Performing Open Heart Surgery on a Furby

Presented at Summercon 2014, June 6, 2014, noon (50 minutes).

No product has fueled more nightmares in children than the satanic toy known only as the Furby. Recent Furbies have received significant upgrades from their predecessors, sporting features such as LCD eyes, interaction with mobile devices, and a new communication method rivaling that of #badBIOS itself. This talk will dive into the world of hardware hacking, as applied to this demonic toy. We'll discuss various techniques to reverse engineer and instrument the hardware, including identifying unknown chips, dumping memory, and sniffing data buses. We'll also plunge into the world of chip decapping (the art of boiling chips in corrosive acid), discuss different methods of analyzing dies, and apply basic IC reversing techniques.


Presenters:

  • Michael Coppola / mncoppola as Michael Coppola
    Michael Coppola is a vulnerability researcher working at a defense contractor, as well as an undergraduate student at Northeastern University. His main interests include Linux kernel exploitation and rootkit development, embedded systems, and burning things with a soldering iron.

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