Whether partly (or fully) state-sponsored, as is usually the case in Europe, or paid out of students' own pockets, as is generally the case across over the pond, there's a question about engineering education that keeps popping up. "Why is it so damn expensive?"
This is often the supposedly elegant …
So what we're going to do today is try our hand at fuzzing the Modbus protocol. We're going to go through a minimal example: we'll fuzz just one Modbus function, with the minimum number of fields that are likely to provide useful results. A full Modbus fuzzing suite is beyond …
I just spent a few evenings playing with WSL2 and all I've been able to think of during this whole time is one of Rob Pike's remarks from his still eerily relevant talk on how systems research has become irrelevant: "[Windows] is [to the pre-OS X Macintosh] an industrial response …
The last two weeks have been among the busiest weeks I've had in years. Most of the security work I've done in the last eight years or so has been largely confined to the realm of embedded systems, IoT, SCADA & friends, but these trying times have brought enough trouble that …
During the last few months, I've been working on something entirely unlike anything I've done before: a game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, a console that's about as old as I am. And I love it!
You don't often hear good things about writing code for resource-constrained systems from the …
There's an old saying that I mistrust deeply: users don't know what they want. I think they do, and I think that products that are designed based on the unshakeable conviction that users don't know what they want routinely turn out to be terrible.
You don't see it because sometimes …
I'm getting old, and there are things that I don't notice too well anymore. But I'm pretty sure UI elements have been getting bigger. Everywhere.
That makes a lot of sense on touch devices. Fingers are big and bulky, and the widgets that press them need to be big and …
It's very hard to write an introduction to an article about BLE without sounding a little ridiculous. What are you going to say, that it's all around us today? It's been all around us for five years. It's the #1 choice for IoT applications today, owing in no small part …
systemd, the (init?) system that everyone loves to hate, needs no introduction. It's pretty ubiquitous today -- to the point where you can find it, for example, in Yocto.
When it comes to its use in embedded systems, the (vocal) community response is either that it's too bloated, or that it's …
Modbus is a quaint protocol. It's one of my favourite protocols -- it's not very convenient to use, but it's pretty convenient to implement and remarkably flexible for an otherwise pretty opinionated protocol. Its specs are very self-contained and easy to follow.
That being said, like all protocols that are a …
