This talk will take you through some tools and techniques Hamish (member of DimSumLabs) used to reverse engineer the keyboard controller in his Thinkpad x230 laptop. He was driven to start this project when the laptops currently on sale just did not meet his requirements. Even the durable Thinkpad laptops he preferred in the past are being dumbed down. Eventually, he will need a new laptop – and with the available offerings, he just does not want anything that currently can be purchased off the shelf.
To keep the project achievable, Hamish reduced his gripes to just the keyboard – asking the question: “Can I shoehorn an older keyboard in a modern laptop?”
Taking you through UEFI, ARCompact CPUs, Firmware Reversing, big structure dumping, SMM and custom virtual machines to answer that with ‘maybe’. Hamish hopes to inspire others to address their hardware gripes too – and offer some tools and confidence that they can.
