I did a presentation, in Italian (see below for similar presentation in English), at the RomHack 2019 – Cyber Security Conference on 28th September 2019 about “Reverse Engineering of IoT devices: Hack a Home Router”.

Here you can find:

Presentation

• The presentation in pdf format, in the last pages of the presentation you will find the links to everything I talked about;

GitHub repositories related to the Home Router Example

• adbtools2: tools for hacking ADB Epicentro routers (the example home router), including firmware modification kit and VOIP password recovery;
• Buildroot-armv7: a set of scripts, configuration files and Buildroot external tree to setup a Qemu emulation environment to run and reverse engineer the Netgear DVA 5592 executables. This environment uses Docker, Buildroot and Qemu to emulate a board with an ARMv7 Cortex A9 processor, Linux kernel 3.4.11-rt19, uClibc 0.9.33.2, and old versions of other libraries.
• hacking-gemtek another reverse engineering project for a Gemtek home router (WVRTM-127ACN), distributed in Italy by Linkem, with the purpose to modify the firmware, gain root access, recover default WiFi password.

Reverse engineering and physical disassembly

• Introduction to reverse engineering, Mike Anderson, Embedded Linux Conference 2018, slides and video;

Recommended Books

• Chris Simmonds – Mastering Embedded Linux Programming – Second Edition – Packt Publishing 2017;
• Norman Matloff , Peter Jay Salzman – The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD and Eclipse – NO STARCH PRESS 2008;

Hardware tools

• Bus Pirate;
• Jtagulator;
• J-Link Debug Probes;
• Bus Blaster;

JTAG and UART interfaces

• Popular pinouts;

Software

• Buildroot;
• Putty terminal emulator;
• OpenOCD (Open On-Chip Debugger) provides debugging, in-system programming and boundary-scan testing for embedded target devices;
• Wireshark, network protocol analyzer;
• Binwalk, firmware analysis tool;
• Jefferson, JFFS2 filesystem extraction tool.

Reverse Engineering Open Source software

• Radare2, a portable reversing framework
• Ghidra, a software reverse engineering (SRE) suite of tools developed by NSA’s Research Directorate in support of the Cybersecurity mission