Everything I own, owned

Over the past two weeks, the author has conducted reverse engineering on various peripherals that are within arm's reach. Through this process, they obtained a full plaintext command shell inside their microphone, controlled a webcam's activity LED, and enabled memory writes on a key light connected via WiFi. Peripherals have proven to be an ideal target for agent-driven reverse engineering due to their small computers, data connections to the host, and firmware update mechanisms.

The author's process for each device involved grabbing the device's firmware and associated update tool, reverse engineering it in their environment, and using Claude Opus 5 to achieve their goals.

The author's investigation began with an Insta360 Link webcam, which runs a ThreadX RTOS from the upstream SoC vendor, Ambarella. This RTOS hosts several small vision models, including face tracking and gesture detection. By exploiting the USB Video Class interface, the author was able to subvert the activity LED and gain full control of the device's firmware. The camera's LED color, blink pattern, and other indicators were found to have structured firmware tables, which Claude Opus 5 could be used to patch and modify.

Next, the author targeted an ASUS ROG Swift PG42UQ monitor that they were annoyed by the pop-up overlay notifying them to run "pixel cleaning". Using Claude Opus 5, the author discovered that the firmware had minimal protection and could be fully flashed without user interaction. The author patched the firmware to disable the pixel cleaning warning.

Additionally, the author explored the DisplayWidget control channel over the display cable to change input and other settings, creating a shell script that could flip through DDC/CI features like hardware crosshair or zoom overlays, FPS counter, and countdown timer.

Finally, the author targeted their Shure MV7 microphone, which connects over USB and has on-device digital volume controls. The firmware for this microphone was hidden inside the Windows software, MOTIV Mix, and Claude Opus 5 installed it in Wine, enabling the author to update their microphone from Linux. The firmware contained both DSP and MCU firmware, but the author found it to be relatively uninteresting in terms of security vulnerabilities.