Shmoocon 2017: A Simple Tool For Reverse Engineering RF
Anyone can hack a radio, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy: there’s a lot of mechanics that go into formatting a signal before you can decode the ones and zeros.
At his Shmoocon talk, [Paul Clark] introduced a great new tool for RF Reverse Engineering. It’s called WaveConverter, and it is possibly the single most interesting tool we’ve seen in radio in a long time.
If you wanted to hack an RF system — read the data from a tire pressure monitor, a car’s key fob, a garage door opener, or a signal from a home security system’s sensor — you’ll be doing the same thing for each attack. The first is to capture the signal, probably with a software defined radio. Take this data into GNU Radio, and you’ll have to figure out the modulation, the framing, the encoding, extract the data, and finally figure out what the ones and zeros mean. Only that last part, figuring out what the ones and zeros actually do, is the real hack. Everything before that is just a highly advanced form of data entry and manipulation.
