Gianluca Pacchiella (Posts about WIP)

Visual complex analysis: first chapter exercises

Gianluca Pacchiella — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 10:21:08 GMT

"Visual complex analysis" it's a very good book, with really good exercises.

Reusing old shit: laptop keyboard

Gianluca Pacchiella — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Here we are with another experiment in reusing otherwise trash-destined electronics material; in this episode we are going to refurbish a keyboard, from the recovering of the internal "matrix" to the design of the PCB destined as the controller board, to finally reworking of an existing firmware to create a new USB keyboard.

Reusing old shit: creating a BSP using Yocto for the Samsung Galaxy S (S5PV210)

Gianluca Pacchiella — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

In this post I'll describe my esperiments in reusing my old Samsung Galaxy S; don't expected anything sophisticated, it's more a brain dump.

Reusing old shit: lcd screen

Gianluca Pacchiella — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

It's happened in the past that someone gifted me of very old (and not working anymore) laptops that otherwise would have been thrown in the garbage; my idea for them was of reusing some parts that are more valuable: battery, disks, keyboards, etc...

Modern cryptography: exercises chapter 3 'Private-key encryption'

Gianluca Pacchiella — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

These are some solved exercises of chapter 3 of the book "Introduction to modern cryptography" (second edition) by Jonathan Katz and Yehuda Lindell. For chapter 2 go here.

Notes on JavaScriptCore

Gianluca Pacchiella — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

In this post I want to add some pratical notes (and maybe a new tool) to the paper from saelo about exploiting modern browsers; in particular I'll focus on Webkit and as in his paper, I'll deep dive into the source code of that version of webkit.

Reversing the USB update process of a device

Gianluca Pacchiella — Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I'm again at it: I have a device that I want to know how it works and I started to reverse it, this time without any particular reason if not curiosity.

What I couldn't know was that I was entering a rabbit hole of biblic proportion and this post is only the tip of the iceberg.

In this post I want to describe without any particular order, how to reverse a C++ application and the USB protocol that it uses to update the firmware on the device. I don't think this will be useful to anyone, let me know in case it has changed your life :)

Build embedded systems with buildroot

Gianluca Pacchiella — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Buildroot is an integration system used to obtain complete bootable embedded systems; it uses a KConfig configuration mechanism (the menuconfig thing).

Tips and tricks in debugging kernel drivers in Linux

Gianluca Pacchiella — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This post includes a couple of notes about linux kernel debugging, in particular the things that I keep forgetting.

ELF file format and a pratical study of the execution view

Gianluca Pacchiella — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

In the post about pratical approach to binary exploitation I talked of how an executable is a memory archive describing a (future) running process. In this post I want to study how this memory archive is loaded in memory in a Linux system, in particular my interest will be directed upon the most used format in *nix system, i.e. the Executable and linkage format (ELF); for other systems, different formats are used: for example the Mac OS X uses the Mach format and the Windows OS uses the PE format. It's reasonable to say that each platform has its own format, and it's the main reason of compatibility issue in running binaries between different operating systems.