Philippe Laulheret - Intro to Hardware Hacking
A practical beginner's guide to hardware hacking fundamentals: identifying and exploiting UART, JTAG, and SPI debug interfaces on consumer electronics.
Summary
Hardware Hacking Fundamentals
Philippe Laulheret (Security Researcher, McAfee ATR) delivers a comprehensive practical introduction to hardware security research targeting consumer IoT devices.
Tooling Setup
The talk covers essential hardware hacking tools: multimeters, oscilloscopes, soldering stations, logic analyzers, bus pirate/FT232H adapters, and software (sigrok/PulseView for protocol decoding).
Identifying Debug Interfaces
Laulheret demonstrates techniques for identifying unpopulated UART, JTAG, SWD, and SPI headers on PCBs using visual inspection, continuity testing, and logic analyzer probing. UART ports typically provide Linux shell access at boot time.
Firmware Extraction
The talk covers multiple firmware extraction paths: UART console commands, JTAG memory dumps, SPI flash chip-off using dedicated programmer hardware (FlashCAT, CH341A), and OTA update capture via network interception. Each path is demonstrated against real target devices.
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