The Hackers Lab - Teensy

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A Teensy? What’s that?

First things first…DO NOT give this to your infant.

A Teensy device is a “USB-based microcontroller development system.” Honestly, that’s really all it is.

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BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!!

“But I thought you just said…”
Well, yes, but it is a development system. Meaning you can incorporate this into THOUSANDS of projects!! Like seriously. There is so many possibilities out there!

For example, you could (Teensy++ 2.0 exclusive) jailbreak your ps3 or create an HID attack such as Samy Kamkar’s USB Driveby.

Now how do I program it?

Just like an Arduino! Don’t know what that is? That’s okay. Here are some resources to get you started with your Teensy. (We will discuss the Arduino in a future article)

Things to think on

  1. Are there any other ways you believe you could use a Teensy in a hacker-related scenario?

  2. Due to its small size, what kind of objects do you think you could hide it in?

  3. If you have a Teensy already, how do you use it?

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I just thought I’d point out this article by @0x00pf

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I’ve been planning to test 0x00pf’s post for a while, but didn’t get to it. I still have to buy a teensy, which one would you advise to buy ?
I was planning to buy from this store that has 3.2, 3.5 and 3.6 available ?

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Get the LC one. It will get the job done and it’s cheaper than the rest.

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@Valkyr fully agree with @_py. The LC (Low Cost) is a lot cheaper and enough for most of the things mentioned in this post. The 3.X series are pretty powerful (Cortex M-4). Unless you want to do some real-time stuff (audio processing for instance), you will be wasting resources

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TEENSY.

I think pretty much all HID attacks are really powerful.

I wonder if you could communicate with an ODB port, to carry out functions on a vehicle?

Like the tool used in this:

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@pry0cc google teensy + CAN (Controller Area Network). Teensy 3.1/3.2 has a CAN bus

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My Teensy LC arrived yesterday, and even just printing “hello world” on another computer, gave me vibes.
Anxious to get some pwning kicked off soon.

While waiting for my teensy, I did some research and found that next to the renowned Samy Kamkar , Nikhil SamratAshok Mittal did some great work with it.
He wrote Kautilya, a Ruby based program for HID, which has a various amount of payloads you can choose from, and tweak to your needs in the menu.

A how-to here is really not necessary, as he did it himself in the github link. I just found his work worth sharing.

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Thanks for sharing !

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@Valkyr Do you know anything about those .HEX files? I’m confused as to how they are being used by the teensy loader. Maybe @0x00pf can shed some light into this.

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Not sure which .hex files are you referring to. Anyway, .hex is usually the extension of Intel hex files. A format to encode binary data in ASCII and used by many tools as source or target format for firmware write/read. In this context, they contain firmware dumps.

avrdude (used by the Arduino environment or when you program AVR MCUs directly) and also teensy_loader use this format to flash your program in the MCU. Normally you compile the code with avr-gcc that produces a kind of ELF file and then you create the .hex file out of it using obj-copy. Just check the Arduino Makefiles.

For more details check the wiki page

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Ruby is king!

All the cool hackers use it :stuck_out_tongue:

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i had no ideea. Thx pico to shed some light over this!