Insights from the MAME project into hardware reverse engineering
Proposta de palestra enviada para a conferência LibrePlanet 2016
Insights from the MAME project into hardware reverse engineering: a path towards free-firmware.
Resumo
This talk presents how libre hardware designs have been helping the software freedom movement to acchieve its goals. But, at the same time, it is also discussed how reverse engineering of digital electrocnic devices is still an extremely important tool for the effective freedom of computer users.
Bio
Felipe Sanches é ativista e desenvolvedor de software livre e projetista de hardware livre. Co-fundador da Metamáquina, empresa brasileira de impressão 3d, é um entusiasta das tecnologias de fabricação digital. Participa do desenvolvimento de softwares livres nas áreas de design gráfico, CAD e modelagem/impressão 3D como Inkscape, OpenSCAD, Pronterface e GNU LibreDWG. É também co-fundador do Garoa Hacker Clube, primeiro hackerspace brasileiro, e do PoliGNU: Grupo de Estudos de Software Livre da Escola Politécnica da USP.
Descrição
This talk presents how libre hardware designs have been helping the software freedom movement to acchieve its goals. But, at the same time, it is also discussed how reverse engineering of digital electrocnic devices is still an extremely important tool for the effective freedom of computer users.
By inspecting a pile of electronic junk, byt reading detasheets and by studying the source code of projects like MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), we can better understand how several digital electronics devices work internally and, with that knowledge, we can interact with these devices even after they become rare and inaccessible. We can also leart more about hardware design techniques and about embedded software development, computer architectures, etc.
The techniques that we need to master in order to develop new emulators include reverse engineering procedures that are also very useful for aiding in the creation of free firmware solutions to replace the non-free blobs used in a broad variety of daily-use devices. These techniques are also useful for the development of free drivers fo undocumented devices and in the porting of operating systems and BIOSes to new hardware platforms.
This way, such reverse engineering knowledge function as an essential tool for reestablishing the computher user's authonomy nowadays. We need to strengthen a community of skillful hardware reverse engineers so that we can solve the freedom issues denounced by projects such as Linux-Libre.
Finally, the creation of hardware based on libre designs has been proving to be a strong ally to the software freedom movement, in times when malicious procedures gradually migrate from non-free software to the inside of microchips in our personal computers.