Tom Nardi as well as I had a great laugh this week on the Podcast when he compared the ECU hacks that enabled turning a VW with steering help into a self-driver to a hack last week that customized a water cooler to fill a specific cup. however it’s really no joke — a few of the extremely exact same methods are utilized in both efforts, although the result of one is life-and-death, as well as the other is just some spilled ice-cold water.
This reminded me of Travis Goodspeed’s now-classic talk “In Praise of Junk Hacking” from method back in 2016. For background, this was a time when IoT gadgets as well as their safety were in their family member infancy, as well as some members of the safety neighborhood were throwing shade on the dissection of “mere” industrial crap. (Looked back on from today, where every other member of a Botnet is an IP camera, that disagreement didn’t age well.)
Travis’ action was that hacking on junk lets us focus on the process — the hack itself — rather than getting distracted by the outcome. emotions run high when a safety flaw impacts millions of individuals, however when it’s a Tamagotchi or a pocket calculator, well, it doesn’t truly matter, so you focus on the actual techniques. as well as as Travis points out, lots of of these methods discovered on junk will be beneficial when it counts. He discovered about techniques to defeat address-space randomization, for instance, from an old hack on the TI-85 calculator, which garbage-collected the variables that needed to be overwritten.
So I had junk hacking in the back of my mind when I was re-watching Hash Salehi’s fantastic talk on his work reverse engineering wise meters. Funnily enough, he started off his reverse engineering journey eleven years back with work on a robot vacuum cleaner’s LIDAR module. Junk hacking, for sure, however the exact same methods taught him to work on gadgets that are substantially a lot more serious. as well as in the craziest of Hackaday synergies, he even hat-tipped Travis’ talk in his video! Hacking is hacking!
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