boricj

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151.
by boricj 2y ago
It's hosted on a computer located inside my apartment. It used to be hosted on a cheap Synology NAS. No Cloudflare or CDN or anything like that, just a bare NGINX server. The website itself is built on Jekyll, but I want to switch to s
152.
by boricj 2y ago
>> As an example, the latest Atari Jaguar linker (aln) for Linux was released back in 1995. It's a proprietary, statically-linked 32-bit Linux a.out executable. > That’s not a user land problem. That’s a CPU architecture probl
153.
by boricj 2y ago
It's not just about dynamically linked executables. The userland of Linux simply isn't as stable time-wise as Windows, especially when the timescale is measured in decades. As an example, the latest Atari Jaguar linker (aln) for L
154.
by boricj 2y ago
Wasn't OpenVMS stuck in a similar situation in the late 1980s, where they had tons of VAX MACRO assembly files they had to transpile to Alpha, then Itanium and nowadays x86_64? VAX is a rather different beast than 32-bit ARM and that b
155.
by boricj 2y ago
I've been meaning to write more articles and not just about delinking or reverse-engineering. I've been hoarding some lower-grade cursed stuff, like a git proxy/cache written in a hundred lines of bash, or a Jenkins plugin th
156.
by boricj 2y ago
This is a bit different. In your case, you're reusing code and data laying around in a running process to do your bidding from within. Here, I'm actually stealing code and data from one or more executables and turning these back i
157.
by boricj 2y ago
Neat! Looks like the closest equivalent in your tooling would be pe2obj, which repacks a PE executable as a COFF object file. Unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't seem to do anything in particular w.r.t. relocations, which is the trick
158.
by boricj 2y ago
The only unusual part about my toolkit is the delinker. Since it outputs relocatable object files, you can then make use of them with conventional tooling. I've mostly used a linker to build new programs with the parts I've export
159.
by boricj 2y ago
You can find it here: https://github.com/boricj/ghidra-delinker-extension I've demonstrated a bunch of use-cases on my blog, ranging from porting software to pervasive binary patching and pilfering application cod
160.
by boricj 2y ago
In the past couple of years I've worked on a Ghidra extension that can export any subset of a program as a relocatable object file. I built that because I tried to reverse-engineer/decompile a video game and had unconventional opi
161.
by boricj 2y ago
It's even worse than that. Office on my work computer is set to the English language, but my locale is French and so is my Windows language. It's saving semicolon-separated CSV files with the comma as a decimal point. I need to un
162.
by boricj 2y ago
I've recently written a library at work to run visitors on data models bound to data sets. One of these visitors is a CSV serializer that dumps a collection as a CSV document. I've just checked and strings are escaped using the sa
163.
by boricj 2y ago
Your comma isn't my comma. French systems use the comma as a decimal point for numbers and we use semicolons to separate fields in CSV files.
164.
by boricj 2y ago
Can that library be rebuilt in a reproducible manner? If so, what's the difference between the library hosted by Cisco and a locally built one that is identical bit-for-bit? Is there any mechanism to ensure that the library was genuine
165.
by boricj 2y ago
In my current job, I was hired based on my previous professional work as a DevOps engineer for a three month emergency job, in order to set up a basic CICD pipeline for a project. Two months in, once the basics were in place I pivoted to em
166.
by boricj 2y ago
I somehow keep falling into rabbit-hole projects that are deeply heretical in nature. I've attempted a video game reverse-engineering/decompilation project and somehow ended up with a Ghidra extension that can export relocatable o
167.
by boricj 2y ago
Fortunately, it's a single no-frills MCU running the Zephyr RTOS. It does communicate with another system, but they are so very loosely coupled to the point that we really don't care whatever is running on the other side. I won&#x
168.
by boricj 2y ago
We already have a watchdog timer. We could automatically trigger a factory reset after N bootloops following an upgrade, but it's up to the end-user to decide to flip the switch so we won't go there. I kept the summary short and s
169.
by boricj 2y ago
> 2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state. Some sequence that resets the device completely back to the way it was when it came out of the box, firmware included, as a last resort. That's a nifty mechanism that also allows
170.
by boricj 2y ago
I'm working on embedded systems and I've seen and heard some horror stories just on the device's side. Piles and piles of pre- and post-reboot shell scripts filled with race conditions against the system's services and t
171.
by boricj 2y ago
We're uniquely suited to not support the F-35. Not unless you swap out the engine for a Safran one, change the avionics for Dassault's, rip out the rest of the electronics for the Thalès stuff and replace the ordnance with MBDA&#x
172.
by boricj 2y ago
I don't have a portfolio for my professional work, but I have a personal GitHub account I can point to for a number of topics (osdev, embedded, reverse-engineering...). I've started a blog to document some of my personal work, whi
173.
by boricj 2y ago
It's a static website built with Jekyll. I'm serving it with NGINX from a DMZ container on a Proxmox instance located inside my apartment. I might migrate to Hugo or another static site generator at some point because I'm too
174.
by boricj 2y ago
It's fairly different than the approach inside the CppCon 2014 talk because the data model itself is not actually strongly tied to the underlying types of the data. That lack of strong integration does result in a bit more boiderplate
175.
by boricj 2y ago
It's definitively different than Frunk, the library is not a general-purpose functional toolkit. One could certainly implement it with Zig's compile-time reflection with ease (don't know much about D). Actually, it's sup
176.
by boricj 2y ago
I'm working on a C++ library at work that lets you define a data model (a tree of objects, arrays and values) and run visitors through it. The data model is both effectively a JSON schema in source code form and a binding to the underl
177.
by boricj 2y ago
It boils down to a pet peeve of mine that requires more context. A former sysadmin job gave me a deep disdain for 40mm fans and modern 1U/2U off-the-shelf AC powered servers. It's a technological dead-end that is a legacy of old d
178.
by boricj 2y ago
Originally, the homelab was supposed to be located inside a 6U, 30cm deep, encased 19" rack. That would fit flush and very snugly just below my encased electrical panel, located right at the entrance inside my apartment. That makes noi
179.
by boricj 2y ago
If that was available when I started to build my homelab server, I'd have bought it. My requirements were a low-power but modern and punchy mini-ITX board with an AMD processor in a very compact build with a 48v DC power supply and Sma
180.
by boricj 2y ago
It wouldn't be fun if Honest Achmed’s Used Cars and Certificates didn't also issue EV and OV certificates. It wouldn't be on brand to miss out on entire segments of the certificate market.

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