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I'm trying to reverse engineering my router firmware after reading an interesting article about an hidden backdoor inside router firmwares from a popular company.

Data has been extracted (using raspberry pi b+ spi) directly from flash because there isn't a downloadable firmware around.

partial serial output 

Start to decompress!
Booting
Press 'ESC' to enter BOOT console...
Ext. phy is not found. 
Boot from NOR/SPI flash
(c)Copyright Realtek, Inc. 2012
Project RTL8676S LOADER (LZMA)
Version 00.01.02a-rc (Nov 13 2014 17:15:26)

binwalk output 

LZMA compressed data, properties: 0x5D, dictionary size: 8388608 bytes, uncompressed size: 70744 bytes
(lots of lines like this one)

findings 

0x8000 to 0xE777: bootloader?
0x10000: rootfs start
  first 0x13 byte: unknown data (header ?)
  build date
  string "router.img"
  firmware data

I think firmware is encrypted. I can't extract bootloader, kernel and rootfs for static analysis. Is it possible to emulate using qemu? Fw link: flashimage pass: fi00

Thanks in advance

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  • i have the same case like you now, Did you found the true file system and extracted ? Please give me hint. Thanks
    – Deject.d
    May 22, 2022 at 15:26

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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From what I can see, it appears to be a binary image for a MIPS processor (big endian). The image appears to be loaded at offset 0x80000000. There is a subroutine at 0x80001d70 offset which prints out the initial "Start to decompress!" message at PC 0x80001e38. Hopefully that should get you started.

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  • Thanks. It's a good starting point indeed. Do you think it's a single file (like VxWorks) as filesytem?
    – L. Darens
    Jun 26, 2017 at 16:20
  • Following your answer, I found that router os is ThreadX (RTOS) and bootloader is TBS bootloader. Can't find some good info/tools online... But there's some GPL source.
    – L. Darens
    Jun 26, 2017 at 18:43

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