3 ms·
I have seen this quite often in legacy devices. 20 years ago there wasn't ida-pro, and the designers probably felt more secure about leaving all the pieces of
by kw71 10y ago
I have seen this quite often in legacy devices. 20 years ago there wasn't ida-pro, and the designers probably felt more secure about leaving all the pieces of the puzzle in the hands of the enduser. Real cryptography was more difficult on 8 bit hardware, as well as being export-controlled.
The last one I encountered was an s-box, where the s-box material was included in the update file. The only secret was the initial substitution ('seed' if you will.) They kept it in firmware until the very last product to use this scheme, whose windows app decrypted the update to learn some details about the update before it was loaded into the embedded device.
- jlgaddis 10y agoIDA Pro might not have existed 20+ years ago but other tools certainly did. I can recall using SoftICE as a teenager to "crack" door games for my BBS. Thanks for the flashback. :) I do understand your point, though.
- kw71 10y agoI still use SoftICE (DOS) for its debugger! (I still get legacy projects from time to time.) But it requires a lot more manual labor to understand a binary.