Even More Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation

Presented at 30C3 (2013), Dec. 29, 2013, 5:15 p.m. (60 minutes)

You might remember Tamagotchi virtual pets from the 1990's. These toys are still around and just as demanding as ever! At 29C3, I talked about my attempts to reverse engineer the latest Tamagotchis, and this presentation covers my progress since then. It includes methods for executing code on and dumping code from a Tamagotchi, an analysis of the Tamagotchi code dump and a demonstration of Tamagotchi development tools that make use of these capabilities.

Recent Tamagotchis are more than just pets. They can talk to their friends over IR, support games on external ROMs and store generations worth of information about their ancestors. This talk goes through the different ways Tamagotchis can be tampered with through these channels. It describes a method of achieving code execution on a Tamagotchi though a flash accessory, using this to dump the Tamagotchi's internal ROM, and the internal Tamagotchi 'secrets' it revealed. It also covers the development tools I've written for the Tamagotchi and includes some demonstrations of modified Tamagotchis.


Presenters:

  • Natalie Silvanovich
    Natalie Silvanovich is a Security Researcher at BlackBerry, where her work involves breaking mobile software and improving the security of the platform, but unfortunately does not involve hacking Tamagotchis. Natalie is also a founding member of Kwartzlab Makerspace in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. While her biggest maker interest is toy hacking, she also enjoys anything to do with Arduinos or lasers.

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