Reverse Engineer Your BIOS

May 21, 2006 by 23 Comments

wooden laptop

[th0mas] has a fun guide to modifying the boot image in your BIOS. This could very easily brick your laptop, but it’s interesting to see how it’s done. He starts by dumping the plain text strings. The magic number for bitmap format appears in the file so he copies a large chunk of data starting at that point. th0mas opens this in MSPaint to maintain the format. After modifying the image it’s placed back in the BIOS file and a couple checks are performed to make sure only the image data has changed. The final section involves running the flash utility in a debugger to find where it checks the CRC. By modifying the program he can then flash the image without the program complaining.

Continue reading “Reverse Engineer Your BIOS” →

3D Video Microscope

May 20, 2006 by 11 Comments

stereo microscope

Gerald Heine’s stereo microscope uses a field sequential method for generating 3D video. A CRT draws half the screen’s lines with each frame. So, if you send the video from two different cameras on alternating frames you can generate a 3D using shutter glasses. Gerald’s setup uses the sync signal from one camera to control the other. Both video signals are fed into his custom 3D video sync box which combines the frames into a single video feed and also outputs a control signal for shutter glasses.

Continue reading “3D Video Microscope” →

Metasploit Running On A WRT

May 19, 2006 by 10 Comments

metasploit

The folks from See-Security have gotten the Metasploit Framework running on a Linksys WRTSL54GS. They were inspired after seeing the Hacker Pimps pen-testing firmware, which we’ve covered before. The Metasploit Framework is used to develop and execute exploit code against target machines. The See-Security team ran into trouble getting Metasploit running due to RAM limitations. This particular model of router has a USB port so they were able to create swap space on a flash drive. The web interface worked as well once they set the bind address to the gateway IP. They’ve got all the steps you need to do this starting with OpenWRT.

[thanks muts and stillbourne]

Continue reading “Metasploit Running On A WRT” →

Remote Controlled Alarm Clock

May 18, 2006 by 14 Comments

remote alarm

Not everyone can have a cute alarm clock that runs away from you like Clocky. Most just resolve to place the clock on the other end of the room so they have to get out of bed to switch it off. That’s what [ryan] had to do to get up in the morning. He wasn’t able to set the time or confirm that the alarm was on from bed anymore so he decided to hack in an IR remote for his alarm. Ryan has written a thorough article on how he decoded the remote codes and implemented the clock control using an ATMEGA8. Now he can just key in the time he wants and the microcontroller takes care of setting it.

Continue reading “Remote Controlled Alarm Clock” →

Dualboot DVD Firmware Mod For The Xbox 360

May 17, 2006 by 16 Comments

chip select

Monday brought news of backups successfully booting on Xbox 360s with modified DVD firmware images. LittleJonny put together a tutorial on how to boot two different DVD drive firmwares. To perform this mod you need a second SST 39sf020a flashrom plus some resistors. The two flash chips are soldered directly on top of each other except for pin 15. Two wires are then attached. Which flash chip is used depends on which wire you pull to ground. Just add a switch and you can install a modified firmware on the second chip while keeping your original. I’m guessing Microsoft will put firmware detection into the dashboard to combat this, but this will keep your original firmware intact so you won’t have to reflash if something breaks.

Continue reading “Dualboot DVD Firmware Mod For The Xbox 360” →

Playstation Controller PC Card

May 16, 2006 by 22 Comments

playstation connector

[timmeh] already had a parallel port PCMCIA card when he started on this Playstation controller port card. He cracked the case to discover that the circuit board only took up about two-thirds of the case. After that it was pretty easy to fit the port onto the card and wire it up. The second slot in his laptop was non functioning from factory, so using the space wasn’t an actual loss.

Continue reading “Playstation Controller PC Card” →

Xbox 360 DVD Firmware Hack

May 15, 2006 by 23 Comments

dvd drive

Backups can now be booted on the Xbox 360 according to Xbox-scene. The firmware was released by Commodore4Eva who previously released a functional Xbox 1 firmware. It works under the same idea as the final Xbox hack: it patches the response to the media check into the DVD drive’s firmware. So the drive responds with an all-clear without even checking the DVD. This hack works on units with the Toshiba-Samsung drive. The new firmware also lets you use the drive under Windows for easy game ripping. There are some quirks to it, but it sounds like everything you need is included. It’s unfortunate that this happened before they were able to get executable code running on the machine. Now that the bootleggers have what they want I’m afraid it might take some steam out of the homebrew movement.

Continue reading “Xbox 360 DVD Firmware Hack” →