In 1981, IBM released the Personal Computer, model number 5150. Unlike IBM designs of the era, it was based on off-the-shelf components. While this meant that it was relatively cheap to manufacture, it also meant that anyone could manufacture a clone board because all components were readily available in the open market. However, the only […]
CMI 6426 Reverse-engineering (Part 1)
USB to Serial adaptor
Ever since I’ve been tinkering with embedded and industrial systems, I’ve needed a way to interface with different types of serial connections. These include RS-232, RS-485, RS-422, digital current loop and TTL serial (5V and 3.3V). For the purposes of this article we’ll ignore digital current loop as it’s a niche media that doesn’t have […]
Secure Boot – Protecting against pre-boot attacks
Running only trusted code on any computer is an obviously important feature from a security perspective (not such much from a freedom point of view, but that’s another discussion), but for whatever reason people tend to think of this starting with the operating system. Of course having a secure operating system is a key part […]