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Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

blog.calif.io

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Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#101

Post by qingcharles »

petercooper wrote: post #38

Not as cool as this, but I had a fun Claude Code experience when I asked it to look at my Bluetooth devices and do something "fun". It discovered a cheap set of RGB lights in my daughter's room (which I had no idea used Bluetooth for the remote - and not secured at all) and made them do a rainbow effect then documented the protocol so I could make my own remote control if needed.

Opus 4.7 finally figured out how to get my Logitech mouse paired with the receiver properly, which 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 could not do lol.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#102

Post by DANmode »

tclancy wrote: post #40
alfanick wrote: post #26

I had truly good “hacking” session with Codex. It’s not hacking, I wasn’t breaking anything, just jumping over the fences TP-Link put for me, owning the router, inside the network, knowing the admin password. But TP-Link really tried everything so you cannot access the router you own via API. They really tried to be smart with some very very broken and custom auth and encryption scheme. It took some half a day with C…

Would definitely be interested in this. Moved to TP Link at the start of the year and I am generally very happy with it, but would like to be able to interact with my router in something other than their phone app.

> Moved to TP Link at the start of the year

Can’t understand buying them or Netgear today.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#104

Post by c420 »

m463 wrote: post #93
alfanick wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ofc I could, but no project supports this specific hardware (Archer NX600) - I'm very happy with my solution :)

I wonder what the effort would be to port openwrt to it? It might be easy if there are adjacent routers on the same chipset.

Generally, if the device is compatible and not new to the market, openwrt has been ported or is in the process (though it may not be the latest version of openwrt). You can search for your device in the compatibility drop downs and get the current status. If it's not listed, searching the device on the openwrt forums may tell you why (which is almost always the chipset).

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#105

Post by SyneRyder »

tracker1 wrote: post #103

If I could turn a Samsung Smart TV into a dumb TV, or even just a basic monitor with input selection and basic volume control, I'd definitely take it.

Pretty much the same with my newly acquired LG Smart TV. I thought I might like webOS, since it's technically a descendent of palmOS, but oh no. No no no.

I've opted just to not plug it in to the network and not provide a WiFi password.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#106

Post by ssl-3 »

qingcharles wrote: post #100
layer8 wrote: post #79

It’s important to note that Codex was given access to the source code. In another comment thread that is currently on the front page ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456 ), the opinion is repeatedly voiced that being closed source doesn’t provide a material benefit in defending against vulnerabilities being discovered and exploited using AI. So it would be interesting to see how Codex would fare here witho…

There are two levels below having the source. One is having the binary of the firmware, which could be decompiled by the AI and understood. And then the worst-case is what I'm dealing with currently, which is where there is no access to the firmware binary and the firmware is stored on the PCB in such a way to prevent sticking a chip clip on it and forcibly extracting it, so you're totally blind. (Just as you would b…

The timing here is amusing to me.

I have a fairly specialized bit of hardware here on my desk. It's a rackmount, pro audio DSP that runs embedded Linux. I want to poke at it (specifically, I want to know why it takes like 5 or 6 minutes to boot up since that is a problem for me).

The firmware is published and available, and it's just a tarball, but the juicy bits inside are encrypted. It has network connectivity for various things, including its own text-based control protocol over SSH. No shell access is exposed (or at least, not documented as being exposed).

So I pointed codex at that whole mess.

It seems to have deduced that the encryption was done with openssl, and is symmetric. It also seems to have deduced that it is running a version of sshd that is vulnerable to CVE-2024-6387, which allows remote code execution.

It has drawn up a plan to prove whether the vulnerability works. That's the next step.

If the vulnerability works, then it should be a hop, skip, and a jump to get in there, enable a path to a shell (it's almost certainly got busybox on there already), and find the key so that the firmware can be decrypted and analyzed offline.

---

If I weren't such a pussy, I'd have started that next step. But I really like this box, and right now it's a black box that I can't recover (I don't have a cleartext firmware image) if things go very wrong. It's not a particularly expensive machine on the used market, but things are tight right now.

And I'm not all that keen on learning how to extract flash memory in-situ in this instance, either.

So it waits. :)

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#107

Post by asdff »

tracker1 wrote: post #103

If I could turn a Samsung Smart TV into a dumb TV, or even just a basic monitor with input selection and basic volume control, I'd definitely take it.

Yup. Sony bravia smart TV has died recently. Can't run the OS without crashing on the home page. So much input lag feels like running ancient hardware in early 2000s. Crashes navigating picture settings and helpfully resets them back to default for you, so you can't really functionally change picture settings.

How I wish I could just strip this thing down into a monitor with a set of speakers... Screen itself is perfect condition of course but the OS turned it into ewaste.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#108

Post by asdff »

SyneRyder wrote: post #105
tracker1 wrote: post #103

If I could turn a Samsung Smart TV into a dumb TV, or even just a basic monitor with input selection and basic volume control, I'd definitely take it.

Pretty much the same with my newly acquired LG Smart TV. I thought I might like webOS, since it's technically a descendent of palmOS, but oh no. No no no. I've opted just to not plug it in to the network and not provide a WiFi password.

I picked up this used 4k sony bravia recently and the thing is such junk. AndroidOS, seemed promising, but it has hardcoded ads on the homepage from whatever movies were coming out in 2015 when they were selling this screen, so much input lag, crashes constantly, can't even change picture settings as it will crash and reset to default. Sometimes it will just boot loop and not turn on until hard reset. Useless device today. Probably cost a thousand dollars when it was new I'm guessing, now it is ewaste.

Meanwhile my ancient 1080p panel still works, and I noticed I can't actually see the pixels from my couch so, ehh, I guess...

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#109

Post by alfanick »

JTbane wrote: post #98
alfanick wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on my long list of projects "to-opensource" (but I need to figure out licensing, for those things CC-BY-SA I think is the way to go), I don't want a random lawyer sitting on my ass though. I started with a simple assumption: if I can access the router via web-browser, then I can also automate that. From that the proof-of-concept was headless Chrome in Docker and AI-directed code (code written via LLM, not using…

Why not just use the GPL? It basically covers the same stuff Creative Commons Share-alike does.

I don't feel like I own the code itself (hey, GPT wrote 99.5% of it), I own the product and the thought process and everything that lead to it - do whatever you want, just don't forget my name somewhere in the process. Feels more like art project than coding project hence CC license.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#110

Post by qingcharles »

ssl-3 wrote: post #106
qingcharles wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two levels below having the source. One is having the binary of the firmware, which could be decompiled by the AI and understood. And then the worst-case is what I'm dealing with currently, which is where there is no access to the firmware binary and the firmware is stored on the PCB in such a way to prevent sticking a chip clip on it and forcibly extracting it, so you're totally blind. (Just as you would b…

The timing here is amusing to me. I have a fairly specialized bit of hardware here on my desk. It's a rackmount, pro audio DSP that runs embedded Linux. I want to poke at it (specifically, I want to know why it takes like 5 or 6 minutes to boot up since that is a problem for me). The firmware is published and available, and it's just a tarball, but the juicy bits inside are encrypted. It has network connectivity for…

That's awesome. I had two of these devices I'm trying to break into. One has the ROM chip exposed, but I think it is cooked. The device doesn't boot because I think the previous owner used the wrong PSU, but I was hoping I could at least extract the code. The newer updated version of the device has an SoC with embedded ROM and almost all the access points on the PCB removed. I'm loathe, like you, to tamper too badly with a working thing that I myself might release the magic smoke from.

It's also scary where this is going. LLMs are getting fantastic at breaking into things. I sometimes have to dance around the topic with them because they start to get suspicious I'm trying to hack something that doesn't belong to me, which is not the case.

I had some ebooks I bought last year which I managed to pull down the encrypted PDFs for from the web site where you could read them. Claude looked at the PDF and all the data I could find (user ID etc) and it came up with "147 different ideas for a decryption algorithm" which it went through in turn until it found a combination of using parts of the userID value and parts of other data concatenated together which produced the key. Something I would never have figured out. Then recently the company changed the algo for their newer books so Claude took another look and determined they were modifying the binary data of the PDFs to make them non-standard, so it patched them back first.

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