Documenting bare-metal systems, embedded hardware audits, and network isolation architectures. Writing zero-allocation POSIX scripts, reverse engineering production microcontrollers, and analyzing memory allocator exploitation primitives.
In security audits of embedded systems, retrieving firmware is the critical first step. When over-the-air updates are encrypted and debug ports (UART, JTAG) are disabled in production silicon, dumping physical SPI Flash memory becomes necessary. This writeup covers extracting firmware from an 8-pin SOP SPI flash chip using a Bus Pirate and flashrom to bypass bootloader lockdowns.
# Query the SPI flash details using flashrom via Bus Pirate
flashrom -p buspirate_spi:dev=/dev/ttyUSB0,spispeed=1M -r firmware_dump.bin
# Verify the integrity of the binary dump by comparing hashes
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Dump successful. Running md5sum..."
md5sum firmware_dump.bin
fiArchitecting automated TLS wildcard certificate propagation, Docker provider label routing, zero-downtime container updates, and backend health-check failover routes on bare-metal infrastructure.
Analyzing edge-case incompatibilities, syntax overhead, eliminating bashisms, and writing fast, bulletproof bootstrapping scripts for Alpine and embedded targets conforming to IEEE Std 1003.1.
Deconstructing modern glibc memory allocator defenses: tcache safe-linking pointer mangling, bypass primitives, and House of Apple file structure hijacking for arbitrary code execution.
Designing strict zone-based firewall rules across isolated VLANs (Management, Server DMZ, IoT, Trusted Clients) with point-to-point WireGuard cryptographic routing.