#01 - Identifying Components - Hardware Hacking Tutorial

Published at : 23 Dec 2025

This is the first episode of the Hardware Hacking Tutorial series.

This series is to share information on how to do hardware hacking and how to do reverse engineering. The series is useful both for beginners and experts.

Hardware Hacking will be described with practical hacking activities on real devices following a process based on:

1. Information gathering of hardware and software

2. Building an emulation environment where to run interesting binaries and reverse engineer them, if needed

3. Analyzing how the device works

4. Hack the device and modify its firmware

In this first episode we will talk about how to identify the device, the manufacturer and the Original Design Manufacturer and how to identify the integrated circuits inside the device using some tips to read part numbers when they seems unreadable.

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Links with additional Information:

Channel's Author: https://www.makemehack.com/2020/02/a-short-introduction-of-myself.html
Channel's Web Site: https://www.makemehack.com

The sample router (Gemtek WVRTM-127ACN) on techinfodepot: http://en.techinfodepot.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Gemtek_WVRTM-127ACN

The sample router (Gemtek WVRTM-127ACN) reverse engineered on GitHub: https://github.com/digiampietro/hacking-gemtek

The OpenWRT Project: https://openwrt.org/

Introduction to reverse engineering, Mike Anderson, Embedded Linux Conference 2018, includes how to open hardened devices:
slides: https://elinux.org/images/c/c5/IntroductionToReverseEngineering_Anderson.pdf
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v7UaMsgg_c

Chinese search engine: https://www.baidu.com

System On a Chip Mediatek MT7621AT datasheet: http://www.t-firefly.com/download/FireWRT/hardware/MT7621.pdf

RAM 128Mb Winbond W971GG6SB datasheet: https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Winbond%20PDFs/W971GG6SB.pdf

74HC164 datasheet: https://assets.nexperia.com/documents/data-sheet/74HC_HCT164.pdf

NAND Flash Memory F59L1G81LA datasheet: https://www.esmt.com.tw/upload/pdf/ESMT/datasheets/F59L1G81LA%282Y%29.pdf