HN user

farmdve

265 karma
Posts2
Comments105
View on HN

For the CEM, I have done no modifications, yet. I have however spent a fair amount of time, reverse engineering the AW55 firmware and have discovered virtually all the maps related to the shifting process, pressures, speeds etc. I have a completely understanding of how the firmware works.

To say I am the only one with such a complete understanding and tuning abilities for it, may not be an understatement.

I am actually fascinated by car electronics. I had heavily modified the software on mine, but it was easier than modern stuff, no encryption of the code, and even the checksum code only triggered a DTC with no consequences.

The only module that was encrypted was the main module, but it if you knew the security PIN you could do what you wanted. It was determined by people that if you observed the jitter of the CAN line fast enough, you could leak the pin via a side channel attack.

But modern car electronics are encrypted, and some probably have security processors that might trigger some irreversible states if you tamper with them. Modern cars are basically as locked up as a PS5.

Denuvo Analysis 1 year ago

The anti-tamper codes, if any tampering is detected will crash on undefined/unallocated regions. Meaning that if Windows ever were to overwrite that region for whatever reason, will trigger the crash.

Such was the case for SecuROM in early days. It featured the CRC checks mentioned, if any single byte was changed, including an INT (breakpoint) instruction, it would crash. Here it's unlikely that it wont crash. Rendering the game inoperable.

Denuvo Analysis 1 year ago

What isn't mentioned in the article is why UD2 is chosen. It is a relic from the SecuROM days, in fact, one of the developers on SecuROM is the one who also works or worked at Denuvo.

I would imagine many things from the SecuROM era live on in Denuvo.

But if you read the article you will realize that certain games will not work in the future due to Denuvo.

"This destroyed any exception-based hooking since majority of the time an exception is triggered, Windows will write an EXCEPTION_RECORD high up in unused stack space. You can probably see where this is going. Now, whenever the CPUID is hooked via an exception, that important value will become overwritten with an EXCEPTION_RECORD, causing undefined behaviour later on. I believe this can be bypassed if you attach a debugger to the process and set certain flags when it comes to exception handling, but the method of patching every hardware check is still cumbersome due to randomness anyway."

As Windows matures, behaviour can change, breaking certain stuff.

I like the concept of the Comma device. If only to get just one feature from it, adaptive cruise control.

But it requires for me to not only reverse engineer, but potentially also modify the firmware of my ABS unit to allow it to brake, which I am not comfortable doing.

It would be an interesting reverse engineering challenge, 20 years down the road when it is more accessible.

I spent 1.5+ years on my 2005 car's ECU to reverse engineer most of the maps, since no public tuning files existed. I then went and spent 1 year on the TCM for which again, no tuning files existed. With the patent files, I was able to discover the algorithms and maps, and am even in IDA as I write this, and in Ghidra emulating some code.

I mean I am asking only because my government has failed to fix these roads and we've had protests that lead to nothing. They are the only connection between the rural parts of the country, as in the only ones.

You have no choice but to go at a speed useful enough to get anywhere. For me, these are real-world conditions.

Inventing Cyrillic 2 years ago

It is only plausible based on your own subjective views and cultural projection. As of now, it has no basis on any fact.

Inventing Cyrillic 2 years ago

Ok, and just because a few countries did it, in what way implies that Bulgaria will? Your arguments have no basis other than "Country A did it, so Bulgaria is also more likely to do it".

Inventing Cyrillic 2 years ago

For a while in the early 2000s to late 2000s there was a very widespread usage of 4 and 6 replacing the ch and sh sounds. In hindsight, this was more likely to replace the letters 'ч' and 'ш' than Latin letters.

However it died out.

Inventing Cyrillic 2 years ago

Well, Bulgaria has a lot of borrowed words now, but I don't see even a hint of switching to the Latin alphabet. Not even a hint.

Yes, what is up with me asking it a question about a subject or something else and it starts lecturing me what the subject is etc. It is never brief, concise, it always has to add these definitions of the subject which I already know.

While we are on the subject of search engines, which search engines still show you like blogs, forum posts and stuff like that? Most of the blogs for obscure projects or problems are no longer even discoverable.

They are annoying, but I quite like the option to choose. I definitely prefer not to have tracking cookies.

I can't say I agree. Back in 2014 a laptop was purchased with a dual-core haswell CPU. 8 years later I revive the laptop by upgrading the CPU to almost the best possible CPU, which is a 4-core 8 thread CPU or 4-core 4 threads, I am unsure which of these it was, but the speed boost was massive. This is how you keep old tech alive.

And the good thing about mobile CPUs is that they have almost the same TDP across the various dual-quad versions(or whatever is the norm today).