Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

Electric scooter hacking!? Sign me up! In this article, the author takes a look into the Brightway Scooters made for NAVEE and Xiaomi. The scooter has a Controller in the bottom that communicates with a motor and a battery. In the top of the scooter is a dashboard that communicates with the Controller uses UART. The Dashboard communicates with cell phones using BLE.

To pair a scooter, the app must be downloaded and a QR code is scanned. To activate the scooter, a home video must be watched. The 'Mi Home' API is integrated with the vendors app. By looking into this internal application, we find the locations of important registers (such as put the scooter into drive mode) and more.

The format for an packet for the scooter is as follows:

• TYPE: The command type. Write, read, MCU (controller) read/write and a few others.
• ADDRESS: The register address mentioned above.
• REST: The package being used.
• LEN: The length of the payload.
• PAYLOAD: The hex values to transmit.

They decided to take apart the scooter and map out all of the hardware. While doing this, they noticed that Single Wire Debug (SWD) pins were left on! All they had to do to access JTAG was connect via OpenOCD. With this, they have complete access to the system memory, control flow and anything else they want.

Another oversight they noticed was that the firmware updates (OTA) for BLE are unencrypted. This allowed for reverse engineering of the system as a whole.

Recently, Xiaomi introduced firmware signing to secure the BLE firmware from tampering. However, the MCU firmware is still not signed. This allows for some tampering of the device still. They tried uploading their own firmware to various components for fun using this issue.

The device has BLE encryption and a secure chip. However, using these does not mean security by default. Protections still need to be put in place for other things. Overall, fun post on reverse engineering!