Cybersecurity student at the University of Alabama College of Engineering, focusing on network forensics, self-hosted infrastructure, and bare-metal systems. Field notes, architecture specs, and low-level security research.
•8 min read•~/notes/iot-firmware-spi-extraction.md
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.
Deconstructing modern glibc memory allocator defenses: tcache safe-linking pointer mangling, bypass primitives, and House of Apple file structure hijacking for arbitrary code execution.