Hacking a Sumup Solo Payment Terminal to Run Doom
Can Sumup Solo payment terminal devices run Doom? Aaron Christophel found out that, indeed, they can.
When the average person hears the word "hacker," they think of the stereotypical black hat hacker sitting in a basement while using a computer with several monitors to steal identities. But the hacking community is so much more than that. That's especially true when it comes to hardware hacking, which is all about finding new uses for the consumer devices that surround us and would otherwise end up in a landfill. Aaron Christophel is an expert in the hardware hacking arena and managed to hack a mini Sumup Solo payment terminal to run Doom.
The Sumup Solo is a small touchscreen-based payment terminal for accepting credit cards and NFC (Near-Field Communication) phone payments, similar to what Square offers but at a much lower price. The device is very compact, but incorporates a large touchscreen. When Christophel cracked open a Sumup Solo payment terminal, he found some pretty impressive hardware that is on-par with many SBCs (Single-Board Computers). It has a 1GHz CPU and 256MiB of DRAM. It needs that much power so that it can run Linux to support the Sumup payment software, which processes transactions via the internet.
By connecting a simple USB-to-UART adapter between his laptop and the Sumup Solo, Christophel was able to access the device's Linux terminal. That provided access to U-Boot, which is already a big security flaw. And by rebooting, Christophel got root access to the terminal without any kind of authentication necessary. Together, those present a pretty massive security flaw, as a bad actor could potentially skim payment transaction information, install scripts to create duplicate transactions, and other nefarious deeds.
Of course, Christophel is not a such a person, so he reported the security vulnerabilities to Sumup. But he couldn't resist having some fun with the device while he had access. Because he had root privileges, it was trivial for him to download Doom. He did have to utilize a few workarounds when compiling to get access to the frame buffer so that the game window would show on the screen, but Christophel's efforts were ultimately successful.
That answers the question for you; yes, the Sumup Solo can run Doom.