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You are here: Home / Guest Appearance / #463 – An Interview with Trammell Hudson

#463 – An Interview with Trammell Hudson

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Welcome Trammell Hudson!

This episode is sponsored by Rohde and Schwarz. Check out AskAnEngineer.us for more info about their value line test equipment.

  • Trammell likes to gets things to the Proof of Concept stage, and then “hand off the keys to the repo”
  • Matthew Garrett quote, (paraphrased) “I don’t think I’m very good with computers, I’m just bad at knowing when to give up”
  • Taking good notes is a big part of Trammell’s process, which resulted in the site linked above.
  • Magic lantern firmware
  • Started from CHDK firmware, which is GPL
  • Starts with looking at the updates that the vendors ship, then getting code execution
  • Toggling the firmware out on an LED
  • Disassembler tools:
    • Hopper
    • Ida
    • Ghidra
  • He’s currently playing with Ikea smart bulbs and dimmers
  • Gave a talk at Hack in the Box about “time of check, time of use”
  • Project called Linuxboot, replaces x86 firmware with linux software
  • Trammell’s newest project is the SpiSpy
  • Logs all the flash memory accesses
  • Tool was built to speed up firmware dev that revealed security hole
  • Built with the ECP5
  • Gave a talk about SpiSpy at CCCamp
  • Hard to emulate the real time flash, since you have to serve up a response in 1 clock cycle
  • DRAM is too slow, so it’s necessary to start the row/column reads before they have all of the bits
  • Retrocomputing
    • PDP11
    • Mac SE
  • Former guest of TAH Fabienne did the ROM dump scarves
  • Archive.org documents old file formats
  • Teensy4
  • Scanlime had a tiny85 act like an RFID
  • Trammell replicated and extended this work
  • RFID doesn’t transmit back from the passive device side, it just shorts the coils together
  • PSK31
  • 13 hz of bandwidth
  • SpiSpy project had a bus contention problem, scope saved the day
  • Vector stuff
  • Used dual DAC to drive the XY
  • Former guest Todd Bailey also did vector work on the VEC9
  • CRTs don’t move instantaneously
  • Vector generation needs to model the magnetic drivers
  • Added tunable parameters to the screen driver code.
  • Later CRTs had color
  • Had a write up in POC | GTFO
  • Worked on Robots with others at NYC Resistor
  • Puma Robot Arms were reverse engineered and turned into shuffleboard robots
  • Using a scope for the quadrature decoding
  • Trammell is a full time Security Researcher
  • Thunderstrike was a vulnerability that allowed code insertion via the thunderbolt cable on the mac.
  • Linuxboot replace proprietary boot software in servers and other hardware with linux
  • Independent bios vendor
  • Bulk of the code comes from intel
  • Unix wars of 80s and 90s
  • OEMs do “not invented here”
  • Gave a talk about it at 34c3
  • Build your own custom firmware for the lamps
  • Check out all of Trammell’s projects on trmm.net
  • Find Trammell as @qrs on Twitter or Mastadon

The image is a capture from a 1 kilopixel Cyclops sensor that Trammell re-projected through an oscilloscope (link)

Trackbacks

  1. Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 1st, 2019 – AWS Feed says:
    November 1, 2019 at 6:37 pm

    […] Matthew Garrett~ I don’t think I’m very good with computers, I’m just bad at knowing when to give up […]

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