The Hardware Hacker

9. hardware hacking

The biggest barrier to hacking is often the fear that you’ll break something while poking around. But you have to break eggs to make an omelet; likewise, you have to be willing to sacrifice devices to hack a system. Fortunately, acquiring multiple copies of a mass-produced piece of hardware is easy. I often do a bit of dumpster diving or check classified advertisements to get sample units for research purposes. I generally try to start with three copies: one to tear apart and never put back together, one to probe, and one to keep relatively pristine. I use the pristine copy to sanity-check whether a certain behavior is due to my probing or just how the hardware behaves.

My typical approach to any hardware hack is first getting ...