This past weekend I (virtually) attended DEFCON 28. It was my first DEFCON experience, and I have to say it was really great! There were so many talks that interested me with very friendly speakers and community. The IoT Village in specific really spoke to me, and inspired me to start learning hardware hacking more in depth.

I think this has been a long time coming. Working as a software engineer is great, but I have always missed working on hardware. Some of my proudest projects are on microcontrollers, so pursuing this definitely made sense for me.

Practice

To get back into a MCU mindset, I decided to work on microcorruption, an online CTF targeting virtualized MSP430 microcontrollers.

Microcorruption is fantastic, especially for beginners to get an understanding of reverse engineering microcontrollers. It uses a simplified debugger, and does all the hard work of setting up the system for you to analyze. It even has a tutorial that walks you through solving the first challenge, step by step.

Next Steps

Once I complete microcorruption, I plan to create my own hardware lab. I have some old MSP430’s from school and various other microcontrollers laying about. That should work well and make for a more interesting post :)

Tips for Starting Out

If you somehow found this post and are wanting to start hacking on hardware too, I suggest learning some fundamentals:

  • how a CPU actually works (computer architecture)
  • assembly and instruction set architectures
  • C language

Or you can dive into microcorruption, but learning the above will result in less headaches. Good luck, and feel free to contact me!