Last week I started the Make Me Hack YouTube channel about Hardware Hacking and Reverse Engineering. I also started the Make Me Hack Website to complement the YoutTube channel with additional links and information.

Currently I have uploaded the following videos:

• 01 – Identifying Components about how to open an IoT device and identify his main components (System On a Chip, RAM, EEPROM etc.).
• 02 – How To Find The UART Interface about how to identify the position and pin-out of the IoT serial interface using simple tools, like a multi-meter, and how to connect this interface to a PC using a USB TTL Serial Adapter.
• 03 – How To Find The JTAG Interface about how to identify the position and pin-out of the JTAG interface, using simple tools, like a multi-meter or a Jtagulator board, and what to do when the JTAG interface has been identified but it is not working.
• 04 – How To Get The Firmware about the possible ways that can be used to to get the firmware of an IoT device.
• 05 – How To Get The Root File System about the available options to understand where the root file system is located in the firmware image, and the tools to use to extract it with the purpose to analyze it.
• 06 – Startup Scripts and The Quest For Root about analyzing startup scripts of an IoT device to understand what the device does, if there is any possibility to login as root and to identify some interesting binary executables to reverse engineer to hack the device.
• 07 – How To Emulate Firmware With QEMU about using QEMU as an emulation environment, reasonably similar to our device, where to run, debug, and reverse engineer interesting device executable binaries.
• 08 – How To Run An Old Toolchain with Docker about how to use Docker to build the emulation environment, using old tools, like old versions of Buildroot, that don’t run on modern Linux distributions. We have to use a container environment, like Docker, or a more complex virtualization environment to solve this issue.