Hash Salehi Outsmarts His Smart Meter

January 13, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 27 Comments

Smart meters form mesh networks among themselves and transmit your usage data all around. Some of them even allow the power company to turn off your power remotely, through the mesh. You might want to know if any of this information is sensitive, or if the power shutdown system has got glaring security flaws and random people could just turn your house off. Hash Salehi has set out to get inside these meters, and luckily for the rest of us, he was kind enough to share his findings during Remoticon 2021. It’s a journey filled with wonderful tidbits about GNU Radio, embedded devices, and running your own power company inside a Faraday cage.

The smart meter in question is deployed by a power company known as Oncor in the Dallas, Texas, area. These particular meters form an extensive mesh network using a ZigBee module onboard that allows them to to pass messages amongst themselves that eventually make their way to a collector or aggregator to be uploaded to a more central location. Hash obtained his parts via everyone’s favorite online auction house and was surprised to see how many parts were available. Then, with parts in hand, he began all the usual reverse engineering tricks: SDR, Faraday cages, flash chip readers, and recreating the schematic. Continue reading “Remoticon 2021 // Hash Salehi Outsmarts His Smart Meter” →

Remoticon 2021: Unbinare Brings A Reverse-Engineering Toolkit Into Recycling

January 6, 2022 by Arya Voronova 5 Comments

Unbinare is a small Belgian company at the forefront of hacking e-waste into something useful, collaborating with recycling and refurbishing companies. Reverse-engineering is a novel way to approach recycling, but it’s arguably one of the most promising ways that we are not trying at scale yet. At Hackaday Remoticon 2021, Maurits Fennis talked about Unbinare’s efforts in the field and presented us with a toolkit he has recently released as a part of his work, as well as described how his background as an artist has given him insights used to formulate foundational principles of Unbinare.

Unbinare’s tools are designed to work in harmony with each other, a requirement for any productive reverse-engineering effort. OI!STER is a general-purpose salvaged MCU research board, with sockets to adapt to different TQFP chip sizes. This board is Maurits’s experience in reverse-engineering condensed into a universal tool, including a myriad of connectors for different programming/debugging interfaces. We don’t know the board’s full scope, but the pictures show an STM32 chip inside the TQFP socket, abundant everywhere except your online retailer of choice. Apart from all the ways to break out the pins, OI!STER has sockets for power and clock glitching, letting you target these two omnipresent Achilles’ heels with a tool like ChipWhisperer.

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Remoticon 2021: Uri Shaked Reverses The ESP32 WiFi

December 30, 2021 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

You know how when you’re working on a project, other side quests pop up left and right? You can choose to handle them briefly and summarily, or you can dive into them as projects in their own right. Well, Uri Shaked is the author of Wokwi, an online Arduino simulator that allows you to test our your code on emulated hardware. (It’s very, very cool.) Back in the day, Arduino meant AVR, and he put in some awesome effort on reverse engineering that chip in order to emulate it successfully. But then “Arduino” means so much more than just AVR these days, so Uri had to tackle the STM32 ARM chips and even the recent RP2040.

Arduino runs on the ESP32, too, so Uri put on his reverse engineering hat (literally) and took aim at that chip as well. But the ESP32 is a ton more complicated than any of these other microcontrollers, being based not only on the slightly niche Xtensa chip, but also having onboard WiFi and its associated binary firmware. Reverse engineering the ESP32’s WiFi is the side-quest that Uri embarks on, totally crushes, and documents for us in this standout Remoticon 2021 talk. Continue reading “Remoticon 2021: Uri Shaked Reverses The ESP32 WiFi” →

RC3 2021: Now Here, Nowhere

December 27, 2021 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

The annual meeting of the Chaos Computer Club, Germany’s giant hacker group, is online again this year. While those of us here are sad that we don’t get to see our hacker friends in person, our loss is your gain — the whole thing is online for the entire world to enjoy.

This year’s Congress has gone entirely decentralized, with many local clubs hosting their own video streams and “stages”. Instead of four tracks, there are now six or seven tracks of talks going on simultaneously, so prepare to be overwhelmed by choice. You can find the overall schedule here, so if you see anything you’d like to watch, you’ll know when to tune in.

Like last year, there is also a parallel 2D simulation world, like Zelda with videoconferencing, but for which you’ll need a ticket, and they’re sold out. (Check out the demo video if you want to see what that’s about.) And what would a conference be without t-shirts, armbands, and even a sticker exchange? Or course, it all has to be done by mail, but you do what you can.

We’ll be keeping our eyes on the talks, and let you know if we see anything good. If you do the same, let us know in the comments!

Keynote Video: Jeremy Fielding Wants To Help You Get Moving

December 23, 2021 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

For many DIY hardware projects, the most movement it’s likely to see is when we pick the assembled unit up off the workbench and carry it to wherever it’s destined to spend the rest of its functional life. From weather sensors to smart mirrors, there’s a huge array of devices that don’t need to move one millimeter to function. But eventually, you’re likely to run into a project that’s a bit more dynamic. Maybe you’d like to motorize your window shades, or go all out and build a remote controlled rover. With these more active designs comes a whole slew of new problems you may never have encountered before.

Luckily for us, folks like Jeremy Fielding are out there and willing to share their knowledge. In his fascinating presentation for the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon, Building Hardware that Moves: the Fundamentals that Everyone Should Know, he took viewers on a whirlwind tour of what he’s learned about designing and building complex machines from his years of professional experience. Whether its a relatively simple articulated workbench for the shop, a gargantuan earthmoving machine, or a high-dexterity robotic arm, each project he’s worked on has presented unique challenges that needed to be solved.

Not all of Jeremy’s machines will fit in your average workshop.

A lot of the projects that Jeremy has worked on are on a much larger scale than what your average hobbyist is ever going to run into. When there’s an arrow pointing out the tiny human in a picture of you and the machine you’re currently working on, you know things are getting serious. But as anyone who’s watched his YouTube videos knows, he’s got a real knack for taking these high-level concepts and distilling them into something more digestible for the home gamer.

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Keynote Video: Elecia White Finds Treasure In The Memory Map

December 16, 2021 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

If you dig microcontrollers, and you like to dig into how they work, Elecia White wants to help you navigate their innermost secrets with the help of memory map files. In this refreshingly funny, but very deep keynote talk from the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon, Elecia guides us through one of the most intimidating artifacts of compilation — a file that lists where everything is being put in the microcontroller’s memory — and points out landmarks that help to make it more navigable.

And when you need to look into the map file, you probably really need to look into the map file. When your embedded widget mysteriously stops working, memory problems are some of the usual suspects. Maybe you ran out of RAM or flash storage space, maybe you have some odd hard fault and you want to know what part of the program is causing the trouble, or maybe you need to do some speed profiling to make it all run faster. In all of these cases, you get an absolute memory address. What lives there? Look it up in the memory map!

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Keynote Video: Dr. Keith Thorne Explains The Extreme Engineering Of The LIGO Hardware

December 9, 2021 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a huge installation measured in kilometers that is listening for wrinkles in space-time. Pulling this off is a true story of hardware and software hacking, and we were lucky to have Dr. Keith Thorne dive into those details with his newly published “Extreme Instruments for Extreme Astrophysics” keynote from the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon.

Gravity causes space-time to stretch — think back to the diagrams you’ve seen of a massive orb (a star or planet) sitting on a plane with grid lines drawn on it, the fabric of that plane being stretch downward from the mass of the orb. If you have two massive entities like black holes orbiting each other, they give off gravitational waves. When they collide and merge, they create a brief but very strong train of waves. Evidence of these events are what LIGO is looking for.

Rai Weiss had the idea to look for gravitational waves using laser interferometers in about 1967, but the available laser technology was too new to accomplish the feat. In an interferometer, a laser is shot through a beam splitter and one beam reflects out and back over a distance, and is then recombined with the other half using a photodetector to measure the intensity of light. As the distance in the long leg changes, the relative phase of the lasers shift, and the power detected will vary.

LIGO is not your desktop interferometer. It uses a 5 kW laser input. The 4 km legs of the interferometer bounce the light back and forth 1,000 times for an effective 4,000 km travel distance. These legs are kept under extreme vacuum and the mirrors are held exceptionally still. It’s worth it; the instrument can measure at a precision of 1/10,000 the diameter of a proton!

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