Extract Firmware using UART
At this point you should have:
Understand what UART does (if not check: UART)
Identified UART pins (if not check: Identify UART)
Got a working connection to UART (if not check: Connect to UART)
Not all UART interfaces are the same. Infact manufacturers could output actually anything over it. So there is no guarante you can abuse UART to dump firmware or get a shell on the device. But there are common methods, which we want to discuss further:
Some manufacturers build a failsafe mode in their devices, which is designed as a recovery option, if the device is not operating correctly. An example for this is OpenWRT, which will print something like this in the bootlog:
Press the [f] key and hit [enter] to enter failsafe mode
Press the [1], [2], [3] or [4] key and hit [enter] to select the debug level
Pressing F
will give us a root shell:

Depending on your device you may have to mount the correct filesystem first:
Run
ls /dev
orblkid
to locate storage devices and partitions (e.g.,/dev/sda1
,/dev/mmcblk0p2
).Use these commands to first create a mount point and then mound the filesystem:
mkdir /mnt/filesystem
mount /dev/<root_partition> /mnt/filesystem
Now you may access the filesystem under
/mnt/filesystem
From here we can check if the root-filesystem is already been mounted and we can look for:
/etc/shadow hashes
ssh private keys
other credentials
Analyze firmware
Using
binwalk firmware.bin
we can try to analyze the firmware and extract sensitive informationcheck the "Analyze Firmware" chapter
Resources
*Accessing and Dumping Firmware Through UART *Extracting Firmware: Every Method Explained
Last updated
Was this helpful?