Single Board Revolution: Preventing Flash Memory Corruption

August 3, 2016 by Moritz Walter 97 Comments

An SD card is surely not an enterprise grade storage solution, but single board computers also aren’t just toys anymore. You find them in applications far beyond the educational purpose they have emerged from, and the line between non-critical and critical applications keeps getting blurred.

Laundry notification hacks and arcade machines fail without causing harm. But how about electronic access control, or an automatic pet feeder? Would you rely on the data integrity of a plain micro SD card stuffed into a single board computer to keep your pet fed when you’re on vacation and you back in afterward? After all, SD card corruption is a well-discussed topic in the Raspberry Pi community. What can we do to keep our favorite single board computers from failing at random, and is there a better solution to the problem of storage than a stack of SD cards?

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Upgrading A Nexus 5 EMMC To 64GB

May 10, 2016 by James Hobson 41 Comments

Sometimes we feel confident in our soldering skills (but only sometimes) — and then we see something like this done.

Someone over on the XDA developers forum managed to upgrade his Nexus 5 from 16gb to 64gb — and not only that, upgraded the eMMC type from 4.5 to 5.0 so it writes and reads much faster.

While the details on the actual conversion are a bit vague, we did manage to dig up another video of someone replacing an eMMC chip from a Samsung Note 2.

It most certainly is possible… but would you look at the size of that chip!

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DEFCON 22: Hack All The Things

August 9, 2014 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

This morning I went to a fantastic talk called Hack All the Things. It was presented by GTVHacker. If you don’t recognize the name, this is the group that hacked the GoogleTV. They haven’t stopped hacking since that success, and this talk is all about 20+ devices that they’ve recently pwned and are making the info public (that link still had oath when I checked but should soon be public).

The attacks they presented come in three flavors: UART, eMMC, and command injection bugs. I’m going to add the break now, but I’ll give a rundown of most of the device exploits they showed off. I found all amusing, and often comical.

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