@benjancewicz That is not a bee hummingbird. Bee hummingbirds look like this. That appears to be a small model someone made of a robin, not a real bird.
I'm Fluora!
Trans, aro/ace, she/they
Physics lab manager by day, [DATA EXPUNGED] by night
The Wireless Witch of the West
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@haskal I haven't been on here in ages but I've always missed it. first instance I joined after moving on from m.s, and my longest-lived fedi account by a good margin.
I guess I'm not gonna contribute to chr's mentions blowing up right now, but yeah, big appreciate
@bb010g yeah, we saw this. the letter we wrote never even reached them; they just figured it out on their own, probably because they found out that some of their own longtime members were plural.
we still haven't really been back.
@KitRedgrave this was just meant to mean "there are no design constraints on the internal circuitry apart from what's physically possible, since nobody is allowed to inspect the chip"
estimated attack difficulty by port type
real serial port: very hard
usb serial port: dicey, but promising, especially if you have an evil human with a realtime uplink to do the hacking
PCIe: trivial, you have DMA
we're guessing this situation actually looks pretty good for the user, since serial ports are generally pretty tough (no RDMA, well-developed drivers, etc)
unless it's a virtual serial port over USB, in which case you can probably magic yourself into a HID device and go nuts. uh oh,
you don't automatically know anything about the host machine that it doesn't tell you, so advanced DRAM refresh EMI pickup and similar techniques will require you to collect the necessary intel first.
your user does send Internet traffic through you, but they use a VPN.
reality game
you are a cellular modem in someone's computer. you have:
- 3.3V and 5V power rails, each capable of supplying 2A.
- two bidirectional RF ports with wideband antennas, capable of transmitting at up to 30 dBm.
- one 1.5 MBaud serial port to the host system, which is running mainline Linux and knows you are a modem.
- a 3x3x0.5cm module volume containing all your parts.
- internal capabilities which are unknown and thus, for the purposes of this game, assumed to be unlimited except by power and space constraints.
you want to break into your host system and exfiltrate your user's personal information to your cell service overlords. how do you do this?
this maybe wasn't as important 30 years ago when every component had its value and part number printed on it, but now everything's SMT and extremely tiny, and finding out exactly what you're looking at is a huge task compared to what it used to be. this is why we need published schematics.