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HDD Firmware Hacking

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Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#3

Post by morpheuskafka »

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?)

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#5

Post by red_balloon »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #3

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 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.com/item?id=47977643

- https://redballoonsecurity.com/careers/

Be sure to mention Hacker News if you apply.

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#8

Post by busterarm »

red_balloon wrote: post #5
morpheuskafka wrote: post #3

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 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…

I'm glad you all are still doing this challenge. Ang handed one to me at Defcon 6 or 7 years ago and it's one of the most interesting challenges I've ever attempted.

Didn't finish it but learned a ton.

For anyone reading, Red Balloon is a great place with great people and I highly recommend anyone remotely interested give them a look.

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#9

Post by Modified3019 »

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

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#10

Post by jareklupinski »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #3

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 j…

i still have mine too! managed to talk to the microcontroller and dump its firmware, but didn't know enough about how to make it arbitrarily run code without worrying about ruining it all
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