Top all-time · #9395
Gary's hacking stuff
Personal blog · garyodernichts.blogspot.comsecurityhardwaregames
Gary's hacking stuff is a personal blog at garyodernichts.blogspot.com about security, hardware and games. Since 2022, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Looking into the Stadia Controller Bluetooth Mode Website”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Gary's hacking blog about reverse engineering hardware and security flaws in microcontrollers and consumer devices. A HN commenter links a post describing recovery of a firmware encryption key from a device.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Looking into the Stadia Controller Bluetooth Mode Website3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-23
- Looking into the Nintendo Alarmo3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-30
- Exploiting the Wii U's USB Descriptor parsing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-06-06
What Hacker News says?
A lot of the security features on microcontrollers are poorly implemented. Here's an example where someone recovered the encryption key on a consumer device with encrypted firmware: https://garyodernichts.blogspot.com/2024/10/looking-into-nin... . The microcontroller supports firmware encryption with a 128-bit AES key, which gets written to 4 32-bit write-only registers. Because it's split up like this, it's possibl…
Comment linking /2024/10/looking-into-nintendo-alarmo.html
on “Using AI to reverse engineer hardware”Submitted Exploiting the Wii U's USB Descriptor parsing as a story · 148 points
HN discussionSubmitted Looking into the Nintendo Alarmo as a story · 108 points
HN discussionSubmitted Looking into the Nintendo Alarmo as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exploiting DNS response parsing on the Wii U as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Looking into the Stadia Controller Bluetooth Mode Website as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Looking into the Stadia Controller Bluetooth Mode Website as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reverse Engineering the Stadia Controller Updater as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exploiting the Wii U's USB Descriptor parsing as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
