IoT Mini Stories
A collection of smaller home automation projects built on open source solutions from others. From magically opening entrance doors to RGB ambience behind every piece of furniture, and a standing desk that obeys Siri.
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Mate CTF: The Greatest Birthday Present Ever Made
My friends built me a custom CTF for my 26th birthday. It had QR codes hidden in birthday cards, physical flags at ETH, and an ESP32 “rowhammer” challenge. A tale of caffeine addiction and hardware security trauma.
HITCON 2025 – IMGC0NV
A writeup about exploiting an image converter service through path traversal and multiprocessing pickle deserialization. The solution required crafting a polyglot file that’s both a valid BMP image and a malicious pickle payload to achieve RCE.
EPFL CS412 CTF – HEAP-MEANU
A writeup for EPFL CS412’s HEAP-MEANU challenge involving heap exploitation through one-byte overflow and constrained brute-force reading. Despite full protections and modern libc 2.39, achieved RCE using a House of Spirits like attack.
Heislberg: The Internet of Toilets
How I used an ESP, Magnets and Kubernetes and to solve the great toilet crisis of 2021. A tale of absolutely necessary workplace optimization.
The Internet of Entrance Doors
How I taught my apartment’s entrance door to recognize me and open automatically. A surprisingly practical tale of BLE authentication, hidden ESPs, and the occasional accidental door opening while driving by.
The Internet of Roof Windows
When your loft flat turns into a sauna every summer, the logical solution is obviously to reverse-engineer a decades-old proprietary bus protocol. A tale of digital archaeology, improvised level shifters, and ladder-based near-death experiences.
The Internet of Furniture
How I reverse-engineered my electric sofa to work with Home Assistant using an ESP32. After frying a transistor and some emergency soldering, I now have a voice-controlled couch.