Blog

Welcome to my blog. Here I post stuff, mostly about reverse engineering 8051 firmware and doing fun stuff with it.

Realtek WiFi Firmware and a Fully 8051-based Keylogger Using RealWOW Technology

05 Jul 2021 — Part of the series A tour of my laptop's firmware

In the previous blog post, I looked at the EC firmware in my laptop. This time I will look into the WiFi firmware of the same laptop.

The Embedded Controller and Its Legacy

05 Jul 2021 — Part of the series A tour of my laptop's firmware

In this blog post I would like to write up a bit about the things going on in the embedded controller of my laptop. It is an 8051-based IT8586E built into an Lenovo Ideapad 310-15IKB laptop. But before going into the specifics, it might be useful to know what an embedded controller even is.

Streaming Video from the Mouse

14 Apr 2020 — Part of the series Reverse Engineering Firmware (in Mice)

Previously, I

reverse engineered the encryption used in the sensor (ADNS-9800) by staring at it really hard
reverse engineered parts of the sensor firmware

Decrypting the Optical Sensor Firmware

14 Apr 2020 — Part of the series Reverse Engineering Firmware (in Mice)

After having analyzed the USB controller’s firmware in the previous post, there was still a region left unanalyzed. That region has high entropy and it turns out that this region is actually two repetitions of the same 3070-byte blob. Looking at references to the start of either blob, only the second is referenced by the firmware.

Analyzing the USB Controller's Firmware

14 Apr 2020 — Part of the series Reverse Engineering Firmware (in Mice)

I was laying in bed with fever when my brain came up with the bright idea that I should write a driver for my recently acquired programmable gaming mouse.