We have chosen to work with a cheap, simple, off-the-shelf router, so anyone learning can walk through this with us. This entry in the Hardware Hacking 101 series will explain what you need to know about UART/Serial communication, and walk through the process of finding and connecting to the UART port on a router. Sometimes a console for interacting with the device’s bootloader or OS is provided as well. With access to the UART, a user can see bootloader and operating system logs. This bus is typically how a user or developer can interface with the processor via a serial port. This is a multi-part series which discusses the fundamental concepts, useful tools, and practical techniques which you can use to approach a basic hardware assessment.įor our first blog post in this series, we will focus on a very common type of debug serial communication protocol that can be used to obtain low-level access to a wide range of devices.Ī Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART) is a hardware serial communication bus used by most processors and chips.

Our team performs penetration testing on IoT / embedded devices every day, and we’re excited to share some of our knowledge and experiences to help those getting started with hardware security learn the ropes. Welcome to an introduction to hardware hacking! This series will discuss the basics of interacting with an embedded device though various hardware interfaces.

Uart serial communication pdf