.

Anyone up for making a how-to on using low tech / mostly software based items to do something similar?

jake so how should some1 figure out usb without dox.
she read other guides then made a simplified shorter version for the public.

you do realize that the usb standard was made by thousands of engineers how about reverse it on your own without any knowledge about it you big haxxor

Know your hardware as you would know yourself.

Well, that was a fun read up to the point where it requires a $1200+ sniffer. It’s going to be a long time before it’s enough of a priority to justify that.

Advanced analysis requires advanced tools. These tools usually are NOT cheap. In some cases, generic, less-functional equivalents are available for less (like the zeroplus logic analyzer that can be easily modified to function as the much more expensive model) but in most cases, you have to shell out the cash. Fortunately, if this is your passion, you won’t have a problem spending all of your hard earned cash on it :D