Epic reverse-engineering

[mikeselectricstuff]

Just watched these 2 vids on investigating a blu-ray drive - some awesome reverse-engineering ( and video editing).

www.misc.name/coastermelt/

[apelly]

She does cool stuff. I've encountered her before when googling for info on other things. Also, I think an Amp Hour guest has spoken about her.

[Howardlong]

I think an Amp Hour guest has spoken about her.

She'd be an excellent AmpHour guest. I see she spent a good few years at the hardware emulation end of VMWare, that explains a lot.

[GK]

More than a bit "out there" in some respects, IMO, like, ummmm..........

http://scanlime.org/2012/11/hacking-my-vagina/

[Howardlong]

More than a bit "out there" in some respects, IMO, like, ummmm..........

http://scanlime.org/2012/11/hacking-my-vagina/

Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

[wreeve]

and she has a cat in the video....win win!

[Howardlong]

and she has a cat in the video....win win!

Not quite a Mrs Slocombe though.

[nctnico]

I love the stone tablets when the subject 8051 comes up.  Also is that cat on her desk still alive?
Interesting hacking techniques; looking at a binary file as grey scale data reveals patterns quickly.

[SeanB]

Well trained cat, it fetches thrown things, and even goes to look for them. Most I have met look at you like " well, you threw it, you bleeding well fetch it! I'm busy" in that situation.

[abyrvalg]

10:36+ - what are you doing?! See "FF B5" -> press 'P'! Hurts my IDA reflexes )))

[SArepairman]

for some reason i felt like i was watching c-span and lol @ software patent trolling

[AndreasF]

I think an Amp Hour guest has spoken about her.

She'd be an excellent AmpHour guest. I see she spent a good few years at the hardware emulation end of VMWare, that explains a lot.

She was the most recent guest on Elicia & Christopher White's Embedded podcast.

[jaxbird]

Look at me and my pink hair.

What is the deal with the funny colored hair?

[Monkeh]

Look at me and my pink hair.

What is the deal with the funny colored hair?

What's the deal with your funny coloured shirt?

It's hair. She happens to want it pink.. so what?

[jaxbird]

What's the deal with your funny coloured shirt?

It's hair. She happens to want it pink.. so what?

My shirt is always either White, Shade of Blue or when I feel rebellish, I might wear crazy colors like green or even a patterned design, never pink or purple though.

[jaxbird]

Look at me and my pink hair.

What is the deal with the funny colored hair?

What's the deal with your funny coloured shirt?

It's hair. She happens to want it pink.. so what?

The saddest thing though is that her technique is less advanced than what we used in the mid/late 80s to break protections on Commodore 64 games.

We've come so far in 25-30 years 

[timofonic]

Her site screams HIPSTER everywhere. Pink hair is part of the style, like Lemor Fried.

She did CIA.vc and many other projects.

[nctnico]

The saddest thing though is that her technique is less advanced than what we used in the mid/late 80s to break protections on Commodore 64 games.

After some though it also occured to me that there are better ways to determine how to control the motors and lasers but I guess her aim is to keep using the processor which is already on the board. Getting a datasheet / user manual would be a shortcut to that but then again that would take away some of the fun of learning that information through reverse engineering. Sometimes I take the long road as well for hobby hacking projects.

[miguelvp]

How hard is really to figure out a Commodore 64 really?

In those days, systems where so simple that it doesn't compare to now, 20 KB of Rom with 6502 code is hardly a challenge.

[jaxbird]

How hard is really to figure out a Commodore 64 really?

In those days, systems where so simple that it doesn't compare to now, 20 KB of Rom with 6502 code is hardly a challenge.

We are going off topic, but it mostly relied on clever tricks, e.g. one of the "encryption" techniques used was to execute a loader code in screen memory, so in case you break the execution, the screen clears and the code is gone.

Just one example, another example is executing certain tasks on the 6502 located in the disk drive to obfuscate operations.

Not as simple as you think. (c64 was based on the mos6510 with about 20kB ROM, bank switchable)

Anyway, better keep the thread on subject.

[miguelvp]

I guess you are saying that the old school reverse engineering, and by that I assume making duplicate copies was not Epic.

I kind of agree of the old school reverse engineering not being epic so it's off-topic, I myself did an assembly routine to copy zx spectrum tapes that had fake headers for copy protection, maybe it was a huge deal then, but now systems are so complex with different processor etc that is not that simple.

Back in those days we knew every special memory addresses by heart and we had access to the full disassembly of the ROM.

Making a simple reader to get the data from tapes, etc was a simple task, as it was decompiling the opcodes by hand because we didn't have the tools available now, but because those old systems where so simple it was possible to do things manually, to the point that I would recognize the opcodes and didn't have to resort to look at the z80 instruction set. Edit: and the z80 is way more complex as far as number of opcodes than the 6502.

Today that's not really that simple, unless you are talking about a cortex m0 that hardly that many opcodes or legacy 8 bit MCUs.

Old systems didn't have any encryption at all, they did however did have schemes to try to protect their work. Even now a days on PCs that's still the case, nothing is truly protected because the amount of tools out there, but what she is doing is not taking the protection out of a piece of software, reverse engineering that blue-ray disc is orders or magnitude more complex than trying to break some copy protection scheme on some software running on a computer that you have full access to.

So not off-topic really, but if you are going to downplay what she is doing there and try to ridicule the work done and compare it to those old simple times you can't just make your comment go away by just saying we are taking things off-topic.

The saddest thing though is that her technique is less advanced than what we used in the mid/late 80s to break protections on Commodore 64 games.

We've come so far in 25-30 years 

[jaxbird]

ZX Spectrum ... 

I see it more as equal to buying a piece of hardware on ebay or aliexpress without the datasheet and just figuring out how to make it work.

[miguelvp]

ZX Spectrum ... 

I see it more as equal to buying a piece of hardware on ebay or aliexpress without the datasheet and just figuring out how to make it work.

That's just a useless missquote as is the comments about hair color etc. 

[SArepairman]

pink hair is hot

[dexters_lab]

interesting videos, thanks for sharing them

made me think how different people would tackle the same problem, ie hardware hacking vs software