Jon Szymaniak

Summary NXP System-on-a-Chip (SoC) fuse configurations with the SDP READ_REGISTER operation disabled (SDP_READ_DISABLE=1) but other serial download functionality still enabled (SDP_DISABLE=0) can be abused to read memory contents in warm and cold boot attack scenarios. In lieu of an enabled SDP READ_REGISTER operation, an attacker can use a series of…

NXP’s HABv4 API documentation references a now-mitigated defect in ROM-resident High Assurance Boot (HAB) functionality present in devices with HAB version < 4.3.7. I could find no further public documentation on whether this constituted a vulnerability or an otherwise “uninteresting” errata item, so I analyzed it myself! This post shines…

Depthcharge v0.2.0 is now available on GitHub and PyPi. This release introduces new “configuration checker” functionality and includes some major updates intended to improve usability. A tl;dr summary can be found in the CHANGELOG file. This blog post dives a bit more into the motivations for the changes, envisioned use-cases,…

Depthcharge is an extensible Python 3 toolkit designed to aid security researchers when analyzing a customized, product-specific build of the U-Boot bootloader. This blog post details the motivations for Depthcharge’s creation, highlights some key features, and exemplifies its use in a “tethered jailbreak” of a smart speaker that leverages secure…

Embedded systems are regularly found to lack modern security-focused designs and implementations, despite decades of advancements in the field of computer security. Although the emergence and adoption of projects such as Yocto and OpenEmbedded have made it easier to develop and maintain firmware for embedded Linux systems, NCC Group has…