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I have a laptop that I recently lost the BIOS Admin password for. I contacted the manufacturer and, after giving them some information about my BIOS (version, uuid), they sent me a file, smc.bin to put on a USB stick and boot in order to reset the BIOS password.

I'm interested in how this works and what the binary file is. I'm skilled with linux, but don't know much about reverse-engineering. What tools can I use to examine this binary? What's a introductory thought-process to determine what a binary file like this is?

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As a tool I would recommend radare2 for this task.

And if you never done something like this before this is probably the best tutorial to get you started with.

Just be in mind its not gonna be a quick and dirty job, might take you a while.

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    That tutorial is for the legacy BIOSes. Modern PC/Laptops firmware usually UEFI-based. Aug 26, 2015 at 16:14
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What vendor do you have? If it is UEFI-compatible firmware, you can use UEFITool to unpack it. And use the radare2 tool to disassemble the code.

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Without actually knowing more about the system (system vendor), I would suggest to use binwalk to get the basic file layout. Then follow what other have done:

You may want to use hachoir / hachoir-subfile, see for example:

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