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.
HDD Firmware Hacking
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Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#22Related, 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
Samsung has lost any credibility they had as a competent manufacturer years ago. Their other products are beyond junk (fridges, washing machines…), their customer service is abysmal (they managed to “repair” my mp3 player and smartphone by returning it even more broken than they got it, and I’ve seen how the company works from the inside when they bought a startup I was working at. I know many people with Samsung fridges failing after a few years (or having too little coolant in them so that they make loud popping sounds when running and Samsung saying you’re holding it wrong)
From these experiences, I’m going out of my way to never buy anything made by Samsung.
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#23[deleted]
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#24how can i upvote this twice?
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#25Since 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.
You can put picoide behind SATA_IDE bridge too
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#26Related, 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
Samsung has lost any credibility they had as a competent manufacturer years ago. Their other products are beyond junk (fridges, washing machines…), their customer service is abysmal (they managed to “repair” my mp3 player and smartphone by returning it even more broken than they got it, and I’ve seen how the company works from the inside when they bought a startup I was working at. I know many people with Samsung fri…
You forget exploding devices or the decision of selling it's crap exynos thing in Europe
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#27The 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…
>why do they even bother So when you start publishing their code they can DMCA you.
Except that DMCA 512 (notice and takedown) is a different section than DMCA 1201 (anti-circumvention) and you don't have to be using any DRM of any kind to use the former because they're unrelated.
Also, wouldn't someone trying to distribute "illicit copies" just distribute the original unmodified file since it's a self-extracting binary with no license check? And what reason would anyone have to do that when they already publish it for free on their own site, and why should they care if someone did?
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#28This 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 j…
Appreciate the (unaffiliated) shout out! No comment on the drive recovery idea... The fundamentals in the article are all relevant to the hard drive challenge, though the actual multi-step solution to our CTF is rather different. If hacking hard drives sounds intriguing to you, we're hiring reverse engineers and security researchers! See our whoishiring posts and careers page for details: - https://news.ycombinator.c…
As a data point for anyone curious, they're US based ("Midtown West in New York City") and their careers page mentions the roles are all in-office ones.
Ah well. ;)
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Samsung has lost any credibility they had as a competent manufacturer years ago. Their other products are beyond junk (fridges, washing machines…), their customer service is abysmal (they managed to “repair” my mp3 player and smartphone by returning it even more broken than they got it, and I’ve seen how the company works from the inside when they bought a startup I was working at. I know many people with Samsung fri…
You forget exploding devices or the decision of selling it's crap exynos thing in Europe
Right. And their complete contempt for user privacy on their smart TVs. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, I'll even pay extra to buy anything but a Samsung device.
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#30Related, 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
How do I know if I have a drive in this situation?