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Courk's Blog
Personal blog · courk.cchardwaresecurity
Courk's Blog is a personal blog at courk.cc about hardware and security. Since 2019, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Breaking the Flash Encryption on Espressif's ESP32 MCUs”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for hardware security research: power analysis attacks that break Espressif ESP32 hardware AES and flash encryption, including a follow-up on doing it for under $100. The comments only cite it as part of a series.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Various reverse-engineering and electronics projects.
Most-linked posts?
- Breaking the Flash Encryption on Espressif's ESP32 MCUs3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-01-08
- Laser Fault Injection on a Budget: RP2350 Edition (2025)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-01-15
- Running Custom Code on a Google Home Mini (Part 1)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-29
What Hacker News says?
That's because this article is more of a part 3 of a series of articles. Part 1: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/090 How to break ESP32 AES with power analysis Part 2: https://courk.cc/breaking-flash-encryption-of-espressif-part... How to do it for no more than $100 Part 3: This article Improving the performance
Comment linking /breaking-flash-encryption-of-espressif-parts
on “Espressif ESP32: Breaking HW AES with Power Analysis (2023)”Submitted Laser Fault Injection on a Budget: RP2350 Edition (2025) as a story · 66 points
HN discussionWhen attacking an encrypted flash, the idea is to trigger the sampling based on the activity of the external SPI flash signals. This is detailed in the paper that inspired this article, or in in this more recent blog post: https://courk.cc/breaking-flash-encryption-of-espressif-part...
Comment linking /breaking-flash-encryption-of-espressif-parts
on “Espressif ESP32: Breaking HW AES with Power Analysis (2023)”Submitted Laser Fault Injection on a Budget: RP2350 Edition as a story · 40 points
HN discussionSubmitted Breaking the Flash Encryption on Espressif's ESP32 MCUs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Running Custom Code on a Google Home Mini (Part 1) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted A “Remote” Vulnerability: buffer overflow attack on a PIC microcontroller as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Breaking the Flash Encryption Feature of Espressif's Parts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Running Custom Code on a Google Home Mini as a story · 2 points
HN discussion