043 - Filling In Zeros

Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast · 21 Dec 2020 · 1h 15m

What this episode covers

Dmitry Grinberg, a hardware hacker and repeat guest, details his reverse engineering of the Nintendo Pokéwalker, which uses a Renesas H8 microcontroller. He explains how he bypassed the chip's self-erase protection by exploiting a buffer overflow in its decompression algorithm to dump the ROM and execute arbitrary code. The discussion also covers his analysis of various processor architectures, specifically contrasting the compiler-friendly H8 and ARM designs with the notoriously difficult 8051 and PIC architectures.

Mentioned

Companies
Renesas
Products
Pokéwalker, Sparkfun Prototype HARP, Pocket Station
Chips
H8300, 8051, PIC, iCE40
Tools
IDAPRO

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