I created an open-source Hardware Hacking Wiki – with tutorials for beginners
79 comments
·January 12, 2025spidersouris
raywu
Case in point, under Case Study > Reconnaissance > OSINT, these two paragraphs follow one another - same content but different wording.
> The first step in any hardware hacking project is research. I started by Googling the router model number, "ASUS RT-N12 D1", and came across an article about a similar model, the ASUS RT-N12+ B1. The article mentioned that the device had an open UART interface allowing unauthenticated root access. However, it provided no exact details on how to exploit this or where the UART interface might be located. Could my router model have the same vulnerability?
> In the first step I googled the model number for my router "ASUS RT N12 D1" and I came accross this article. It shows that a similar model the "ASUS RT N12+ B1" appears to have an open UART interface, which gives unauthenticated root access. It does not show how to exacltly abuse this or any details where to find the UART interface. Let's see if our router model may have the same vulnerability!
Joel_Mckay
Get a ham radio technician license, and you may develop an intuitive perspective on most electrical engineering concepts.
i.e. the physics lab derivation of the core EE tool set is unnecessary if you understand what the models are describing.
AI is slop in and slop out... and dangerous to students... =3
John Shive's Wave Machines is where every student should start:
TeMPOraL
> Get a ham radio technician license, and you may develop an intuitive perspective on most electrical engineering concepts.
May. I managed to get one without developing much intuition for most EE concepts, unfortunately.
Joel_Mckay
Did you mean you don't understand the equations/theory, or are having difficulty applying the concepts to design circuits?
In the first case, install LTSpice (free from Analog Devices), and head here to run down the basics:
https://www.youtube.com/@FesZElectronics/videos
And in the latter, go though common basic designs analyzing how they work:
https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofelectroniccircuits...
https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofel02graf
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780070110779
https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofel0006graf
Then try your own designs combining properties of several designs. Start with simple blinkers and buzzers at first... Try to avoid Arduino designs until you've done a few 555, transistor, and opamp circuits first. =3
CamperBob2
dangerous to students
It's fatally dangerous to students who ignore it or dismiss it out of hand. That much is already certain.
Joel_Mckay
How so?
null
Fokamul
Omg, wiki is recommending "Bus Pirate", this HW is many years old and basically abandoned project. Use something up-to-date, like Tigard and BitMagic.
abetusk
Unfortunately not Open Source, in the common definition of the word.
From the license.md [0] page, under "Terms":
> Exemptions: Commercial Use: For inquiries regarding commercial use, please contact the author.
[0] https://github.com/f3nter/HardBreak/blob/fd3d2d4cd17624a3f62...
CaptainFever
Thanks for your work in pointing this out! Like a trademark, we have to defend this term if we want its meaning to persist.
I don't have specific sources, but to those curious, the gist is this: open source, or more accurately free software or free culture, is not about the creator. It is about affirming the rights of the user, to use the work in any way they wish, which includes selling it.
A common phrase to correct this unfortunate misconception is "free as in speech, not as in beer". The price tag is not the issue (you can actually sell free work, like by commission or by phsyical copies), the freedom of the user is. This includes the freedom to reuse the content in a commercial manner. Just about the only freedom that may be restricted is the freedom to restrict others.
You may disagree with this, but this is just the history of the free software, free culture and open source movement, which built a significant portion of the software world we have today.
hw-f3nter
I just don't want anyone to copy the content and sell it. It's meant to be freely accessible to everyone.
nerdile
That's fine. It's just not open source. Don't call it open source if it's not.
Definition: https://opensource.org/osd
SomeoneOnTheWeb
Not everyone agrees with this definition. If the source is open to read, for me it's open source. The website you linked is an opinionated view on what open source is.
Llamanator3830
This reminds me of the discussion of whether if open source AI models are open source or not, when the training data is not available to the public.
megous
I mean this lists MIT license as opensource license, when it's clearly not, because it doesn't at all mention source code. The license just talks about "software".
Anyone is free to publish only binaries+docs under this license, if they wish.
So the website is not very accurate.
byteknight
[flagged]
38
that definition is wrong, really by just common sense
themaninthedark
>Free and open-source software (FOSS) or free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS) is openly shared source code that is licensed without any restrictions on usage, modification, or distribution. Confusion persists about this definition because the "free", also known as "libre", refers to the freedom of the product, not the price, expense, cost, or charge. For example, "being free to speak" is not the same as "free beer".
I generally think of open source as where I can see the code and freely modify it, not necessarily freely commercialize it on my own.
ajot
Have you thought of a Creative Commons license? You can have a Non-Commercial clause, while letting others to cooperate with you and remix the information in your site. CC licenses are IMHO better suited for documents than things like GPL, BSD or MIT.
snvzz
Note that the CC -ND licenses are not Open Source either.
null
38
wrong. your definition essentially means "business friendly", the wiki is open source in every way that matters, except for "lets make money off this persons free work"
hi_hi
This is great timing. I recently purchased a micro:bit for learning with my young daughter (who loves it) and found I was very quickly out of my depth with even the most rudimentary customisation for the board.
My draws have now exploded with breadboards, alligator clips, jump wires, LCDs and various other electrical components and I'm in desperate need of understanding the fundamentals of how all these things work.
There's something magical and addictive about being able to control your own hardware components from your own code though. We've had great joy from simply lighting up LEDs and programming our IR receiver.
petabyt
Shameless plug: For anybody wanting to get into rockchip SoC development I've created a (no AI) resource: https://danielc.dev/rk/
polalavik
This is rad! I’ll throw this in my embedded resources round up [1]
findyourexit
Whoa! Very much appreciated!
Fantastic round-up with loads of useful inclusions. Thanks for sharing!
HeartofCPU
I love it so much. I always wanted to get started with hardware hacking , and this is the right place to start !
JoeDaDude
Nice! Hopefully it will grow to include circuit bending [1] techniques, those typically used for altering music machines and similar.
amatecha
A minor nitpick, but it would be great if you put a description of the site in the meta/og description[0] so people get an explanation of what the site is when linking elsewhere, e.g. the same "This page is a free and open-source wiki about hardware hacking!" as is on the page itself. I just linked the site in Slack and it just says "hardbreak.wiki / Welcome to HardBreak | Hardbreak" which is pretty terse. I imagine there might be some setting in your wiki software that might populate these tags automatically (moreso than they already have), with any luck!
[0] https://ogp.me/
hw-f3nter
You are right! I encountered the same problem. Unfortunately, I didn't find a setting in Gitbook to change the preview text, just the preview image. It seems like it just takes the name of the first page 'Welcome to HardBreak' and adds the site name 'HardBreak' at the end. So I'd have to change the name of the first page, but a name like 'HardBreak - a Hardware Hacking Wiki' or something similar would look weird on the website, I think. I haven't found a good solution for that yet.
sen
I think having it in the homepage title is fine. I do it for most sites I build for exactly this reason.
“HardBreak - Open-Source Hardware Hacking Wiki”
Looks fine as a title, and helps for embeds/sharing.
theyknowitsxmas
AI gen hogwash
Head to your local public library and pick any book pre 2020
david_shaw
This is great.
I've always been on the application security side of things, but I'm increasingly interested in hardware hacking. Through some cursory research, I learned that there are a few scattered resources, but the best way to learn is to really work with someone who knows what they're doing.
Putting all these guides, roadmaps, etc. together in a single place is a great resource that I'll definitely use.
Thank you!
Over2Chars
The wiki is free and open-source? Or the contents of the wiki are free and open-source?
If it's a wiki, it would be less than courteous to restrictively copyright public contributions (but I'm sure it's been done).
And presumably, paywalling it would reduce contributions.
My impression as to the number one barrier to hardware modifications is soldering. For some reason people can't or won't do it.
So I'd like to introduce the non-sponsor for this comment, "Pincel" the open firmware soldering iron
https://pine64.org/devices/pinecil/
It's running a risc-v chip on open firmware so you'll have cool points with when you whip it out at Richard Stallman's next BBQ.
Thanks for the wiki -- I have always been interested in hardware hacking but I have always felt overwhelmed as I didn't know where to start. I believe this kind of resource can greatly help with that, especially the case studies.
However, I can't help but feel that a major part of the content is LLM-generated, or at least LLM-rewritten. It feels off and uninteresting to read, honestly. Is it the case? To support my case, I see that the case study page (https://www.hardbreak.wiki/introduction/case-study-led-to-a-...) has very similar paragraphs next to each other, the second one seemingly being the "genuine" one, and the first one being the LLM-rewritten version.
I'm not against using LLMs to help fix typos or reformulate things, but you should definitely keep some of your style. The LLM that you used (if you used one) made the content super bland, and as a reader, I'm not really incentivized to browse more.