What if you forgot your credentials and lost access to the device? One possibility to regain access is to extract and change the firmware image. Without access to the source code, one possibility is to extract the firmware to make the necessary changes and then update the device.

You may want to improve or change the behavior of the device. Extracting and analyzing the firmware image can be a viable option to understand its operation. Now imagine that you want to understand better how the device works, but you don’t have much information about it.

Imagine an electronic device like a router, an IP camera or a hard disk. This process of extracting the firmware image is also called dumping or snarfing.īut why extract the firmware from an electronic device? Why? The extraction process involves reading and copying the firmware image stored in the device’s memory to a file on your computer. The firmware, a program that executes in a dedicated way and with a specific purpose in a microcontroller or microprocessor, is usually stored in a persistent memory device like a NAND/NOR flash or EEPROM. JTAG is a physical hardware interface that makes it possible, among other things, to extract the firmware image from electronic devices.

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