039 - Changing the Nature of Reality
Natalie Silvanovich, a member of Google's Project Zero, discusses her extensive reverse engineering of Tamagotchi devices, detailing how she bypassed epoxy blobs using nitric acid and exploited memory timing vulnerabilities to dump firmware from GeneralPlus chips. She explains the evolution of the devices from simple 6502-based systems to modern ARM-based models with Bluetooth, Android apps, and Unity engines, while also touching on her professional work finding remote code execution vulnerabilities in WebRTC and Flash implementations. The conversation covers the small but dedicated community of Tamagotchi hackers, including Mr. Blinky and Boulter, and highlights the tools she uses, such as IDA, Ghidra, and Frida, to analyze both hardware and software components.