Using AI to reverse engineer hardware (blogs.gnome.org)

you're confusing musicians with "audiophiles"

it will also help with the environment by stopping a lot of forced obsolescence for no reason (apple rolls out a new OS every year, then magically wacom stops supporting perfectly working tablets in their new driver versions)

> why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours

When that happens it shouldn't be forgotten that people (broadly speaking) chose this. AI proponents lit intellectual property on fire out of self-interest.

> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?

I think it goes deeper than that, in that the AI era will eventually force us to rethink how we value each other. It used to be economic scarcity: I provide a service that very few people can provide, therefore I make a lot of money (supply and demand.) Now we're moving to a place where most anybody can do anything, so our value system needs to evolve, as well. Instead of valuing scarcity, perhaps we should value personal creativity and self-expression. Kind of like paying money for a concert, or for someone's personal painting, even though you can listen online, or you can just have AI generate the same painting. It comes more from wanting to support people than to supply scarcity-based demand.

I think this idea makes many peoples' eyes roll, but IMO that's a testament to where we are today as a society. Most interactions get reduced to just business transactions without the humanity in it, and that's where our problems come from.

This was a huge problem before AI due to Amazon and global internet marketplaces. Why spend R&D dollars developing an amazing product when Chinese knockoffs will show up 6 months later? I wonder how many great consumer products don't exist because there's no way to recoup your R&D costs and develop a healthy market.

Imagine if there were no intellectual protections for pharmaceuticals. The government would have to take over R&D.

Intellectual property is terrible for society on the whole.

You could just as easily argue "why are 200 companies burning through people and natural resources to come up with the exact same thing and then marketing it as different" as you can say "why would anyone create anything without the ability to making oodles of money by restricting imitation".

> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?

The same reason I have open sourced every line of code I have written in the last several years, even new inventions. Because it is good for society, and good for my reputation to show what I am capable of which has been very good for my career.

Better to be the one to open source it before someone else does.

The only business model left is convenience tax. Save people time and they give you money.

IDK about the grass, bro, I've mostly just seen a lot of pavement since I lost my SWE job

Even so, if you can manage to get a agent into the loop of "change variable > inspect results > do change > repeat", you can replicate everything from server-side game servers to audio effects, as long as you manage to get the data into a format they can either "visually" inspect, or inspect by data. For audio, I've had success replicating synth sounds and effects by giving them MIDI access to analog hardware, spectrograms and a suite of other unix tools.

The tricky part is figuring out the workflow, once that's in place, you can encrypt the protocol itself as much as you want, the output (audio, video, JSON, whatever) has to go somewhere, and that can be captured and replicated.

Or just ask Claude what is the best way to protect your IP. It should know its capabilities.

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 possible to find 1/4 of the key by writing every possible value to one of the registers and checking that the output matches, before repeating with the other 3 registers. This means that the number of possible combinations to check is reduced from (2^128) to (4*(2^32)), which can be brute forced in a few hours.

Imagine if your comment is part of Exhibit A in a lawsuit.

They never weren't important. What's important now is being prepared to act on them, which is expensive.

Seems "information wants to be free" wins yet again. To bad we don't have any strong political leaders in the world that could run on such platform, I guess in 2-3 decades the tide will start turning the other way again.

Do you think Chinese manufactures can't clone the hardware? Do you think they can't provide a premium product/experience? They most certainly can and do.

Just be different. Just create a brand. Oh if only it were that easy!

Reverse engineering of audio effects can be done completely independently of the hardware that generates it.

I think you are torturing the analogy.

A moat isn’t a perfect defense. It’s a delay tactic that keeps the enemy from coming right up to your wall and climbing it or breaking it down. While you defend your moat, you whittle down the attackers so even when they do cross it they can be more easily defeated.

Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.

Claude isn’t just a faster way to cross the moat, it’s gunpowder, and with it the rules have fundamentally changed.

Firmware security is useless if your product can be bought tested and reverse engineered through multiple trials. So long as you have something that can be understood and used by humans, you have something that can be reverse engineered.

Having the code accessible makes it easier, but just having both input and output is sufficient.

The problem is that many of us seek employment from rent seekers. It's all great in theory, but not fun in the in-between times if you're trying to pay your own rent and find placement and nobody wants to bring anyone new on board because they can't find ways to make it profitable.

If an asset doesn't exist to hold value, how do you "protect" expertise? How do you differentiate it? How do you justify investment if someone else will steal anything of value you create?

For a short while, it's great, but in the long run, it makes it difficult to financially invest in building software with either time or money.

> Instead of someone being able to just lock the knowledge away, now we can all have it

Uhh I think you're missing a tiny 3 trillion dollar detail. I understand though, something that small and inconsequential is easy to overlook.

Just release it under a pseudonym. The worst they will do is force it off GitHub! Don't redistribute the firmware files if you're really concerned. I am also sort of struggling with this idea so I get where you're coming from.

> Every device you buy wants you install an app on your phone. Not if I can help it.

That sounds interesting. What's the usual approach, install the app in some emulator or something, and ask your agent to reverse engineer it? Or is the setup for the agent to work simpler than that?

In a legal fight of printers VS AI behemoths, my money is on the ruthless printer mafia.

It's time to hack into my solar inverter...

I do that, but it would be nice to have a single device/remote and faster UI.

How do you do this with XFinity? They no longer allow you set your own DNS servers "for better security".