Microcontroller Exploits

Introduction

Howdy y’all,

Microcontrollers are single-chip computers. There’s one in your credit card and dozens in your laptop and car. Medical devices, video games, electric power meters, and two-way radios use them. Inside each there is some non-volatile memory for a computer program, the barest minimum of a CPU to run that program, and enough RAM to store global variables, and maybe also a heap and a call stack.

I’ve long been fascinated with the readout protection features of microcontrollers, which protect a chip’s firmware from being extracted and reverse engineered. In that time, many clever neighbors have come up with many clever ways to extract this firmware, but when I wanted to share them, I’d often find myself sketching the broad ...