Just a terminology nit in the article: this isn't really exploiting anything. Exploitation means breaking intended security, but there is no security here; obvi

Just a terminology nit in the article: this isn't really exploiting anything. Exploitation means breaking intended security, but there is no security here; obviously this device was not designed to attempt to stop you from tinkering with eMMC directly. Hacking is the more general term for what this is :-) Cable modems in general don't seem to really make much of an attempt at physical-access security, even though they rely on being "secure from the owner" to enforce ISP bandwidth limits. Back when I was on cable, my cable router didn't have an official bridge mode, but there was a way to get telnet by uncommenting a hidden settings field in the HTML (lol) and then you could use an undocumented command to enable it. Later, the ISP broke this in an update, possibly inadvertently: bridge mode was still there, but enabling it caused some process to crashloop and destroyed performance. I got tired of that nonsense, found an old firmware image, and directly flashed it to the SPI flash chip on the board (except I left the version metadata as the higher one, so it wouldn't try to update itself again). Worked fine until I moved out of that place and stopped using cable. The DOCSIS cert and private key were right there in the flash too, I'm pretty sure I still have a backup somewhere.