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2026-07-20 • 8 min read
Reverse Engineering IoT Firmware: SPI Flash Extraction
In security audits of embedded systems, retrieving the 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.
extract_firmware.sh
POSIX sh
# 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
fi