Andrew Zonenberg's Open-Hardware DUMPTRUCK Will Dump Any Flash, NVM Module You Fancy

Embedded security engineer Andrew Zonenberg is working on a device designed to make it easier to reverse-engineer devices through flash content analysis, by interfacing with and dumping almost any flash or other non-volatile memory (NVM) device you can imagine: DUMPTRUCK.

"This is DUMPTRUCK, an open hardware flash dumping (and eventually programming) platform for embedded RE [Reverse-Engineering] work," Zonenberg explains of his creation. "It provides 50 GPIOs [General-Purpose Input/Output pins] at each of 3.3, 2.5, 1.8, and 1.2V logic levels, power at the matching voltage, plus DUT [Device Under Test] core power muxable to any of the four voltages."

The idea behind DUMPTRUCK is simple: to provide a single device, which can be connected to a host over a gigabit Ethernet connection, capable of dumping the contents of as wide a variety of flash and other non-volatile memory modules as possible including I2C EEPROMs, SPI flash, raw ONFI NAND, and eMMC — so that their contents can be analyzed and, when the project is later expanded to include flashing support, modified and restored.

"[The] programming/dumping algorithms are implemented in a combination of a[n AMD] Xilinx XC7S100 FPGA and a [STMicroelectronics] STM32H735 microcontroller," Zonenberg explains of the device's driving hardware, "allowing the entire device to be controlled over SSH from a PC. This is a 'junk box build,' [using] components I have in inventory as much as possible, even if they're not necessarily optimal, unless there is a well defined reason not to."

At the time of writing, Zonenberg was part-way through bring-up of an initial prototype; his progress can be followed on Mastodon. More information, including copious notes, hardware design files, and source code, is available on the project's GitHub repository under the permissive BSD three-clause license.