[HN Gopher] Drone Hacking Part 1: Dumping Firmware and Bruteforc...
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Drone Hacking Part 1: Dumping Firmware and Bruteforcing ECC
Author : tripdout
Score : 127 points
Date : 2026-01-17 02:35 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (neodyme.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (neodyme.io)
| nerdsniper wrote:
| What a beautiful write-up! This is such a lovely resource for
| anyone who ever has the curiosity of "I'm interested in getting a
| firmware dump".
| purplehat_ wrote:
| For anyone else who got a little too excited at the title, ECC
| here is error correction codes, not elliptic curve crypto.
|
| Very cool writeup, thanks for digging into all those data sheets
| and sharing it with us! I feel like the hands-on electronics
| stuff has always been a little bit inaccessible to me, but posts
| like these always make me a little more excited to start doing
| little projects myself. So thanks for posting.
| eimrine wrote:
| Drane Hacking next: bypassing Radio Electronic Warfare.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Dead Reckoning + Physical Media + Return to Base
| eimrine wrote:
| What a laugher, of course it is not like that. Especially
| funny sounds the return to base function.
|
| Multi-frequency communication, a lot of retranslators making
| you to be able to fly inside of caves, refusing to use
| Starlink in the areas having a bleeding-edge anti-starlink
| antennas deployed. Or just receiving Netflix-grade picture
| from the optical cable while reducing to zero anything
| emitting radio-signals.
| aenis wrote:
| Fantastic and inspiring write up, big thanks!
|
| Here is to hoping someone will do something similar for DRM'ed
| BOSCH ebike motors.
| stavros wrote:
| Be the change you want to see in the world.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Here is to hoping someone will do something similar for
| DRM'ed BOSCH ebike motors.
|
| Please not. Bike thieves are already annoying as they are (a
| ring in the rural city I live in managed to steal over 400 kEUR
| worth of bikes in a matter of months, in my case they only
| stole the control unit), and so are people modding their bikes
| to run (way) faster than the legal limit, leading to more and
| more calls for them being banned off of normal bike tracks.
|
| [1] https://www.idowa.de/regionen/landshut/landkreis-
| landshut/se...
| gessha wrote:
| Is people stealing bikes and parts a technological problem or
| a people problem?
| Palomides wrote:
| you could compare with apple locking down iphones and
| parts, which I understand significantly reduced theft
| IshKebab wrote:
| I seriously doubt any kind of DRM is going to dissuade bike
| thieves. It hasn't really worked for phones has it?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It has. Yes people still steal iPhones but not even close
| to levels pre-Activation Lock.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| We do it at https://infinite-battery.com :) our battery is
| compatible with Gen2/Gen3/Gen4 (we haven't yet tested on smart
| systems though)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| And as usual... something that looks like it uses Linux, but has
| absolutely zero Google search results on how to obtain the GPL
| sources.
|
| We desperately need some large ass legal fund that takes the GPL
| violators to court.
| smokel wrote:
| If they use unmodified Linux, then they only have to provide (a
| link to) the source code to that kernel on request. No source
| code is required for proprietary add-ons, unless they are
| kernel modifications.
|
| The GPL also does not state that the source code should be easy
| to find. In the early days, one had to write a letter, send it
| by mail, in hopes of getting a tape or CD-ROM with the source
| code. For which you then had to pay as well.
| wuschel wrote:
| What could be the potential risk of not being compliant to the
| software license at hand e.g. let us say we would sue a GPL
| violator?
| ofrzeta wrote:
| There have been several trials, all of them won, I think
|
| https://gpl-violations.org/about/
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Damn, I really enjoyed reading this. Great writeup!
| vachina wrote:
| Now do DJI next
| Neywiny wrote:
| Great work.
|
| Seems like a typo when covering inversion. They claim parity(0) =
| 0 but still use the equation with != from before.
|
| It's nice to see that they, like me, subscribe to "an hour of
| experimenting can save 5 minutes of reading the documentation."
| Of course what people often fail to realize is that until you've
| found the answer, you often don't realize what the documentation
| was saying, such as the 16-bit thing. Management may ask "was
| that not in the manual?" But it's more nebulous than that.
| gessha wrote:
| I bet you that one hour was full of excitement, where's the fun
| in reading the documentation :P
|
| Another great to look at it is possibly as a TDD approach vs
| analyzing the problem at a deeper level.
| dextrous wrote:
| Thanks very much for this awesome write up! It's detailed labor-
| of-love work like this that helps others (like me!) make great
| jumps in learning. So appreciated.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Fun read! How long does the script take to run? I'm curious if
| you would have noticed any performance increase if you wrote it
| in C++.
| duttybear wrote:
| Bruteforcing ecc is the Services may subject to the contrary. My
| vision of brutforcing is droning below sea levels, .
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(page generated 2026-01-17 23:01 UTC)