David Buchanan showed ingenuity to root a laptop without using expensive hardware.
Noted hardware modder David Buchanan was able to root a laptop using just a resistor, wire, and a plain old cigarette lighter. He shared the details of this process on his blog.
“To write an exploit, you need a bug. When there are no bugs, you have to be resourceful — this is where the injection of faults comes to the rescue”, — noted the hacker.
David Buchanan's method involves modifying the DRAM, soldering a tiny 15 ohm resistor, and connecting an antenna to specific pins on the laptop's memory module. The wire acted as an antenna, picking up any nearby electromagnetic interference, and the resistor was needed to ensure that the interference was not large enough to disrupt the normal operation of the memory.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000As the author notes, injection of hardware failures usually requires specialized and expensive equipment. The cost is due to the fact that a high degree of precision is required as to when and where the failure is introduced. However, the hacker tested a more budget-friendly method.
For the experiment, he chose a Samsung S3520 laptop equipped with an Intel i3-2310M processor and 1 GB of DDR3 RAM, released in 2011. According to the hacker, it's new enough to comfortably run a lightweight Linux desktop distribution, but also old enough to not worry about breaking it.
With a few steps, David Buchanan was able to set up the machine to provide root access, which allows the user to perform any operations in the system. To induce the desired bug, he used an ordinary cigarette lighter near the antenna wire. He demonstrated the entire process on video.
“I've been extremely lucky with this run, it usually takes a few clicks of the lighter to get a good glitch. Not shown are the few previous attempts that crashed the whole system!” — stressed the hacker.