Building a Debugger (26th CCC)

This is the video of the talk "Building a Debugger" given by Travis Goodspeed at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress.

Abstract: The GoodFET is an open source tool for programming microcontrollers and memories by SPI, I2C, JTAG, and a slew of vendor-proprietary protocols. In this lecture, the design of the GoodFET will be explained in detail, and various semi-proprietary protocols will be discussed in depth. Leading toward the future, methods of packet sniffing proprietary protocols will be discussed. Finally, the BadFET – a voltage glitching variant of the GoodFET – will be introduced.

This lecture begins with a brief introduction to microcontroller debugging devices, along with packet captures of each. These include asynchronous serial (UART bootloaders), synchronous serial protocols (AVR ISP, Chipcon), and JTAG (MSP430, ARM). After these have been introduced, the talk continues by showing packet captures of each as implemented on the GoodFET. Attention is also paid to the security vulnerabilities of each debugging protocol, its access controls, and methods of circumventing those access controls. The GoodFET is the device that I used to break Chipcon's line of Zigbee SoC devices for BlackHat USA.

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Vivek Ramachandran is a security evangelist and has been working in computer security related fields for the past 7 years. In 2007, Vivek spoke at world renowned conferences Defcon (WEP Cloaking Exposed) and Toorcon (The Caffe Latte Attack). The discovery of the Caffe Latte Attack was covered by CBS5 news, BBC online, Network World etc news agencies.In 2006, Vivek was announced as one of winners of the Microsoft Security Shootout contest held in India among 65,000 participants. He has also been a recipient of a Team Achievement at Cisco Systems for his work on 802.1x and Port Security modules on the Catalyst 6500 switches. Currently he spends all of his time maintaining Security- Freak.Net , SecurityTube.Net and is the co-founder of Axonize. Vivek, is a Bachelor in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.You can contact him at vivek[at]securitytube.net