How to get start in hardware hacking stuff

[Reisen_1943]

Hello guys, i have a basic fundamentals of exploit (most from CTF and wargame). I want to do some hardware hacking stuff. I know nothing about electric and hardware yet, how to get start in this. Any advice will be priceless for me. Thanks alot

[0x00pf (pico)]

My 2 cents.

Grab an arduino, a protoboard, a bunch of jumpers and some stuff (buttons, LEDs, resistors,…) and just start following the online tutorials (there are thousands)… After a while you will learn enough about serial ports, buses and the main interfacing techniques as well as the basics of electronics… It is easier that it looks, at least to get stuff running.

Then go for some hacker friendly device, check OpenWRT web to find some device easy to hack. This is a list of supported devices. In that list, for some of the devices you will find details on how to access the serial port or JTAG interfaces.

If you are interested in other type of devices (not routers), go for one that has already been hacked a thousand times so you will get answers to all your questions on-line and have a baseline to work on. That will save you a lot of time at the beginning.

During that journey you will be exposes to a lot of more SW stuff (firmware images, busybox, boot loaders, …) and HW stuff (USB OTG, basic RF, I2C, SPI, memory dumping…) progressively, and after a while you will have the foundation to go for more sophisticated/specialised devices…

It is also useful to play with some SBCs to get familiar with the SW side, it is nice to compile your own kernel and busybox and dump a few Mb in a SD card and have a computer booted in 2 secs.

Rpi is an option, but any other SBC will do the trick. An SBC would be more user friendly than a router and still allows you to build pretty much the same environment. You will also get interesting knowledge about the different booting process, get to know tools like U-Boot or how to define your own device tree for a given SoC. This platform is midway between a microcontroller and a smartphone so, personally, I found it pretty interesting.

As I always say, take this as a suggestion. Everybody is different and what works for somebody may not work for somebody else. But IMHO, I believe this is a reasonable approach,

Hope this helps

[Reisen_1943]

thanks for the tip.
I got my ESP32 and arduino for a while but just make some funny stuff for fun (alcohol test using mq3 sensor, led button, display stuff on lcd 16x2,…) Maybe now i start to learn about UART port, bootloaders,…