Recent content on Rootkit Labs Blog
This article was written by a human, for humans. Phantomdrive is now available from the Rootkit Labs shop . Many places don’t respect privacy laws, in certain situations you may be forced to unencrypt your media, or worse, assumed to be guilty. A Veracrypt hidden volume is useful in the former situation, but not the latter. This is why I made Phantomdrive. Phantomdrive is a completely open…
Everything we do is for educational and ethical purposes only . I build open source hardware that I want, but I won’t work on hardware nobody else wants. If people aren’t fired up, I can’t get excited, so my projects only take off when there’s real interest. I’ve got three ideas, please pick your favourite. I only have so much time, and I want to gauge interest first. They’re all…
This isn’t a dropshipping success story, a lucrative exit, or a guide. This is a silly story documenting our failed hardware startup. It’s embarrassing to fail, so we seldom hear these stories, but I’m going to tell you one, here goes. Fresh out of college a decade ago, I landed my first job as an “Electromechanical Technologist”. Here’s a graphic to describe my…
This post is not sponsored or affiliated with KiCad or Digikey. Back when I worked for a hardware startup, rather than making my own, we used Altium. Altium is a PCB design suite that is loved and hated by thousands. It’s not cheap, and if you need a component management system, you could pry open your wallet and shell out more, upgrading to “Altium Vault”. Vault looks at all your schematics,…
I’m building an open-source USB drive with a hidden obfuscation If you plug the device in normally, it will appear blank, but if you quickly plug it in three times in a row, you will be able to read and write data. We built Ovrdrive for journalists working in hostile environments, security researchers, and anyone interested in open hardware. Device for Sale Now! I ended my last post with the…
I’m building an open-source USB drive with a hidden obfuscation If you plug the device in normally, it will appear blank, but if you quickly plug it in three times in a row, you will be able to read and write data. We built Ovrdrive for journalists working in hostile environments, security researchers, and anyone interested in open hardware. Device for Sale Now! This post outlines the design…
Device for Sale Now! Because we all know the best way to keep your data safe is by blowing it up, right? Well, for most of us, the real answer lies with encryption. But consider this: there are certain countries where it is dangerous to be a journalist. Now pretend you’re investigating political corruption in one of these countries; in such cases, it may not be safe for you to be found with…
If you develop software, a fork isn’t just a utensil. It indicates a divergence in a codebase. Code gets forked for several reasons, different opinions, access rights, making a pull request into the upstream repository, etc. There is the correct way to fork software. Then there’s what I call a naked fork. A naked fork is summarized below. git clone…
Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny, fast, and versatile board built using RP2040, a brand new microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi in the UK. — Raspberry Pi People I picked up a Pico for a couple of bucks to try it out. In a time of extreme scarcity and shortage in silicon, I’ve started evaluating different options, and the RP2040 is very available. It hosts a dual Cortex M0+ processor…
A few weeks ago, I headed to my local computer shop in search of affordable RAM. Due to the chip shortage , I have had to become creative lately in how I source parts for prototyping. My idea was to buy older DDR3 laptop RAM, remove the chips, and then repurpose them for my current project. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, but I figured it was better than waiting for a twelve-month lead…
Up Until Now The WifiWart is a powerful embedded Linux WiFi security device hiding inside a phone charger. It is akin to the WiFi Pineapple without looking malicious. Over the length of the project, I’ve had plenty of comments telling me to buy a single-board computer (SBC), jam in an existing enclosure, and call it done. If I was trying to build a one-off device for personal use, this is what I…
The nRF52 is a very popular Bluetooth chip that has taken over most of the wireless embedded space. The system-on-chip (SoC) houses an ARM Cortex M4 and 2.4Ghz radio to implement various wireless protocols. In this tutorial, I want to walk through setting up a Zephyr RTOS environment and building/flashing some code to do some wardriving. But first, what is wardriving? Wardriving is the act of…
There are two classes of problems in the world: stupid and interesting. Building a fusion reactor is an interesting problem, while a thorn in your finger is a stupid problem. Typically you don’t like working on stupid problems. You want them gone. A job dealing with primarily stupid problems may be considered a shitty job. Currently, I’m working on some really stupid problems. Let’s read an email…
This post will outline the bringup of Linux on a PCB I developed from scratch. You can read more about the hardware design in the earlier posts linked above. I’ll talk about driver bringup, system characterization, testing, and software development. By the end of this post, we will have a fully booted single-board computer (SBC). The last post was left on a somewhat unexciting note. To recap, I…
This project is effectively “building a computer from scratch”; RAM, disk, USB and a processor. Our computer will be running a full-fledged operating system capable of installing programs, managing a network stack, playing games and even browsing the internet. However, we’re not going to be playing any games. This post is going to outline board layout, BOM generation, assembly and PCB bring up.…
This is the first part of a blog about putting a wifi router into a phone charger. Join us on Discord here . Check out the Github . WiFi Pineapples are well-known tools in the security community. For those unfamiliar, Pineapples are purpose-built routers to be used in network attacks and exploits. With a Pineapple, you can perform man-in-the-middle attacks, network deauthing and password sniffing.…