Spritesmods

I feel like this is missing a link to spritesmod[0], which might use a little bit of a bigger platform (esp32) but a functional Mac plus that fits in your palm is absurd. I would never have thought you could do what OP did, rp2040 looks way too small, amazing work! [0]: http://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus&page=7

Sprites Mods, great hacker, an inspiration for me : https://spritesmods.com/ Fabrice Bellard, creator of FFMPEG, QEMU, and lots of other amazing stuff : https://bellard.org/

Exposing drives directly with no virtualization layer - is there a risk that a malicious user might somehow flash a trojan firmware onto the drive, and then later the drive is used for a different customer? The classic Sprite Hard Drive mod comes to mind https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=5

I don’t think the nozzle would have to be open source for this to be useful, just a printer that can be modified to print on things other than paper and be cool about whatever cartridges you put it it would be great. Inkjet cartridges are a little messy, but easy to refill at home, whit the printers DRM like check’s being the main issue. This project reverse engineered cartridge control and developed an ESP32 controlled hand held printer: http://spritesmods.com/?art=magicbrush&page=3

Sprites is someone that I feel truly epitomises the original hacking spirit. His ability to understand the inner-workings of a large variety of things, strip them down to their bare elements and combine them in different ways to make something new is nothing short of impressive. His hacks section is very entertaining (https://spritesmods.com/?art=hardware). My favourites are his Minecraft portal and his automatic jello-shot printer made from old CD-ROM parts.

For the impatient, the final product is here: https://youtu.be/UCPUPO21Cwk?t=17 linked from the fifth page of the post: http://spritesmods.com/?art=frekvens&page=5 It's an eye that follows movement around, pretty cool.

"Here is linux on a hard drive microcontroller http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 " No, that isn't Linux on a HDD microtroller. It's bare metal on an HDD MCU sort of fooling the Linux box that is accessing it. True that you can run uCLinux on some MCU devices, but this thread isn't necessarily showing the best one for that. Dancing bears are amusing, but not common or recommended.

There might be a way tune the risc-v port to this chip if there isn't one tuned already, and while it is likely you wouldn't be able to run linux well on them at the moment, and you'd definitely need some additional rw memory of some form, it would be possible, it does run on microcontrollers with worse specs. For example here is how to get Ubuntu linux to boot on an 8-bit AVR ATmega1284p, by emulating ARMv5: http://dmitry.gr/index.php?proj=07.+Linux+on+8bit&r=05.Projects And as most people know, but if they didn't, here is linux on a hard drive microcontroller http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 And probably the best option for performance, if it can be ported over, uClinux doesn't require an mmu. http://www.uclinux.org/ports/

Great to see Jeroen is still at it. I used to live across the street from him and it was always fascinating to see what he was up to. Hanging out at his place was the closest thing to what I imagine Silicon Valley must have been like during the heydays of hardware hacking. Probably why he moved to Shenzhen. His writeups at https://spritesmods.com are also good reads. I see he has also done a miniature Mac Plus: http://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus

If you haven't checked it out, Sprite_tm - who was behind this project - has a homepage with writeups of lots of other projects, which are all great reading: http://spritesmods.com/

Thanks for the link! I've stumbled upon this site few years ago. Recently I tried to find it again, but failed. This is such a great resource. Edit: what brought me originally to the site was this - http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=10 Mac SE with guts replaced by ARM board. With deyellowed chassis, functional screen, keyboard and mouse. Also a mod of diskette.

It's updated monthly but really worth to have in your rss feed http://spritesmods.com/ The guy hacks and create stuff from time to time and it's very interesting to read. It's also more on the hardware side of things (I had to Google what's a shift register and how they work to understand one of the article)

Love your list, here are a few other hardware people that put out great stuff: - Charles Lohr http://cnlohr.net/ mixed bag of art and hardware - Jeroen Domburg (SpriteTM) of http://spritesmods.com now at Espressif, an adept magician.

Brilliant demonstration from a few years ago of what's possible with a hard drive firmware hack. You're basically completely fucked. http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1

I guess writing a new hard drive firmware from scratch, without inside knowledge, would be close to impossible. But why start from scratch if you can just modify the existing firmware? And that seems to be perfectly possible: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack I'd say the most difficult and resource consuming part is to make versions which work on as many brands, models and revisions as possible, and make them all robust enough so they won't be detected because of random malfunctions. But I don't know anything about hard disk firmwares: Perhaps they are not too diverse and once you know how to modify one drive, the others will follow easily?

The scary part is that blowing away the OS install won't save you completely. There are BIOS, firmware attacks, to name a couple. Take a look at the following link with information about persistent root access via hard drive firmware hacking. Even if you reinstall the OS, your box will continue to be owned: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1

Oh, you're absolutely right that modifying SSD firmware gives you a lot of fun possibilities for hijacking a machine, but that is not new either, it's a threat vector that has been known and investigated for many years now. Here's someone running Linux on an HDD controller in 2013: https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 It's well known that SSD vendor security is usually atrocious; these companies do not have much experience building secure-boot systems, and there are often vendor-specific backdoor commands and such. You absolutely do not need the resources of a state actor to pull that off; a good reason and 5-6 digits' worth of (competent) security researcher time ought to do it. I've spent half of my life breaking systems that try a lot harder to have secure boot than SSDs, as a hobby. Indeed, IOMMU support is critical in the modern hardware ecosystem. Honestly, any system that does not use them by default for all off-chip peripherals in 2021 is just unsuitable for any kind of sensitive use case. That, plus FDE with hashtree authentication, eliminates SSD compromise as an attack vector.

The VM may get compromised, it depends on how you set it up, not all apps need to phone home for a start and dont need anything more than limited network access but thats firewall/IPS/IDS domain. You hint your may be corporate unlike a home user who has less tools and disposable income at their disposal and VMware unity is a quick cheap fix as its free for home use. Its ok to burn an image to the ground, do you check your firmware like your bios with something like Copernicus? https://www.mitre.org/publications/technical-papers/copernicus-2-sente… or HDD firmware hacking ? https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 Your persistence is right there, doesnt matter how often you reinstall an OS then if you have a system running like a sim card working with a smartphone OS but also independently communicating with the hw like a bluetooth/wifi mesh network but you also have network printers/scanners and other HW that connects to a network to check out to check out the firmware for. I loved having to flash the old EEPROM's, physically taking the chip out, removing the sticker over the quartz window, exposing it to UV light, before sticking the label back over the window and then flashing it on a EEPROM flash machine, that physical process made it harder to hack unlike today. So how quickly can you get your backup loaded on blank servers, workstations and switches? Exchange server can take its time if people have GB+ mailboxes. This is an interesting post mortem of…

I suspect it's because the protocol for driving those cartridges is known and others have used them: https://spritesmods.com/?art=magicbrush https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker

There's also another very good series of articles about hacking the firmware of a HDD, with modifications of /etc/shadow hashed passwords: https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

FM radio with an ATTiny: https://spritesmods.com/?art=avrfmtx

Sprites mods did one a few years ago. A Mac Plus in a tiny chassis with a 1.5" monitor. https://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus&page=7

I find it VERY weird that there's no mention of https://hackaday.io/project/176931-hp-printer-cartridge-control-module… which is a CUPS-based 2D inkjet printer using the exact same print head and open source software and CERN license open hardware. Most likely, that's also precisely the reason why this product uses a very old HP print-head. (The one from HP DeskJet 1110, released December 2014.) Because that one has been reverse-engineered already: https://spritesmods.com/?art=magicbrush&page=3

Is the controller really going to be that much simpler on a HDD? On HDD you still have things like command queuing, caching, checksumming and bad block remapping just as with SSD. Sure you don't have the flash translation layer, but I'd expect processing of the analog signal going to/from the heads to be a processing headache too. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to do temperature compensation and factory and/or runtime calibration of the analog path. Of course much of that will be done in fixed-function custom hardware blocks, but almost certainly so would a SSD for eg. ECC calculations. https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=3 has some data points on a 10+ year old HDD - 3 ARM9 feroceon cores + Cortex-M3 core. Doesn't sound too simple.

FYI all modern hard drives have multi-core ARM or Risc-V microprocessors built-in. Usually one core manages the motor control and signal decode from the RW head and another core runs an embedded OS and manages the data interface to the host computer. Folks have managed to get malware running on the hard drive's embedded CPU(s)[0] as well as full blown Linux distributions [1]. So your average hard drive definitely already has enough grunt to get the job done. Just needs a firmware written to expose the functionality. 0: https://hackaday.com/2015/06/08/hard-drive-rootkit-is-frighteningly-pe… 1: https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

Nice article, Thank you for the write-up. First time I saw somebody 'creatively using' an RTL83something switch was https://spritesmods.com/?art=rtl8366sb, and there were others since then, but yours was the first 'build my own managed switch', instead of 'adding an external brain to an unmanaged switch'

It's been done before - but apparently the performance is pretty poor - https://spritesmods.com/?art=avrcpm

Do you mean this? https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 Searched "run linux on hard drive without cpu or ram" on Google - third result.

There is an even bigger missing entry: toys. The Chinese company Sunplus/GeneralPlus has had a near monopoly on toy microcontrollers for over two decades at this point and the vast majority of their lower-end offerings are based on trimmed down 6502 derivatives, usually expanded with dedicated hardware for tasks like audio playback. Notably, the original Furby [1] and many Tamagotchi models [2] use such chips. [1] https://archive.org/details/furby-source [2] https://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity&page=2

Then there is the Tamagotchi Singularity inspired by an XKCD comic [1]. It is a server full of emulated tamagotchis [2] that interact with each other in a simulator, all running code dumped by Natalie's technique. I'm impressed by both these hacks, especially the combination. All this is via a Hackaday article. [3] 1. https://xkcd.com/1546/ 2. https://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity 3. https://hackaday.com/2015/11/24/building-the-infinite-matrix-of-tamago…