I’m currently writing up a series on hardware hacking fundamentals, and before I get into the specifics – I thought it sensible to add a piece on why hardware security is important and to lay out the major themes of what I’ll be discussing.
Discovering UART with the JTAGulator and connecting to it with UART PassThrough and a USB-to-UART!
UART stands for Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter, however in the context of Hardware Hacking we’re generally looking for an serial interface which will give us text output from the system and possibly allow for command input. The general intention from the manufacturers point of view – is to allow easy debugging, both out of the factor (to check the system is working as intended) and if a device is returned as broken.
Getting up and running with PulseView and reading pin output with an Analyzer!
Logic Analyzers are inexpensive devices that allow you to just take a look at what a small number of pins on a chip are up to. They can be hooked into software like PulseView to read pin output and decode it into something more useful. Many decoders are available, but in this introduction we’ll have a quick look at PulseView and reading (decoding) UART data.
I’ve previously written about UART and how to find them with a JTAGulator, but here’s a different approach.