During the reverse engineering of hardware systems it is handy to be able to dump EEPROMs without removing them from the circuit under examination, it makes for faster and easier system analysis. eepeep comes with a preconfigured list of EEPROMs for ease of use but it can be customised to extract any EEPROM that supports the I2C protocol.
eepeep hardware component connects to the EEPROMs using logical probes and then the software component is used to run the extraction.
You can find a detailed step-by-step guide on extracting EEPROMs with eepeep in this blog post.
The hardware component acts as a bridge between the client and the EEPROM, implementing the bus scanning and EEPROM access protocols. At its core it is a state machine that receives messages from the client (scan bus, dump eeprom) and translates these to the I2C protocol commands that interact with the EEPROMs.
The reference implementation of the hardware component uses an Arduino Uno and a couple of 4.7k resistors, this is the BOM:
- Arduino UNO
- 2 x 4.7k resistors
The following schematic shows the simplicity of the hardware component:
Flash the Arduino with the eepeep firmware and you are ready to go, just connect the SCL, SDA, Vcc and GND ports using logic probes (or anything you can get your hands on that does the job) and move to the software component.
The software component of eepeep is an ElectronJS application that communicates with the hardware component through serial port commands, precompiled binaries are available for the following platforms:
If your platform is not listed of you prefer to compile the software yourself just checkout this repository and execute the following command:
$ cd client && yarn distBefore you launch the software client make sure the hardware component is connected and powered up through USB.
If you find eepeep useful consider contributing to its development by sharing issues you face during it usage, submitting pull requests to add new functionality or suggesting ideas for improvement. If you end-up developing code for eepeep you will find the following commands useful:
yarn test: runs the test suiteyarn dev: runs a fully-functional development instance of the client
If you submit new functionality it will be great it you can submit test cases to automatically confirm the functionality is working as expected, eepeep uses mocha as the test framework.
If you are in the mood to implement new functionality for eepeep the following list shows the prioritised list of pending functionality; it will be eventually implemented but certainly it will be faster if you implement it :-)
Release 1.1
- Refresh list of ports dynamically
- Show firmware version in welcome message
- Prefix time with console log entry
- Checksum verification
- Add preloaded configurations for at least 5 EEPROMs (and test them)
- Write tests for UI interaction
- Add logo
- Scan result as bit-pack of 0 and 1 instead of ASCII
- Add autoupdate capabilities (https://www.electron.build/auto-update)
- Compile binaries for MacOS
Release 1.2
- Implement SPI
- Achieve 100% test coverage
- ...