In previous posts, we've gone over how to tear down Arcade cabinets containing SPI Flash as well as how to dissect the data that was extracted from the Rom. With this next series of posts, I'd like to take the concepts we talked about on those platforms and demonstrate them on a more popular platform With this post our goal will be to extract the firmware from the platform and locate and type of debugging if possible (UART,JTAG,etc). We will explore multiple ways of attempting to extract the filesystem and outline the steps taken for each method.

When reverse engineering an embedded system that is Linux based, one often wishes that they had an examplar system that could be virtualized, if only to gain familiarity with the nuances of the specific kernel version or to learn more about the running applications without needing the native hardware. Make no mistake, this is a bit of a pipe dream when working with bespoke embedded systems, but if you're working with a more generalized system (or if you just want to quickly spin up a Linux system to test against using QEMU) buildroot is a tool that can be used to generate images that will run in QEMU! The purpose of this post will be to describe how to build specific kernel images for QEMU using buildroot.