Hacking a Knockoff Google Chromecast

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Hacking a Knockoff Google Chromecast - Firmware Extraction

Рет қаралды 98,196

Ай бұрын

In this video, I extract the firmware from a Chinese Google Chromecast knockoff.
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Пікірлер: 225

@Mr._Mythical Ай бұрын

I wish these videos were longer, i would love to sit here and listen for hours to you rambling about the innerworkings of a device nobody has ever heard of

@doubled8511 Ай бұрын

I love your videos man but they are just too damn short! I would happily sit here listening for a few hours whilst you ramble on figuring out how to extract the firmware.

@kennwood 26 күн бұрын

Haha I was just thinking the same thing

@Icemourne_ Ай бұрын

14:47 At the bottom it says LZMA compressed data

@4megii Ай бұрын

Glad I'm not the only one to see this. Rootfs is probably compressed within LZMA and then uncompressed and mounted via the bootloader.

@RetroDelete Ай бұрын

I was just about to comment this, seems like it will be fairly easy to get access to the rootfs. +1

@monad_tcp Ай бұрын

cliffhanger !

@guiorgy Ай бұрын

Towards the end of the video I could swear I had seen "lzma" somewhere, went back to strings and watched closely while pausing, thought I was going crazy 😂

@pete3897 Ай бұрын

It's only 8MB though - the 980MB partition a couple above it will be the interesting one I would think...

@M0UAW_IO83 Ай бұрын

16:58, there's reference to SC16550UART so there's good possibility of a UART output somewhere on that board for the bootloader

@bnister Ай бұрын

Yep indeed, it's pin 99 on the SoC muxed to UART2_TX quite early on. It's supposed to be pulled up externally + there are some suspicious test points at the other side, but, generally speaking, manufacturers rarely care enough to break this one out in any convenient way

@qwertykeyboard5901 Ай бұрын

Might be on the usb port. Sometimes they do that.

@martontichi8611 Ай бұрын

binwalker said on the bottom that there's LZMA compressed data. Uncompressed size is 7M! probably squashfs!

@dazealex Ай бұрын

Also saw in the string something about unzip length.

@dieSpinnt Ай бұрын

Great work and thanks for sharing, Matt:) Side-note, Tip, Womansplaining: Calipers 4TheWin! So you can measure the dimensions of the package. Works when soldered in and after some time you memorize the dimensions of TSSOP/SSOP/SOP/etc anyways. "To measure is to know!" And as a poor-(wo)men's-alternative: Print out a sheet with the whole zoo of electronics packages in the scale of 1:1

@KallePihlajasaari 27 күн бұрын

Do you have a link to a sheet that you can link to for us other newbies?

@unh0lyav3ng3r8 16 күн бұрын

@@KallePihlajasaari i got an actual ruler with different package sizes on it..

@sjoervanderploeg4340 Ай бұрын

@17:23 it clearly says HDCP :D "HDCP stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. The purpose of HDCP is to protect digital copyrighted content as it travels from a device to your TV, usually through an HDMI, DVI or DisplayPort connection." You might be able to interface that programmer with flashrom, I'm not sure if it is but it should be possible to implement! I own a "Willem EPROM Programmer", it also supports SPI flash memory like these but these days I generally use a very cheap ch341a_spi USB device.

Ай бұрын

There's seem to be a compressed LZMA region, i'm pretty sure it's what you seen as high entropy, i'd bet it's the compressed rootfs mounted by the bootloader. Many times the MAC address is the one injected for the Wifi, as those modules don't have any hardcoded, Really interested to see your deep dive analysis. I'll join your discord, hopefully i can find the dump and analyze it myself also. I'd buy one of these if these if there's the possibility of a custom Firmware.

@4megii Ай бұрын

I think you're spot on about LZMA being the rootfs and that it's uncompressed and then mounted by the bootloader.

@allwitchesdance Ай бұрын

I bet it's going to be a kernel with the built in rootfs. No reason for these little gadgets to pivot root to a real file system

@309electronics5 Ай бұрын

@@allwitchesdancei had a miracast device that had a full rootfs and a kernel. It even had a recovery kernel. Mine used a Actions semiconductor SOC

@bnister Ай бұрын

Yeah a custom one is possible, but I bet you won't like the only FreeRTOS-based SDK available

@tweebs1 Ай бұрын

I really enjoy seeing how you methodically figure out how things tic and then bypass the security like its not even there. Firmware should be open, so we may use hardware as we see fit.

@TheWarhoop Ай бұрын

Watching SMD's getting soldered onto PCB's is so satisfying... don't judge, I'm just saying what everyone's thinking. BTW, @Matt Brown, I switched to those little foam tipped eye makeup brushes which really elevated my flux clean up game over the Q tips, give 'em shot.

@mattbrwn Ай бұрын

I'll have to try that. Getting those Qtip hairs everywhere is annoying

@jamesdim Ай бұрын

My new favorite tech channel! Can't wait for the next hack adventure!

@saschaschnuppe3409 Ай бұрын

What exactly did he hack?

@Z-Ack Ай бұрын

I like how you spend way too much time going over all the laymen stuff like how to solder then jump through all the coding log processes and writing…lol

@samuraidriver4x4 Ай бұрын

The silkscreen of footprint on the board is a bit akward due to it being a fairly universal footprint. I do agree with you about the lead free solder, its definitely leaded solder seeing how easy it melted. No issues with using leaded solder in in China.

@functiontek Ай бұрын

Don't know if someone already mentioned it, but I would bet that key you saw mentioned at the start is unrelated to the encryption. It has "HDCP" in it, which would make more sense to be HDMI Content Protection instead.

@tal1296 Ай бұрын

Love your videos,I saw in strings HDCP which is hdmi copyright protection

@quetzalcoatl-pl Ай бұрын

16:20 'anonymous' and '88888888' sounds like a default user-password pair, 8x 8 being the password, IIRC the '8' is a lucky number in china, so eight 8x would be sth like seven 7s in US.

@TerrisLeonis Ай бұрын

"anonymous" as the username makes me think of FTP.

@OsX86H3AvY 5 күн бұрын

just came to say the same thing - thats exactly what it is

@CosmicMyst Ай бұрын

I think I ventured into the fun side of KZfaq

@compucar03 9 күн бұрын

I really want to see the next one! Disagree with some of the comments about your video being too short. It is just long enough so that I watch the whole thing and it leave me wanting next weeks episode! It is too short but that’s a good thing, in a way.

@meowyahh Ай бұрын

Really good work, youtube's algorithm brought me here!

@mikehensley78 Ай бұрын

same. a few weeks ago a Matt Brown video was in my recommended vids. i been subbed/watching ever since.

@ChrisMIA Ай бұрын

great stuff bro! been so much into software have been slacking on the hardware firmware side of things, good to have this under my belt especially with todays supply chain being chip tainted

@qweriop Ай бұрын

Thank you youtube for showing me this channel! I love this kind of electronics hacking!

@JerryThings Ай бұрын

I love this kind of videos where you showcase your adventure! Hope to see some in depth analysis in the future regarding the fw :D ty Matt

@SailAway33 Ай бұрын

Thanks Matt for your great video. I love to see how you can pull these out and get the information from it.

@bnister Ай бұрын

You've got a fairly standard ALi Tech sat receiver dump :-) These run off a proprietary TDS2 RTOS. The HCSEMI clone chips have a FreeRTOS SDK available, but it's not as stable tbh

@revancedsubsfuckgimp Ай бұрын

And here I was wondering why the NCRC string seemed so familiar.... likely MIPS based as well

@antivaxxtoaster8919 Ай бұрын

Another banger as per usual

@Fatpumpumlovah2 Ай бұрын

Really? What did you learn? Nothing but more propraganda, every device you own is made by chinese/taiwanese companies. America makes nothing and tbis guy has no clue

@mmkf Ай бұрын

I wonder if the filesystem is compressed in a non-standard way.

@saad1983 Ай бұрын

@Matt Brown good sir. you are on fire lately. another awesome video.

@adagioleopard6415 Ай бұрын

They put two footprints on top of one another so if the wide version of the chip is unavailable they can use a regular soic8. We did the same but we at least made a package with nice looking silk so it didn't look so crap

@aldythsatya601 26 күн бұрын

Glad to see this video, I don't understand the KZfaq algorithm but videos like this don't show up when I search for them, but they magically appear on the homepage 🗿. And I have 4 devices like that that can't connect even though they have been reset

@-r-495 Ай бұрын

using possibly compromised sw to dump a knockoff product. like it! 😏

@pap3rw8 Ай бұрын

I would guess it's compressed based on the output of strings including "unzip" but it's possible there's also some encryption of the bootloader or whatever.

@user-wy6iy7ij1z Ай бұрын

It is like reading and flashing a motherboard BIOS chip, I did it many times, but after this, I didn't understand anything anymore, but this is really cool.

@riccardopolelli1825 Ай бұрын

Cannot wait for part two

@allwitchesdance Ай бұрын

The two lzma blobs are probably the kernel and initramfs

@bnister Ай бұрын

One's the kernel, and another (usually) the localization data. This thingie doesn't need any fs at all

@davidezequielborges392 Ай бұрын

to clean stuff you can use an old toothbrush instead of qtips so it doesnt left off any fibers, at least to remove the most of flux witout much hussle.

@samuie2 Ай бұрын

There were multiple strings that referred LZMA and unzip "main code". I think that the code is just compressed, and the key if for hdmi drm not the firmware.

@rbmwiv 19 күн бұрын

Great video I just subscribed. I really enjoyed the one shot approach. Nice job. I am fixing to check out the second part!

@wasabinow Ай бұрын

Cool stuff! Thank you for sharing your electronic adventures!

@poweron3654 Ай бұрын

17:18, NCRCHDCPKey refers to HDCP, or high-bandwidth digital content protection, it is not an encryption key for the firmware

@OsX86H3AvY 5 күн бұрын

and CRC is just cyclic redundancy check used all over to ensure data integrity I believe....so baciasll the string after that is just the HDCP key needed to get around content protection - I mean not get around it but actually use it properly

@gamerriasaat6622 Ай бұрын

How about modding a xiaomi 4c router (which is really cheap) to port usb(it has two open data pins) and openwrt (just enable ohci and ehci in kernel while complling) and then make a wifi pineapple(decompile pineapple rom and port using overlay) bcz they both use mips24kc :) then tada 15$ pineapple 🍍 btw it has better specs then original pineapple...

@gamerriasaat6622 Ай бұрын

I can't try this bcz of my upcoming entrance exam for varsity...

@OsX86H3AvY 5 күн бұрын

i have the xiaomi 4A gigabit and its super easy to openwrt, don't need to open it can do it just by firmware upgrade, and YES please someone make a pineapple out of it, I got part way there and had to move on to other things but I still have it and WISH someone would make it a package!!!

@Roadbobek 15 күн бұрын

I have no idea what’s going on but I watched the whole thing

@fronbasal Ай бұрын

Matt this was absolutely fantastic. Thanks for sharing!

@hafiz468 Ай бұрын

8:16 What the FLUX is going on here ?! 😂

@roelbrook7559 Ай бұрын

You've got LZMA compressed data there. That might explain the entropy results you're seeing.

@Sonny482 Ай бұрын

Great job! Which microscope / camera do you use?

@toxicpsion Ай бұрын

that entropy spike is totally compression; probably a ramfs of some kind, looks like it showed up at the bottom of binwalk.

@paerrin1 Ай бұрын

Another great video! Keep them coming!

@ratkaelzey 27 күн бұрын

kay, I’ve always scratched my head about the obsession around the kislux book totes and their practicality, but this one is adorable!! Congratulations

@RemovedBrain 9 күн бұрын

Nice. One thing - that SW you are using, it is not (only) Chinese crap, it is standard crap. Those ergonomy-hells are created mostly by HW engineers who's simply doesn't understand how (and why) to make user friendly GUI. :)

@adamkavala 23 күн бұрын

Good job, looking foward to see more progress.

@n2cthe1 Ай бұрын

love your videos, i also think there too short... i enjoy complete and in-depth look into IoT

@wlloxik 26 күн бұрын

this is the perfect video to listen to in the background lmao

@pamelax64 Ай бұрын

Let's wait for the next video about it,interested!

@videshx818 Ай бұрын

Nice soldering skills, I have one of this device in which the micro USB is detached. I am yet to solder

@UndeadAlex Ай бұрын

Loved this man awesome work!

@rrrlasse2 10 күн бұрын

I think if it's encrypted, entropy is almost exactly 1. If it's compressed it might be slightly lower

@raraujo4951 Ай бұрын

Great video Matt,!!!

@revancedsubsfuckgimp Ай бұрын

Great video! Instructions (sequences of 4 bytes that end with a 0x3x byte) kinda remind me of little endian MIPS (similar to how ARM instructions can be identified by the 0xEx bytes)

@mikesyr Ай бұрын

Hi Matt, do they make clips for SOP8s that size? Seems like that would be quicker than desoldering that chip, then again it came off with no issue. :)

@309electronics5 Ай бұрын

Sadly often when you put the clip on it powers the flash but also the soc/cpu its connected to which then tries to read from it and messes up the firmware read

@bnister Ай бұрын

Yeah this exact platform has no trouble being dumped via the cheap ass clip usually shipped with CH341A kit. The LZMA packed firmware gets extracted to the RAM, and the SPI chip gets almost no accesses at all

@nohaynoticias 29 күн бұрын

"the logo for the company that makes this device" SHERLOCK!

@TheGreendabomb 7 күн бұрын

You said you didn't open it.. then you said you opened it.. 😂

@richiebricker Ай бұрын

very cool stuff. I look forward to learning from ya

@Ibrahim-rc8sn Ай бұрын

What analyzation software do you use in 18:50 ? I subscribed to your channel , great content

@ilyassamraoui3234 Ай бұрын

That's binwalk program running -E [capital e for Entropy, if -e it will extract firmware "structure" I guess ]....

@markmuir7338 Ай бұрын

China is taking a big risk having most of their systems run a proprietary OS made by an American company. Hard to change that though, given the cultural attachment to Windows - shown by most Chinese software only being available on that OS.

@Tim_Small Ай бұрын

They're fine, they've got the source code...

@AymanAlhkeemi Ай бұрын

Please make a video on how to rebuild the firmware and calculate the checksum

@Neolith100 Ай бұрын

If the XGecu Pro software is windows, how do you run it in linux? Are you using WINE or Bottles... I am incredibly curious?

@mattbrwn Ай бұрын

Wine

@phuo2185 28 күн бұрын

can you make a video on synology TC500

@tomteiter7192 13 күн бұрын

I think the XGecu Software isn't that bad, it's rather barebones and packs a shtload of functions in a no-frills kind of way. To be honest it kinda feels like someones project rather than a productof a big evil chinese spyware flinging knockoff company.... A Linux Version and an API to add new programming algorithms and chips would be banger, though.

@mattbrwn 13 күн бұрын

Totally agree. As much as I complain about XGecu it's the best thing we've got.

@tomteiter7192 12 күн бұрын

@@mattbrwn I still remember my utter disbelief when I first saw the older version popping up, together with a boatload of zif adapter sockets, for a total price of less than one tenth of what a single tsop adapter for a "respectable" programmer cost.

@UndernetSystems Ай бұрын

The good thing about dumping the firmware is that you can just buy another flash chip and reflash it if it breaks.

@bnister Ай бұрын

Not unless the firmware ties itself to the flash Unique ID, and Chinese-sourced thingies usually DO... as a form of copycat protection

@adnanalam6201 Ай бұрын

Dude I've the same thing 😅 gotta follow this guy now

@matheuscezar6309 Ай бұрын

Nice! I'm curious to discover how to decompress/decrypt those data!

@bnister Ай бұрын

Bog standard LZMA. binwalk -e handles it well, but any unlzma tool will suffice. An RTOS2 SDK seems to come with the unmodified LZMA build from Igor Pavlov, too

@kikihun9726 Ай бұрын

It had a hdcp string above so that encrypted data propably contains hdmi hdcp handshake key too.

@user-ff5yb9hh6c Ай бұрын

I used bug prove for complication software.İt's can't decyrpt firmware if it's encyrpted but if it's uncrypted bugprove can good job and you can detect old binarys,vulnarabilities etc.

@jonathanzimmer8143 Ай бұрын

Great video this was fun! Please do something on a Vortex phone, Oxtab tablet or other freeware. TV devices are big duh, I have an M-95 4k box that was immediate full throttle/unresponsive... turns out they're pretty much all spyware. Tried to hack my google acct from Shenzen. Oops. But devices handed out to the elderly etc are no longer motorola or lg, but chinese companies with knock off Galaxy designs and questionable Android builds.

@surewill8190 Ай бұрын

always interesting to watch

@arashgudarzi2623 Ай бұрын

hey Matt, I like you videos and watched many of them. I am a student who loves hardware hacking. I started electronics basics and Arduino to kinda get familiar with the hardware stuff. do you have any roadmaps to be successful in this field of job ?

@Holycurative9610 Ай бұрын

The anycast logo looks like it was stolen from Paul Daniels of Apple fixing fame...

@georgeyreynolds 12 күн бұрын

A lot of these devices have malware on them which lies dormant. If it turns out to be android etc , mainly the Android TV types.

@frtls Ай бұрын

Are these not cracking videos?

@tomu1337 Ай бұрын

Another great video!

@jheimissantos8682 Ай бұрын

Nice video, Matt! Tks for share your knowledge! It's possible extracting the firmware via software? connecting via terminal (adb) and copy some partitions? sometimes i have dificult to consider what is the firmware, e.g all image firmware or only bootloader firmware.

@309electronics5 Ай бұрын

Adb is android only. If a device runs Uboot as bootloader you can interrupt the boot process and dump the flash.

@bnister Ай бұрын

@@309electronics5 This one doesn't, everything is proprietary. Doesn't like to respond over USB, as well. There's usually some form of OTA on these, though, but dumping is tough

@AppliedCryogenics 23 күн бұрын

Even if it's just video playback + TCP/IP stack + some RTOS, 4MB compressed seems wayyy too small to be the whole firmware.

@hafo821 Ай бұрын

it´s not a SPY flash it´s SPI flash! 🤣😁

@mattbrwn Ай бұрын

I also say Sequel instead of SQL... 😂

@309electronics5 Ай бұрын

I actually had an miracast device which looked and worked simmilar to this. Just that it had an actions semiconductor soc and had 2 uarts onboard and i got a shell. Its funny to me how these chinese manufacturers manage to put Linux on everything (Shows how great Linux really is) but wont comply (at least my device type) with the GPL. Sadly yours might be running some custom os or a RTOS. Or its a weirdly formatted Unix os but thats unlikely. It might be encrypted and that the bootloader decrypts it and mounts the os

@bnister Ай бұрын

Nooope no Linux this time around, with no way to run one, to boot

@user-vg4io9sl9g Ай бұрын

The problem of Chromecast devices is too small internal storage, and i am curious can you replace the original with a bigger one?

@VulcanOnWheels 18 күн бұрын

1:01 You say, "*to* your TV", but I read "*on* your TV". Why do you keep hitting the Return key so often?

@andreamitchell4758 Ай бұрын

Can you extract FW from a twinkly ARGB LED controller next

@MotSter Ай бұрын

does it not work out of the box? Is there a further use goal to add to it or is this just pull the firmware cause you can as title kind of obviously states?

@duefourbail 28 күн бұрын

what terminal ui is that when you check through the device i’m trying to learn more about the software you use

@MrL22 Ай бұрын

14:46 LZMA compressed block hinting at 7.8mb of uncompressed data.

@Cotten- Ай бұрын

What's up bro. I have a LG Stylo 6 that I'm trying to unlock the bootloader on. I can't get mtk client to recognize the device and I learned that someone else got theirs to become recognized by taking apart the phone and using a jumper wire on the board. Do you think that you could just Google a picture of the board and tell me which pins the jumper wire needs to touch for this process. If I blow my device up then I know that that's my problem. I trust your expertise which is why I'm asking you. Thanks for the videos either way I really appreciate them.

@SolveElectronics 20 күн бұрын

HDCP is for video decoding HD streams

@gatitomono47f77 27 күн бұрын

Hello I wonder I've seen that theres also clips for Ic's like the one you desoldered like would It have been easier to Connect with a clip to the reader or am I missing slmething

@mattbrwn 27 күн бұрын

I have clips to do that but I prefer to take the chip off

@VSteam81 Ай бұрын

Just curious, what linux distro and DE/WM do you use?

@mattbrwn Ай бұрын

Arch Linux and i3wm

@VSteam81 Ай бұрын

@@mattbrwn Holy shit that was fast. Nice! I've used i3 and its really cool to have something that is so configurable.

@skeffers1988 Ай бұрын

I have tryed to hack the m5 displays / ebike controller . I cant get the firmware extracted from this device over uart . I have 2 uart connections on this board this m5 display comes with the nuvoton MS51FCOAE whitch has more uart connections on it .

@aure_eti Ай бұрын

When dealing with sticky stuff like flux or glue, i deal with it with brake cleaner. You could maybe do the same thing with alcohol. Diagram migh tbe poorly drawn but if it were aligned with chip pin 1 indicator would probably end up underneath solder pads

@M4XD4B0ZZ Ай бұрын

99% isopropanol for flux. Not sure about glue tho

@richardred15 Ай бұрын

Please don't use brake cleaner for this...

@aure_eti Ай бұрын

@@richardred15 is it dangerous with flux? Like more dangerous that it is normaly?

@richardred15 Ай бұрын

@@aure_eti It's bad for you, the environment and most materials