challenge-setup-hw

Getting Set Up

Over the course of this training, you'll solve challenges that use real hardware and software. Before each challenge, you'll want to take a moment to set up your host PC and GreatFET devices.

Most challenges will include a pair of binaries:

• Binaries with a icon are intended to run on your host computer, and are "statically linked"-- which means they include most of their dependencies.
  They've been tested with the Ubuntu image distributed during in-person classes, but will likely also work on other Linux installations.
• Binaries with a icon are intended to run on a GreatFET .
  You'll program these to one of the two GreatFET devices provided with the course-- allowing the GreatFET to simulate a target device.

Ensuring you're on the latest verisons

The live USB image provied with the course ships with copies of each of the open-source projects used in the course. Before you being, run the following commands to ensure you have the latest versions:

# Update the GreatFET repo
cd ~/greatfet
git pull origin training_latest
cd host
sudo python  setup.py install
sudo python3 setup.py install

# Update the FaceDancer repo
cd ~/facedancer
git pull origin training_latest
sudo python  setup.py install
sudo python3 setup.py install

Loading a GreatFET Binary

The easiest way to load GreatFET Target binaries is using the greatfet_firmware. To keep things simple, we'll load from Device Firmware Update (DFU) mode -- which works no matter the state of your GreatFET and makes selecting which GreatFET you're working with easy.

Entering DFU mode is simple:

1. Press and hold the DFU button on your GreatFET.
2. Without releasing the DFU button, press and release the RESET button.
3. Release the DFU button. Your GreatFET should not have any illuminated LEDs, and should show up as a NXP Semiconductors LPC, 1fc9:000C.

Once the device is in DFU mode, you can load a GreatFET binary with the following command:

greatfet firmware -d -w <bin_filename>

or, for short:

gf fw -d -w <bin_filename>

For example, if your binary was called single_packet_analysis.bin, you could load and run it with the following command:

greatfet firmware -d -w single_packet_analysis.bin

You can use the same process to restore the default GreatFET firmware. An appropriate version of the GreatFET firmware is provided on the tools page and in the home folder of the course Live USB. You can restore the original firmware at any time by running the following command with the GreatFET in DFU mode:

greatfet firmware -d -w ~/greatfet_usb.bin

Running a Host Binary

Host binaries are designed to run from the training's live environment, but will likely run on any modern Linux machine. You can run these binaries in the same way you'd run any other Linux script or binary. To run a program called host_communication, you'd simply run the binary from the Linux command line:

./host_communication