BlackHat Europe 2022 During the first week of December, I had the pleasure of attending a training course at BlackHat Europe 2022 titled Assessing and Exploiting Control Systems and IIoT run by Justin Searle. Part of the course involved Assessing and Exploiting Embedded Firmware by reading on-chip Flash using OpenOCD. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to finish the last labs during the training (we ran 9 am-6 pm each day). So I decided to follow along with the very comprehensive notes [...]| Sticky Bits - Powered by Feabhas
Dynamic polymorphism (virtual functions) is central to Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Used well, it provides hooks into an existing codebase where new functionality and behaviour can (relatively) easily be integrated into a proven, tested codebase. Subtype inheritance can bring significant benefits, including easier integration, reduced regression test time and improved maintenance. However, using virtual functions in C++ brings a runtime performance overhead. This overhead may appear inc...| Sticky Bits - Powered by Feabhas
Creating a flash image The primary purpose of the ihex file in the embedded space is to create a file that is used to program/reprogram a target system. There are various file formats around, with the Intel Hex (ihex) format being among the most widely used. The output of the linker stage of a build process is typically to generate a .elf file (Executable and Linkable Format). Many debuggers and programmers can work directly with the ELF file format. However, in many [...]| Sticky Bits - Powered by Feabhas
Ceedling is still probably the best Test-Driven Development (TDD) environment for C programmers out there. But, as with many Free Open-Source Software ( FOSS ), tools getting it to work natively on a Windows environment involves the odd hoop-jumping exercise; either involving messing around with the likes of Cygwin or Mingw; or using a full Virtual Machine (VM) environment such as VirtualBox or VMware. However, with the introduction of Windows-Subsystem-for-Linux (WSL) and the much-improved u...| Sticky Bits - Powered by Feabhas
In this post, by Embedded I’m generally referring to deeply embedded/bare-metal systems as opposed to Linux-based embedded systems. Embedded systems and strings Historically, the need for and thus the use of strings in embedded systems was fairly limited. However, this has changed with the advent of cheaper, full graphic displays and the growth of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT). Many embedded systems sport full-colour graphics displays, supported by embedded-specific graphics libraries,...| Sticky Bits - Powered by Feabhas
