by Modified3019
3 subcomments
- Related, someone decompiled Samsung’s 840 EVO ssd firmware, before Samsung later started encrypting it: http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/ssd/TheMissingManual.pdf
Came across it looking how to deal with multiple different samsung drives caught in bad states due to shitty firmware. My original salty post warning about vendor branded Samsung drives on eBay is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37165189
by turpentine
3 subcomments
- The obfuscation hardware vendors do is so trivial, why do they even bother?
One of the current vendor provided consumer SSD firmware update utilities for Linux as a live-usb decrypts the firmware and writes it out to disk decrypted before uploading it, so simply using seccomp to fail a rmdir syscall nets you the decrypted version without having to reverse engineer any of the updater/decryption code.
I deleted my own negative rant about SSD manufacturers not opting in to lvfs/fwupd when drives have a high risk of bricking without firmware updates.
by morpheuskafka
2 subcomments
- This article might be handy for someone interviewing at that firm (Red Balloon) that sends you a "weird" hard drive as the interview CTF? I still have it sitting around but it arrived around finals season so I never really looked at it, but since they bothered to send a whole drive and SATA-USB adapter, it obviously must have something to do with the drive itself.
If someone had a ton of money, it would be funny to just send the thing to a data recovery lab, have them swap the platters onto an unmodified model and get a raw image of the data to work with. (Or maybe the key is hidden inside the drive firmware chip itself?)
by system7rocks
1 subcomments
- One of my favorite things to do is update the firmware of devices. I know it is often ill-advised because if it is working fine, why risk something going wrong? But it’s kind of fun to imagine gaining tiny speed increments with optimizations. I like to do it on Fridays - Firmware Fridays - vacuum cleaners, hard drives, motherboards, ip cameras, Apple IIGS expansion cards, Bluetooth scales, and on and on.
- There's also another very good series of articles about hacking the firmware of a HDD, with modifications of /etc/shadow hashed passwords: https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack
by throw0101c
1 subcomments
- Congrats OP, you can work for the NSA:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/nsa-hid-spying-software-in-h...
* https://www.wired.com/2015/02/nsa-firmware-hacking/
:)
by ElenaDaibunny
1 subcomments
- The fact that vendors still ship firmware with trivial obfuscation in 2026 is wild. I wonder how many data recovery shops already reverse-engineer these routinely but just don't publish.
by UomoNeroNero
0 subcomment
- I feel like a Neanderthal watching a sixteen-year-old fiddling around on a smartphone. Incredible. Maximum respect.
- Since this is xb360, this is SATA rather than IDE, but in a similar vein I am really looking forward to my PicoIDE to play with adversarial hdd controllers in real systems.
by fuzzfactor
0 subcomment
- For anybody involved with research of any nature, you don't need to be interested in HDDs or SSDs or even hacking hardware or software of any kind.
This says a lot right here:
>One of my initial ideas was to modify the HDD firmware to introduce a delay of a few hundred milliseconds when a specific sector is read from the drive, which would give enough time for the exploit to trigger successfully.
>As it would later turn out I found other ways to dial in my race condition attack and ended up not needing to modify the HDD firmware at all.
The result is a remarkable paper documenting outstanding milestones that is outstanding on its own, and was completely unintentional to begin with, and with subject matter that was also unintentional if not a completely unrelated subject than the direction that the initial ambition was leading toward.
If your research leaders or techniques don't allow for excursions like this, you'd probably be better off getting some.
- how can i upvote this twice?
by ezconnect
1 subcomments
- I am surprised he didn't try to lower the clock of the MCU of HDD first if he just wanted to delay the reply.
- [dead]
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