Hacking a Knockoff Google Chromecast - Firmware Extraction

[@Mr._Mythical]

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

[@Icemourne_]

14:47 At the bottom it says LZMA compressed data

[@4megii]

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]

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

[@monad_tcp]

cliffhanger !

[@guiorgy]

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]

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

[@martontichi8611]

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

[@dazealex]

Also saw in the string something about unzip length.

[@tweebs1]

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.

[@M0UAW_IO83]

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

[@bnister]

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]

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

[@doubled8511]

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]

Haha I was just thinking the same thing

[@PILATESDILEMMA]

Short? Is 25 minutes, a whole episode

[@peckservers]

This!

[@OfflineSetup]

I disagree he could easily cut it down to 5 mins and that includes the intro video.

[@Bill_Bacon]

Lullaby.

[@dieSpinnt]

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]

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

[@unh0lyav3ng3r8]

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

[@TheWarhoop]

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]

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

[@sjoer]

@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.

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]

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

[@allwitchesdance]

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]

​@@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]

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

[@functiontek]

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.

[@samuraidriver4x4]

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.

[@jamesdim]

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

[@saschaschnuppe3409]

What exactly did he hack?

[@compucar03]

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.

[@Z-Ack]

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

[@XenoWiz]

Ive been loving those tuts thanks its hard to get info like this in a video

[@tal1296]

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

[@billf.2960]

is that the program freezing the video on my computer when i open my OBS.. I was doing two different things.. but noticed this freeze.. and that it stopped if the obs was entirely exited and i had to refresh..

[@ChrisMIA]

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

[@meowyahh]

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

[@mikehensley78]

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

[@JerryThings]

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

[@quetzalcoatl-pl]

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]

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

[@OsX86H3AvY]

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

[@nyckid]

Probably a firmware update check

[@davidezequielborges392]

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.

[@mmkf]

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

[@bnister]

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]

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

[@user-wy6iy7ij1z]

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.

[@qweriop]

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

[@saad1983]

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

[@SailAway33]

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

[@mogwopjr]

I like that D+ and D- are easy to trace out. Thanks for showing your process, I just got Xgpro working in anticipation for my T48 to show up tomorrow

[@poweron3654]

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

[@OsX86H3AvY]

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

[@aldythsatya601]

Glad to see this video, I don't understand the KZbin 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

[@pap3rw8]

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.

[@antivaxxtoaster8919]

Another banger as per usual

[@Fatpumpumlovah2]

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

[@rbmwiv]

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

[@adamkavala]

Good job, looking foward to see more progress.

[@adagioleopard6415]

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

[@tomteiter7192]

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]

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

[@tomteiter7192]

@@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.

[@riccardopolelli1825]

Cannot wait for part two

[@samuie2]

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.

[@MystJi]

I think I ventured into the fun side of KZbin

[@toxicpsion]

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

[@raraujo4951]

Great video Matt,!!!

[@Sonny482]

Great job! Which microscope / camera do you use?

[@fronbasal]

Matt this was absolutely fantastic. Thanks for sharing!

[@allwitchesdance]

The two lzma blobs are probably the kernel and initramfs

[@bnister]

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

[@Roadbobek]

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

[@pamelax64]

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

[@markmuir7338]

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]

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

[@paerrin1]

Another great video! Keep them coming!

[@wasabinow]

Cool stuff! Thank you for sharing your electronic adventures!

[@n2cthe1]

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

[@phuo2185]

can you make a video on synology TC500

[@mikesyr]

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]

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]

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

[@rrrlasse2]

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

[@roelbrook7559]

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

[@richiebricker]

very cool stuff. I look forward to learning from ya

[@videshx818]

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

[@UndeadAlex]

Loved this man awesome work!

[@VulcanOnWheels]

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

[@AymanAlhkeemi]

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

[@Ibrahim-rc8sn]

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

[@ilyassamraoui3234]

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

[@kikihun9726]

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

[@hafiz468]

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

[@john_titor1]

What happened to the dynamic analysis vid?

[@nohaynoticias]

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

[@UndernetSystems]

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

[@bnister]

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

[@Neolith100]

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]

Wine

[@ТошоТошо-с4ф]

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

[@frtls]

Are these not cracking videos?

[@gatitomono47f77]

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]

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

[@duefourbail]

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

[@jheimissantos8682]

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]

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

[@bnister]

@@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

[@RemovedBrain]

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. :)

[@Ibrahim-rc8sn]

Where can I find this software you use called Xgpro in 5:00 ?

[@-r-495]

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

[@VSteam81]

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

[@mattbrwn]

Arch Linux and i3wm

[@VSteam81]

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

[@gamerriasaat6622]

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]

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

[@OsX86H3AvY]

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!!!

[@Holycurative9610]

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

[@MotSter]

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?

[@matheuscezar6309]

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

[@bnister]

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

[@md.arifulislamarif8077]

sir Is it possible to read the program of IC provided by pic Microcontroller? Protected ic

[@KallePihlajasaari]

Only if you are very dedicated and some security vulnerability has been discovered. Many times those offering such read out services do not share the vulnerabilities so you may have to spend time looking to find the operation that has the skills to defeat the security on your specific chip. Generally the older the chip the more likely it is that a security bypass exists.

[@kksdls]

Another great video!

[@foufou33g]

the key thinh seems HDCP related ?

[@skeffers1988]

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 .

[@Cotten-]

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.

[@arashgudarzi2623]

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 ?

[@jayrambk8479]

Extraction of Nokia G2425 router firmware pls i cannot find any video related to this

[@georgeyreynolds]

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.

[@rafaelrafinha1101]

tenho um programador t48 muito top ele e possível uma coneçao uart com ele ?

[@mattbrwn]

T48 is just for reading flash chips, not for UART

[@AppliedCryogenics]

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

[@hoteny]

5:42 okay so i really dont see the “d” after “g” (obviously) and wonder how you knew it would work out… was it just trial and error?

[@mattbrwn]

Just some searching on the internet. Like I mentioned that's the one part I kind of "cheated" by looking it up beforehand.

[@andreamitchell4758]

Can you extract FW from a twinkly ARGB LED controller next

[@309electronics5]

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]

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

[@surewill8190]

always interesting to watch

[@Ela-t9k9d]

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.

[@cristianvillalobos3448]

Lzma is a compression and the hdcp is related to the security on the hdmi 🙄 make a tutorial on binwalk

[@adnanalam6201]

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

[@M4XD4B0ZZ]

Did you dye your hair?

[@mattbrwn]

Lol no. Why you seeing my gray hair coming in 😂 It has begun

[@parsipax6337]

can I have the dump file?

[@jonathanzimmer8143]

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.