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Category Archives: General
On BashLite and Shellshock
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
A number of people have been in touch with me about the fact that our Linux courses use an embedded target system that deploys BusyBox as standard and that there’s a “known exploit” doing the rounds called BashLite.SMB – this is obviously a cause for alarm!… Right?
WRONG!! Never one to shy away from defending my beloved Linux I wanted to make a quick public service announcement to say that this appears to be a fairly run-of-the-mill piece of malware riding […]
Posted in General
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Acorn Goes to Market with RISC Microprocessor
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
No I’ve not lost the plot, this was actually the headline from Electronics back in August 1985!
Recently my father was clearing out his loft at home and came across a couple of bagfuls of “rubbish” (garbage) which was full of various memorabilia from my degree days. Among the various artefacts, to my great surprise, I came across a photocopy of this article.
For those of you, like me, who were involved in electronics at that time, it’s a real trip down […]
Posted in General
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Rapid Application Development with Python
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
Following on from my previous post on Python and our new course on Python for Test Engineers which takes an elementary approach, I felt it was time to pay homage to that wonderful language once again but this time focusing on its applicability for Rapid Application Development.
The Higher Level the Language; The More Productive the Programmer
I love writing Python. I’ll be honest, it’s the closest I’ll get to writing executable pseudo-code which best mirrors how my mind works and I’m […]
Posted in General
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The Top 5 Things I’ve Learnt about Git
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
During the last couple of years, internally we’ve moved over to using Git as our Revision Control System (RCS). It’s been an interesting exercise, especially where, like me, you’ve come from a traditional model (such as subversion or even back to good old SCCS). I’m sure you’ve all got your own “top 5” and I don’t necessarily expect you to agree with me, but here’s my key learning points:
#1 “Branch always, branch often”
At the outset this was […]
Style vs. Substance in C programming
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
In an email from UBM Tech this week there was a link to an article titled “A Simple Style for C Programming by Mansi Research“. It was actually authored back on May 2010 by Meetul Kinariwala but appeared this week under the what’s hot section, so I thought I’d take a look [advice to the reader; don’t bother].
The problem with guides like this is that style is a very subjective area (as any parent will tell you how their kids […]
Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues, General
Tagged astyle, MISRA-C, Static Analysis
7 Comments
Python – The everyman’s language
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
Python is a very nice language in many respects: enforced white-spacing promotes readability, extensibility and Python’s inbuilt Read-Eval-Print-Loop interpreter combined with its introspection capabilities provides a very easy way to learn and get to grips with the language.
But that can’t be all, can it? Why Python?
One of the reasons behind the success of our course has been customers wanting a good language for developing automated testing scripts and Python fits the bill brilliantly – it’s fast (enough), approachable and has great […]
Default construction and initialisation in C++11
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
Default constructors
In C++ if you don’t provide a constructor for the class the compiler provides one for you (that does nothing):
This, of course, isn’t very useful so typically we write our own constructors to initialise the attributes of our class. However, as soon as you write a (non-default) constructor the compiler stops providing the default constructor:
The normal solution is to write our own default constructor. In C++11 there is syntax to allow you to explicitly create the compiler-supplied constructor without […]
Posted in General
2 Comments
I Dream of a Cheeky Missile Launcher
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
I read a blog post by Matthias Vallentin a while back about getting a USB missile launcher working and thought that a similar gadget would be a nice candidate for the 2012 refresh of our successful EL503 Developing for Embedded Linux course so ordered a nice looking piece of hardware from Amazon – the Thunder Missile Launcher from Dream Cheeky.
Sadly these guys don’t provide Linux drivers and the hardware wasn’t an exact match for the launcher used in Matthias’ article […]
Posted in C/C++ Programming, General, Testing, training
Tagged kernel driver, launcher, linux, USB
2 Comments
Capturing the Stripe-d Flag 2.0 – The After Party
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
Following on from our previous article looking at Stripe’s Capture the Flag 2.0 challenge, Team Feabhas cracked the last of the levels and its members should hopefully be receiving their complementary t-shirts soon.
It has proven to be a popular article with lots of people coming to the blog for solutions and walk-through, and now that the competition has finished we have decided to share the way we approached each of these levels, their solution and the way in which the […]
Posted in Design Issues, General, Testing
Tagged linux, walkthrough, web security. strip ctf
2 Comments
Capturing the Stripe-d Flag
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
In the first half of this year, the online payment company Stripe held a Capture the Flag competition as a way to draw attention to online security.
They state that:
“The hardest part of writing secure code is learning to think like an attacker. For example, every programmer is told to watch out for SQL injections, but it’s hard to appreciate just how exploitable they are until you’ve written a SQL injection of your own.” – Stripe
It was a fascinating challenge and […]