PhyWhisperer-USB is a hardware USB sniffer & triggering platform that allows users to test the security of USB devices using side-channel power analysis and fault injection using a Python 3 interface, beside simply capturing packets. This has become especially important now as some USB devices include Bitcoin Wallets, FIDO2 keys, and encrypted drives with valuable data. PhyWhisperer-USB hardware specifications: FPGA – Xilinx Spartan 7S15 with 12,800 logic cells USB USB 2.0 Low/Full/High Speed mode PC connection – Micro-USB 2.0 HS port Host connection – Micro-USB port Target connection – USB-A female connector Trigger pattern – 1 – 64 bytes with mask Trigger delay – 0 – 1048576 cycles of 240 MHz internal clock derived from USB clock USB sniffer FIFO – 8192 bytes (FPGA block RAM, adjustable depending on FPGA utilization) Expansion – Spare digital I/O: 8 data pins, 1 clock pin routed to FPGA (on front panel) Clock output […]
Arduino Partners with Chirp to Enable Data-Over-Sound M2M Connectivity
Announced on August 12, 2019, Arduino has partnered with the London-based Chirp, a wireless data-over-sound software solution for machine-to-machine connectivity. The system has the ability to work online or offline, as long as there is a loudspeaker and a microphone available. The software works with the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense board in send and receive mode, while most Arduino MKR boards and Arduino Nano 33 IoT will also be supported by the SDK, but only to send data. The software and board are fully compatible with SDKs from a wide variety of platforms. The Nano 33 BLE Sense is available for purchase from the Arduino website, for $29.50. The sensor-rich Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense is application-ready right out of the box, and Chirp is ready to start sending encoded data from a device fitted with an audio speaker, to the board’s built-in microphone, where it is encoded and […]
Teensy 4.0 Launched for $20 with a Much Faster NXP i.MX RT1062 Arm Cortex-M7 Processor
We last wrote about Teensy boards in 2016 for the launch of Teensy 3.5 & 3.6 boards powered by NXP Kinetis K64/K66 Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller, and a longer form factor. Paul Stoffregen has now upped the ante with Teensy 4.0 featuring a much more powerful NXP i.MX RT1062 Cortex-M7 cross-over processor clocked at 600 MHz, and going back to the original, and more compact, form factor of earlier Teensy boards such as Teensy 3.2. Teensy 4.0 hardware specifications: SoC – NXP i.MX RT1062 Arm Cortex-M7 processor at 600 MHz with 1024KB RAM (512KB is tightly coupled), Storage – 2048KB serial flash (64KB reserved for recovery & EEPROM emulation) USB – 1x micro USB port for power and programming Expansion via through-holes and pads USB – 2x USB ports, both 480 MBit/sec Storage – 1x SDIO (4 bit) native SD Audio – 2x I2S Digital Audio, 1x S/PDIF Digital Audio Serial […]
Linaro Connect San Diego 2019 Schedule – IoT, AI, Optimizations, Compilers and More
Linaro has recently released the full schedule of Linaro Connect San Diego 2019 that will take place on September 23-27. Even if you can’t attend, it’s always interested to check out the schedule to find out what interesting work is done on Arm Linux, Zephyr OS, and so on. So I’ve created my own virtual schedule with some of the most relevant and interesting sessions of the five-day event. Monday, September 23 14:00 – 14:25 – SAN19-101 Thermal Governors: How to pick the right one by Keerthy Jagadeesh, Software Engineer, Texas Instruments With higher Gigahertz and multiple cores packed in a SoC the need for thermal management for Arm based SoCs gets more and more critical. Thermal governors that define the policy for thermal management play a pivotal role in ensuring thermal safety of the device. Choosing the right one ensures the device performs optimally with in the thermal budget. […]
MINIX NEO S2 USB-C SSD Hub Review in Ubuntu 18.04 with Khadas Edge
MINIX NEO S1 & S2 are USB-C hubs with the usual HDMI and USB outputs, but also a built-in 120 GB & 240 GB SSD respectively. The company has sent me a sample of each, and in order to test the platform, I decided to do on a Khadas board running Ubuntu 18.04 with LXDE desktop environment (aka Lubuntu). I’ll start by checking out the packages’ content, before going through my experience with the MINIX NEO S2 USB-C hub in Ubuntu 18.04 with LXDE desktop environment. MINIX NEO S1 & S2 Unboxing Both packages are basically identical except for the different color, and one shows 120GB SSD capacity, while the other has 240GB The back side has some more details about the USB-C hub. I’ll focus on the 240GB model since it’s just the same, but around $13 to $20 more expensive, and it offers double the capacity, as well […]
Reading ID Card Data in Ubuntu with EZ100PU Smart Card Reader (Thai ID Edition)
I was asked help with configuring a smart card reader on a government computer running Windows 7, but this made me wonder what would happen if I connected the card reader to my Ubuntu laptop and whether I’d be able to read content from a Thai ID card. EZ100PU Smart Card Reader Let’s have a look at the card reader itself first. It’s a FAST ID EZ100PU smart card reader compliant with ISO7816 standard. That’s the product page of the specific model, but a search for EZ100PU only reveals the manufacturer may be InfoThink Technology based on Taiwan. The USB smart card reader comes with a CD that includes drivers for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and Android, as well as an SDK with a demo program and sample code in C++, Visual Basic .NET, and C#. As we’ll see further below, the Linux driver is not needed as it works […]
Aviat WTM 4800 5G Multi-band Radio Targets Transport Applications
Aviat Networks has released the WTM 4800, an eBand and Multi-Band Radio focused on 5G transport applications such as autonomous vehicles, remote healthcare, and industrial machine-to-machine communications, while still being able to work with the 4G network. The radio is structured to work with eBand and Multi-Band, all in one unit, and only needing an antenna to function contrary to the usual 2 or 3 radio unit systems. This is the industry’s first and only single box design for a multi-band 5G transport application solution. The unit is said to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) significantly. The WTM 4800 does not need an indoor interface for the user as with other solutions, which need to be configured, maintained and installed in a complex series of steps. The WTM is less complicated, easily configured over the cloud and scalable for nearly any type of transportation application needing radio connection. […]
How Do You Handle Backups in Linux? Hardware, Software, Configuration, etc…
Linux EXT-4 File System Corruption & Attempted Recovery There’s a file system corruption bug related to EXT-4 in Linux, and it happened to me a few times in Ubuntu 18.04. You are using your computer normally, then suddenly you can’t write anything to the drive, as the root partition has switched to read-only. Why? Here are some error messages:
1 2 3 4 |
[15882.773747] EXT4-fs (dm-4): re-mounted. Opts: (null) [15898.557605] EXT4-fs error (device dm-4): ext4_iget:4831: inode #2113041: comm rm: bad extra_isize 20100 (inode size 256) [15898.568305] EXT4-fs error (device dm-4): ext4_iget:4831: inode #2113042: comm rm: bad extra_isize 35148 (inode size 256) [15898.569774] EXT4-fs error (device dm-4): ext4_lookup:1577: inode #2557277: comm rm: deleted inode referenced: 2113043 |
What then happens is that you restart your PC, and get to the command where you are asked to run:
1 |
esfsck /dev/sda2 |
Change /dev/sda2 to whatever your drive is, and manually review errors. You can take note of the file modified, as you’ll likely have to fix your Ubuntu installation later on. Usually the fix consists of various package re-installations:
1 |
sudo apt install --resintall <package-name> |
It happened to me two or three times in the past, and it’s a pain, but I eventually recovered. But this time, I was not so lucky. The system would […]