Smartwatch Snitches On Itself And Enables Reverse Engineering

If something has a “smart” in its name, you know that it’s talking to someone else, and the topic of conversation is probably you. You may or may not like that, but that’s p…

Fixing Issues With Knockoff Altera USB Blasters

One exciting feature of hardware development involving MCUs and FPGAs is that you all too often need specific tools to program them, with [Doug Brown] suffering a price tag aneurysm after checking …

JTAG Hacking An SSD With A Pi: A Primer

[Matthew “wrongbaud” Alt] is well known around these parts for his hardware hacking and reverse-engineering lessons, and today he’s bringing us a JTAG hacking primer that demoes s…

ESP-Prog-Adapter Makes Your ESP32 Tinkering Seamless

Did you ever struggle with an ESP32 board of yours, wishing you had exposed that UART, or seriously lacking the JTAG port access? If so, you should seriously check out [0xjmux]’s ESP-PROG-Ada…

37C3: When Apple Ditches Thuderbolt, Hack USB-C

[Thomas Roth], aka [Ghidraninja], and author of the [Stacksmashing] YouTube channel, investigated Apple’s Lightning port and created a cool debugging tool that allowed one to get JTAG on the …

Using JTAG To Dump The Xbox’s Secret Boot ROM

When Microsoft released its first entry into the video game console market with the Xbox, a lot of the discussions at the time revolved around the fact that it used a nearly off-the-shelf Intel CPU…

Need To Dump A Protected STM32F0x? Use Your Pico!

Sometimes, security mechanisms can be bypassed if you just do things slightly out of the ordinary. For instance, readout protection on microcontrollers is a given nowadays, to the point where it&#8…

Reverse Engineering Reveals EV Charger Has A Sense Of Security

As more and more electric vehicles penetrate the market, there’s going to have to be a proportional rise in the number of charging stations that are built into parking garages, apartment comp…

Need A JTAG Adapter? Use Your Pico!

JTAG is a powerful interface for low-level debugging and introspection of all kinds of devices — CPUs, FPGAs, MCUs and a whole lot of complex purpose-built chips like RF front-ends. JTAG adap…

New more compact design of ARM-USB-OCD-H(L) is released with USB-C connector

ARM-USB-OCD-H is very popular OpenOCD debugger supported by almost all IDEs and platforms. It’s in the Application notes of Intel and ARM processor vendors. The ARM-USB-OCD-H initial design w…

An “unbusy” USB-C Port Doubles-up For JTAG Programming

Board space is a premium on small circuit board designs, and [Alvaro] knows it. So instead of adding a separate programming port, he’s found a niche USB-C feature that lets him use the port t…

JTAG Hat Turns Raspberry Pi Into A Networked Debugger

Over the last year or so we’ve noticed a definite uptick in the number of folks using OpenOCD on the Raspberry Pi. It’s a cheap and convenient solution for poking around with various mi…