HDD Firmware Hacking
icode4.coffee138 points by jsploit 11 hours ago
138 points by jsploit 11 hours ago
The obfuscation hardware vendors do is so trivial, why do they even bother?
One of the current vendor provided consumer SSD firmware update utilities for Linux as a live-usb decrypts the firmware and writes it out to disk decrypted before uploading it, so simply using seccomp to fail a rmdir syscall nets you the decrypted version without having to reverse engineer any of the updater/decryption code.
I deleted my own negative rant about SSD manufacturers not opting in to lvfs/fwupd when drives have a high risk of bricking without firmware updates.
>why do they even bother
So when you start publishing their code they can DMCA you.
Related, someone decompiled Samsung’s 840 EVO ssd firmware, before Samsung later started encrypting it: http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/ssd/TheMissingManual.pdf
Came across it looking how to deal with multiple different samsung drives caught in bad states due to shitty firmware. My original salty post warning about vendor branded Samsung drives on eBay is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37165189
This deserves its own blog post and HN submission. Since SSDs have been 2x to 4x prices people are now more likely to buy used and could get burned.
BTW thank you for raising this.
This article might be handy for someone interviewing at that firm (Red Balloon) that sends you a "weird" hard drive as the interview CTF? I still have it sitting around but it arrived around finals season so I never really looked at it, but since they bothered to send a whole drive and SATA-USB adapter, it obviously must have something to do with the drive itself.
If someone had a ton of money, it would be funny to just send the thing to a data recovery lab, have them swap the platters onto an unmodified model and get a raw image of the data to work with. (Or maybe the key is hidden inside the drive firmware chip itself?)
i still have mine too! managed to talk to the microcontroller and dump its firmware, but didn't know enough about how to make it arbitrarily run code without worrying about ruining it all
Appreciate the (unaffiliated) shout out! No comment on the drive recovery idea...
The fundamentals in the article are all relevant to the hard drive challenge, though the actual multi-step solution to our CTF is rather different.
If hacking hard drives sounds intriguing to you, we're hiring reverse engineers and security researchers! See our whoishiring posts and careers page for details:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977643
- https://redballoonsecurity.com/careers/
Be sure to mention Hacker News if you apply.
I'm glad you all are still doing this challenge. Ang handed one to me at Defcon 6 or 7 years ago and it's one of the most interesting challenges I've ever attempted.
Didn't finish it but learned a ton.
For anyone reading, Red Balloon is a great place with great people and I highly recommend anyone remotely interested give them a look.
The Red Balloon website looks AI generated.
1) so what? 2) evidence? 3) it's very obviously a wordpress site using elementor 4) the content really hasn't changed a ton in the last 10 years or so as far as I can tell 5) again, so what?
May I have a challenge drive just for the challenge (not interested in switching jobs)?
The fact that vendors still ship firmware with trivial obfuscation in 2026 is wild. I wonder how many data recovery shops already reverse-engineer these routinely but just don't publish.
Not publishing is the point of why they {{{encrypt}}} it.
Start publishing it and it's a good chance you'll get a DMCA notice in short order.
There's also another very good series of articles about hacking the firmware of a HDD, with modifications of /etc/shadow hashed passwords: https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack
Congrats OP, you can work for the NSA:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/nsa-hid-spying-software-in-h...
* https://www.wired.com/2015/02/nsa-firmware-hacking/
:)
Sounds like a punishment. Extra-paranoid work culture and be mistrusted by your counterparts on the outside.
Since this is xb360, this is SATA rather than IDE, but in a similar vein I am really looking forward to my PicoIDE to play with adversarial hdd controllers in real systems.
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