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Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

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Re: Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

#81

Post by nkrisc »

somat wrote: post #79
nkrisc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an Anova sous vide cooker that is also about 10 years old and has an app, but is fully functional without it. When I bought it the app was free, but then later became a subscription addon. However they grandfathered all original owners into a free lifetime subscription. Pretty classy.

Needing an app for these things is stupid in the first place, but the real kick in the metaphorical nuts is that the needed app should be stored on the device. Want to use your phone to control the device load the program to do so off the device itself. We really only have one tech stack where this actually works, the web. And I consider this to be either the great failure of the app ecosystem(why on earth do apps ne…

For the one I have the app is completely optional. It doesn’t add any capability, it just lets you control it remotely. It will perform all its capabilities just fine without you ever taking your phone out.

For the subscription you also get additional content like recipes and such that I don’t care about. I wouldn’t pay for it.

Re: Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

#82

Post by greenavocado »

seany wrote: post #72
greenavocado wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is essential to purchase and configure Home Assistant ( https://www.home-assistant.io/ ) compatible devices around the home whenever possible if you want a "smart home" that will last. Everything else is an Internet of Shit treadmill that lasts at most a few years before it falls off and is replaced by a new piece of e-waste.

The caveat here is that it needs to be local. I have a few things that work with HA, but they basically highjack the apps cloud login tokens ..

That is terrifying

Re: Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

#83

Post by zffr »

saagarjha wrote: post #21
JimDabell wrote: post #7

The same is true for iPhone apps (.ipa files). You can just unzip them.

They are typically encrypted, though.

Well the executable binaries inside IPAs are encrypted, but the IPA bundles themselves are typically unencrypted. You should be able to see unencrypted assets inside of them

Re: Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

#84

Post by compass_copium »

Ekaros wrote: post #36
morsch wrote: post #10

What a coincidence, I just got an email announcing that Breville intend to orphan my Joule sous vide stick: the existing app will stop working, the new app is only available the US and Canada and in parts of Europe. Live in another country? You're s.o.l., it wasn't officially sold there. You need a new account as well, hope you like the TOS. All of this for a device whose core functionality -- setting a target temper…

From get go I considered the whole design with no interface on device a bad idea... Apps can and will often go. Better to have also the local controls.

Don't want to remember how much money I spent on a Copengagen wheel for my wife when she was in school. At least some kind souls published a way to unbrick it.

Re: Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

#85

Post by radicality »

morsch wrote: post #10

What a coincidence, I just got an email announcing that Breville intend to orphan my Joule sous vide stick: the existing app will stop working, the new app is only available the US and Canada and in parts of Europe. Live in another country? You're s.o.l., it wasn't officially sold there. You need a new account as well, hope you like the TOS. All of this for a device whose core functionality -- setting a target temper…

That’s just sad ugh, just the other day I was using my pre-shitty-IoT era Sous Vide machine (Anova brand, I think it might have been chefsteps recommended too, got around 2014/2015), and I was thinking how glad I am that it has zero fancy connectivity - just a wheel to set the temperature and a start/stop button and simple led display. Still works great.

Re: Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

#86

Post by actionfromafar »

jsmith45 wrote: post #68
ACCount37 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude doesn't care as long as you aren't straight up asking it to write exploits. It's my go-to for reverse engineering tasks. ChatGPT is full of refusals and has to be jailbroken out of it.

Right. Claude models seem to have had very limited prohibitions in this area baked in via RLHF. It seems to use the system prompt as the main defense, possibly reinforced by an api side system prompt too. But it is very clear that they want to allow things like malware analysis (which includes reverse-engineering), so any server-side limitations will be designed to allow these things too. The relevant client side sys…

They clearly scan traffic in retrospect, one of our devs got her account closed for RE.

Re: Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

#87

Post by elwebmaster »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #73
WalterBright wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've bought 4 internet radios over the last 25 years. They work for a few years, then are bricked because the remote server disappeared.

You rented the devices with a full up-front payment, but the manufacturer stuck you with the e-waste problem when they decided to be come an absentee landlord. This needs to be fixed by regulation. If a device requires an online service to function it (a) needs to be clearly advertised as rental and not a purchase, and (b) the device manufacturer must take the devices back and deal with the e-waste if they discontinu…

This! Absolutely needed regulation. Why is it that such a clearly beneficial and necessary piece of legislation is not making its way through the legislative bodies of the world while age checks somehow magically appeared universally?

Re: Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

#88

Post by zadikian »

bombcar wrote: post #52
AlienRobot wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before 1984 "take a taxi" meant you could actually take the taxi.

Apparently Taxis in New York used to all be ex-cop cars, and cop cars all had the same key, so one key would get you any taxi.

I did buy a new key for my ex-cop car on eBay, but there isn't just one, I had to buy all 7 possibilities (for $8 total).

Re: Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

#89

Post by evilduck »

26d0 wrote: post #14
charcircuit wrote: post #2

I've found that Claude Code works well at reversing java applications. Even if it is fully obfuscated claude can restore sensible names for everything and understand how it all works and answer questions about what it is doing.

+1. While vibe-coding (natural language to code) is not such a great idea, we can always check the source, so vibe-reverse-engineering (code to natural language) may actually be quite useful.

Super useful. I have a no-name USB microscope that only supported iOS and Android (just look up "USB microscope" on Amazon, there's like 500 versions of the same device). The device doesn't work like a normal webcam so you can't just plug it into a PC, and their mobile software is shady and low quality so I would only ever connected it to a GrapheneOS phone where I could prohibit their app having network access entirely because it gave me a bad feeling. As a result I underused the device since it was annoying.

I recently took their .apk and dropped it in a new empty project folder, instructed Claude Code w/ GLM 5 to reverse engineer the app, assess it for security and privacy concerns out of curiosity and then to probe the USB device to figure out why it doesn't work like a normal UVC webcam. After the investigation and planning I then instructed it to write a new app to use it on my desktop. I pretty much yolo'd it from that point and let AI drive the bus (I did the visual checks of the video stream in the app to provide feedback... while I watching a movie). I wound up with a working Electron app using libusb two hours later. With a Typescipt/C POC in hand as reference in another hour I had functioning Rust + egui application. Visually, both apps are rough around the edges but have complete functional parity with the mobile apps. It took 68 million tokens.

Re: Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]

#90

Post by OptionOfT »

morsch wrote: post #10

What a coincidence, I just got an email announcing that Breville intend to orphan my Joule sous vide stick: the existing app will stop working, the new app is only available the US and Canada and in parts of Europe. Live in another country? You're s.o.l., it wasn't officially sold there. You need a new account as well, hope you like the TOS. All of this for a device whose core functionality -- setting a target temper…

Makes me glad I got the Anova one. They don't _need_ an app per-se, however they recently did do a rug-pull by making the app a subscription.

They grandfathered me in, of-course, but it still is absolutely disgusting.

It should be mandatory to build systems with local connections in mind. mDNS is a thing.

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