Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Freescale customer service

Tuesday, March 10th, 2015 Nigel Jones

I have to admit to having a soft spot for Freescale microprocessors. The first micro I ever used was a Motorola 6809 and for the first few years of my career I worked exclusively on 6800’s, 68HC11’s and 68000 processors.  Times changed and I largely moved away from the product range, although I did return periodically as projects dictated. Well such a project has recently come up. The project requires me to make some modifications to an existing code base and as is often the case, the original compiler and its license file have been lost to the winds of time. Accordingly, I downloaded an evaluation copy from Freescale’s web site and got to work.  After convincing myself that there were no significant issues with moving to the latest compiler version, it was time to purchase a license. And as the joke goes, that’s when the trouble started…

Freescale offers various versions of the compiler, and in addition offers various optional software components that can be purchased. Trying to work out which components I needed to purchase was incredibly hard. Anyway, after considerable time, I came up with what I thought was needed and had my client purchase the requisite licenses. Downloading and installing the licenses was ridiculously complicated (as in it took about an hour to wade through all the documents), but I eventually got there. I then invoked CodeWarrior and got a wonderfully obtuse licensing error message that seemed to be saying I needed to purchase an additional component. However the component wasn’t for sale on Freescale’s website…

Accordingly I called customer support. Here’s the gist of the conversation:

Freescale: This is is unusual. It shouldn’t do that.

Me: OK.

Freescale: We don’t offer support for licensing issues over the phone. You’ll have to send an email to technical support detailing the problem.

Me: OK. How long is the response time?

Freescale: 48 – 72 hours.

Me: Do I have this right. Your product that I’ve paid for doesn’t work as advertised, you don’t offer telephone support for licensing issues, you require me to send you an email and it will then take you up to 72 hours to get me an answer?

Freescale: Yes.

I’m not sure what planet Freescale resides on, but this level of service simply doesn’t comport with what’s needed in the embedded space today. I think I understand now why I see so few Freescale designs. Is my experience unusual or is this the norm for Freescale today?

Firmalware

Tuesday, February 17th, 2015 Nigel Jones

There’s a fascinating story from Reuters (with a far more detailed report from Kaspersky) about how a very sophisticated hacking operation, presumably the NSA, has been targeting computers by reflashing the firmware of hard drives such that the attacker controls what is loaded at boot time. If you think this has shades of Stuxnet about it, then you aren’t alone.

Why am I posting this? Well I think in the embedded community there’s been a certain amount of nonchalance concerning malware attacks on firmware, aka Firmalware. I see a lot of shrugs – it’s firmware, so it’s not modifiable, or who wants to take control of X, or to attack it they will need the source code and so on. Well if you read the articles – and I strongly recommend you do, then you’ll read that the attacker almost certainly did get hold of the source code for the disk drives, that they exploited undocumented commands, that they reprogrammed the disk drive firmware and that they proceeded to take complete control of the victim’s computer.

So what’s this to do with you? Well I strongly urge you to consider the consequences of what would happen if an attacker took control of the gadget you are working on. For example, sitting on my desk right now is a USB dongle used to receive over the air digital TV broadcasts. It doesn’t sound like it’s a great avenue for exploitation. However, an attacker could easily do the following if they had control of this device.

  1. On broadcast (i.e. over the air) command, switch the dongle into acting like a USB drive. USB drives are a major source of malware infection.
  2. Again on broadcast command, force the dongle to tune to a specific frequency resulting in the user being exposed to whatever the attacker wishes them to.

Although I’m not exactly the paranoid type, it really doesn’t take much imagination to work out how legions of embedded devices could be made to do some rather nasty things to their users.

The bottom line. If you haven’t thought about what happens if an attacker gets control of your gadget then you aren’t doing your job. Some things to ponder:

  1. How secure is your source code?
  2. If you have a bootstrap loader, how secure is it?
  3. When you distribute new firmware for installation on your gadget, is it distributed in encrypted form?
  4. Even if it’s distributed in encrypted form, is it downloaded in encrypted form?
  5. How do you protect the encryption keys?
  6. Are you setting the lock bits correctly so as to at least make binary extraction more challenging. (However don’t get too cocky – see this site )

The list could go on – but I think you get the idea.

The engineering – marketing divide

Sunday, April 6th, 2014 Nigel Jones

We have all sat in surreal meetings with the sales and marketing folks. This video captures the dynamic perfectly (caution – you won’t know whether to laugh or cry):

The Expert Video

I actually have some sympathy for the marketing people portrayed here, as it must be very hard when you’re so far out of your depth. The person I can’t stand is the smarmy sales guy who’ll promise anything to make a sale, regardless of the consequences. I have to admit to having chewed out a few sales guys in my time that have pulled stunts like this one.

Anyway, I don’t have any particular insights on this other than to let you all know that you’re not alone when it comes to meetings like these.

2012 Explained – Toyota

Thursday, December 27th, 2012 Nigel Jones

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed the paltry number of articles posted by me this year. While there have been a number of contributing factors, one of the more significant has been Toyota. I have been part of the team that has spent a large part of 2012 examining the engine control module hardware and firmware for Toyota cars and light trucks in light of reports on unintended acceleration. Yesterday, a tentative settlement was announced in the class action lawsuit. Other litigation concerning personal injury is still pending. As a result of the pending litigation, together with various protective orders (confidentiality agreements) I can’t comment or provide any details. For those of you that are interested, here are some key links.

Settlement announced: Approximately 5pm EST on December 26th 2012

Statement by the plaintiffs.

Statement by Toyota.

Information about the settlement.

The proposed settlement

Update: The federal judge has given provisional approval to the settlement.

For a primer on Toyota’s engine control module, you can read the lengthy report published by NASA. Readers of this blog will find appendix A the most illuminating.

Anyway, it is my hope that I will be able to blog considerably more frequently in 2013.

 

Rabbit patches and embedded systems

Monday, August 29th, 2011 Nigel Jones

You may think from the title that I’m writing about Rabbit microprocessors – but no I’m actually intending to talk about bunnies. What you ask do rabbits have to do with embedded systems? Well read on and find out…

If you have ever had a vegetable garden then you will know that they are magnets for rabbits. Furthermore, you will soon find out that it takes extraordinary efforts to keep the rabbits out, as they have a tremendous ability to circumvent all sorts of fences.  When faced with such a problem, it is sometimes advisable to build a rabbit patch. The basic idea is this – you plant your garden and put a fence around it, and then on the outside of the fence you plant a second vegetable garden that is purely for the rabbits – i.e. a rabbit patch. The rabbits feed on the rabbit patch and leave your real garden alone because they would have to exert effort to get to it – and they don’t need to as their needs are satiated by the rabbit patch.

So what has this to do with embedded systems? Well let me describe a scenario to you that is almost certainly all too familiar to anyone that has been doing this for a few years.

It’s dog and pony show time and marketing is coming to pronounce judgement on your latest creation. Now if you are fortunate, the folks in marketing are a pleasure to work with. However from time to time, you run into someone who is incapable of attending a dog and pony show without offering criticisms / complaints. (I’m talking about the sort of person who would have criticized Michelangelo’s David at its unveiling). When faced with such an individual, I have found that the answer is to build the embedded system’s equivalent of a rabbit patch. It works like this. You intentionally put into the demonstration something that obviously isn’t quite right. Come time for the dog and pony show, the complainer latches on to the ‘problem’, and proceeds to explain in detail why it is wrong. You sit there and graciously accept the pearls of wisdom dispensed to you. You can then proceed to the meat of the presentation and get some useful work done.  The meeting ends and our protagonist walks away happy – and you have managed to actually have a useful and productive meeting. Naturally the fix to the ‘problem’ is a flick of a compilation switch.

So now you know what a rabbit patch is. I encourage you to use it sparingly. I also encourage you to watch out for it being used on you! I have sat in on a couple of presentations where I’m pretty sure a rabbit patch has been deployed. Fortunately I’m also pretty sure the rabbit patch wasn’t for my benefit…

On a personal note, I’m expecting to return to my normal blogging schedule. The long awaited hardware test may actually make an appearance soon.