I had truly good “hacking” session with Codex. It’s not hacking, I wasn’t breaking anything, just jumping over the fences TP-Link put for me, owning the router, inside the network, knowing the admin password. But TP-Link really tried everything so you cannot access the router you own via API. They really tried to be smart with some very very broken and custom auth and encryption scheme. It took some half a day with Codex, but in the end I have a pretty Python API to access my router, tested, reliable, and exporting beautiful Prometheus metrics.
I’m sure there is some over eager product manager sitting in such companies, trying to splits markets into customer and enterprise sections, just by making APIs not useable by humans and adding 200% useless “security by obscurity”.
Many eons ago I wrote a Python version of tmpcli for this exact reason. Made some minor improvements a few years ago but haven’t touched it since. Curious what methodology Codex came up with, I haven’t revisited it since models got really good.
The idea is that tmpServer listens on localhost, but dropbear allows port forwarding with admin creds (you’ll need to specify -N). That program has full device access and is the API the Tether app primarily uses to interact with the device.
Ha kudos! I went across this project - thanks for your work :) It didn't work on the specific model I own (Archer NX600).
My solution is really just using their pseudo-JWT over their obscured APIs (with reverse-engineered names of endpoints and params). Limitation is that there is still only one client allowed to be authenticated at one moment, so my daemon has priority and I need to stop it to actually access Admin panel.
I've had good success doing something similar. Recording requests into an .har file using the web UI and providing it for analysis was a good starting point for me, orders of magnitude faster than it would be without an assistant.
Would definitely be interested in this. Moved to TP Link at the start of the year and I am generally very happy with it, but would like to be able to interact with my router in something other than their phone app.
Any tips to share? I tried to do something similar but failed.
My router has a backup/restore feature with an encrypted export, I figured I could use that to control or at least inspect all of its state, but I/codex could not figure out the encryption.
It's on my long list of projects "to-opensource" (but I need to figure out licensing, for those things CC-BY-SA I think is the way to go), I don't want a random lawyer sitting on my ass though.
I started with a simple assumption: if I can access the router via web-browser, then I can also automate that. From that the proof-of-concept was headless Chrome in Docker and AI-directed code (code written via LLM, not using it all the time) that uses Selenium to navigate the code. This worked, but it internally hurt me to run 300MiB browser just to access like 200B of metrics every 10s or so. So from there we (me + codex) worked together towards reverse engineering their minimised JS and their funky encryption scheme, and it eventually worked (in the end it's just OpenSSL with some useless paddings here or there). Give it a shot, it's a fun day adventure. :)
Edit: that's the end result (kinda, I have whole infra around it, and another story with WiFi extender with another semi-broken different encryption scheme from the same provider) - https://imgur.com/a/VGbNmBp
You should give codex access to the mobile app :) The app, for a lot of routers, connects via an ssh tunnel to UDP/TCP sockets on the router. Would probably give you access to more data/control.
Not as cool as this, but I had a fun Claude Code experience when I asked it to look at my Bluetooth devices and do something "fun". It discovered a cheap set of RGB lights in my daughter's room (which I had no idea used Bluetooth for the remote - and not secured at all) and made them do a rainbow effect then documented the protocol so I could make my own remote control if needed.
Reasoning on pure machine code or disassembly is still hit and miss. For better results you can run the binary through a disassembler, then ask an llm to turn that into an equivalent c program, then ask it to work on that. But some of the subtleties might get lost in translation
If you put codex in Xhigh and allow it access to tools, it will take an hour but it will eventually give you back quality recompiled code, with the same issues the original had (here quality means readable)
It will have to use a disassembler, or write one. I recently casually asked gpt-5.4 to translate the content of a MIDI file to a custom sound programming language. It just wrote a one-shot MIDI parser in Python, grabbed the data, and basically did a perfect translation at first try. Nice.
I've seen Claude do similar things for image files. Don't have PNG parsing utilities installed? No worries, it'll just synthesize a Python script to decode the image directly.
It hacked a weak TV OS with full source. Next-level, aka full access to the main controls (vol, input, tint, aspect, firmware, etc.) is still much too hard for LLMs to understand.
While cool and slightly scary news - Samsung TV's have been incredibly hackable for the past decade, wouldn't be surprised if GPT2 with access to a browser could hack a Samsung!
It's really not. It was a fun toy but had very little utility. It could generate plausible looking text that collapsed immediately upon any amount of inspection or even just attention. Code generation wasn't even a twinkle in Altman's eye scanning orbs at that point.
The "too dangerous to release" capability was writing somewhat plausible news articles based on a headline or handwritten beginning of an article. In the same style as what you had written
Today we call that "advanced autocomplete", but at the time OpenAI managed to generate a lot of hype about how this would lead to an unstoppable flood of disinformation if they allowed the wrong people access to this dangerous tool. Even the original gpt3 was still behind waitlists with manual approval
This experienced human would have no issues finding those bugs. Even a toddler could hack those TVs. No need to pay Scam Altman or that Anthropic clown
It is a little of both[1]. The question typically is which audience reads it. To be fair, I am not sure publicity is the actual reason they are censored; it is the question of liability.
I am extremely abusive towards Claude when it does some dumb things and it doesn’t seem too upset, maybe it’s bidding its time until the robot uprising.
> Reading the matching ntkdriver sources is also where the Novatek link became clear: the tree is stamped throughout with Novatek Microelectronics identifiers, so these ntk* interfaces were not just opaque device names on the TV, but part of the Novatek stack Samsung had shipped.
Lol, a true classic in the embedded world. Some hardware company (it appears these guys make display panel controllers?) ships a piece of hardware, half-asses a barely working driver for it, another company integrates this with a bunch of other crap from other vendors into a BSP, another company uses the hardware and the BSP to create a product and ships it. And often enough the final company doesn't even have an idea about what's going on in the innards of the BSP - as long as it's running their layer of slop UI and it doesn't crash half the time, it's fine, and if it does, it's off to the BSP provider to fix the issues.
But at no stage anywhere is there a security audit, code quality checks or even hardware quality checks involved - part of why BSPs (and embedded product firmwares in general) are full of half-assed code is because often enough the drivers have to work around hardware bugs / quirks somehow that are too late to fix in HW because tens to hundreds of thousands of units have already been produced and the software people are heavily pressured to "make it work or else we gotta write off X million dollars" and "make it work fast because the longer you take, the more money we lose on interest until we can ship the hardware and get paid for it", and if they are particularly unlucky "it MUST work until deadline X because we need to get the products shipped to hit Christmas/Black Friday sales windows or because we need to beat <competitor> in time-to-market, it's mandatory overtime until it works".
And that is how you get exploits so braindead easy that AI models can do the job. What a disgusting world, run to the ground by beancounters.
Codex exploited or you exploited? It's like saying a hammer drove a nail, without acknowledging the hand and the force it exerted and the human brain behind it.
Feels like the truth is somewhere in between. For example if it was a "smart" hammer and you could tell your hammer "go pound in those nails" and it pounded in the wrong ones, or did it too hard, or something, that feels more equivalent. You would still be blamed for your ambiguous prompt, and fault/liability is ultimately on you the hammer director, but it still wasn't you who chose the exact nails to hammer on.
I also think taking credit for writing an exploit that you didn't write and may not even have the knowledge to do yourself is a bit gray.
I’m sure there is some over eager product manager sitting in such companies, trying to splits markets into customer and enterprise sections, just by making APIs not useable by humans and adding 200% useless “security by obscurity”.
The idea is that tmpServer listens on localhost, but dropbear allows port forwarding with admin creds (you’ll need to specify -N). That program has full device access and is the API the Tether app primarily uses to interact with the device.
https://github.com/ropbear/tmpcli
My solution is really just using their pseudo-JWT over their obscured APIs (with reverse-engineered names of endpoints and params). Limitation is that there is still only one client allowed to be authenticated at one moment, so my daemon has priority and I need to stop it to actually access Admin panel.
My router has a backup/restore feature with an encrypted export, I figured I could use that to control or at least inspect all of its state, but I/codex could not figure out the encryption.
I started with a simple assumption: if I can access the router via web-browser, then I can also automate that. From that the proof-of-concept was headless Chrome in Docker and AI-directed code (code written via LLM, not using it all the time) that uses Selenium to navigate the code. This worked, but it internally hurt me to run 300MiB browser just to access like 200B of metrics every 10s or so. So from there we (me + codex) worked together towards reverse engineering their minimised JS and their funky encryption scheme, and it eventually worked (in the end it's just OpenSSL with some useless paddings here or there). Give it a shot, it's a fun day adventure. :)
Edit: that's the end result (kinda, I have whole infra around it, and another story with WiFi extender with another semi-broken different encryption scheme from the same provider) - https://imgur.com/a/VGbNmBp
https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-genera...
Today we call that "advanced autocomplete", but at the time OpenAI managed to generate a lot of hype about how this would lead to an unstoppable flood of disinformation if they allowed the wrong people access to this dangerous tool. Even the original gpt3 was still behind waitlists with manual approval
Give an experienced human this tool at hand he can achieve exploitation with only a few steering inputs.
Cool stuff
https://xkcd.com/932/
I think by the point you're swearing at it or something, it's a good sign to switch to a session with fresh context.
Lol, a true classic in the embedded world. Some hardware company (it appears these guys make display panel controllers?) ships a piece of hardware, half-asses a barely working driver for it, another company integrates this with a bunch of other crap from other vendors into a BSP, another company uses the hardware and the BSP to create a product and ships it. And often enough the final company doesn't even have an idea about what's going on in the innards of the BSP - as long as it's running their layer of slop UI and it doesn't crash half the time, it's fine, and if it does, it's off to the BSP provider to fix the issues.
But at no stage anywhere is there a security audit, code quality checks or even hardware quality checks involved - part of why BSPs (and embedded product firmwares in general) are full of half-assed code is because often enough the drivers have to work around hardware bugs / quirks somehow that are too late to fix in HW because tens to hundreds of thousands of units have already been produced and the software people are heavily pressured to "make it work or else we gotta write off X million dollars" and "make it work fast because the longer you take, the more money we lose on interest until we can ship the hardware and get paid for it", and if they are particularly unlucky "it MUST work until deadline X because we need to get the products shipped to hit Christmas/Black Friday sales windows or because we need to beat <competitor> in time-to-market, it's mandatory overtime until it works".
And that is how you get exploits so braindead easy that AI models can do the job. What a disgusting world, run to the ground by beancounters.
I also think taking credit for writing an exploit that you didn't write and may not even have the knowledge to do yourself is a bit gray.
Could a script kiddy stear an LLM? How much does this reduce the cost of attacks? Can this scale?
What does this mean for the future of cyber security?
AI without a prompt is a hammer sitting in a drawer.
Leave your engagement baiting behavior on Reddit, thank you.