This particular box also has RS-232, ssh (with almost zero auth), and telnet as a control plane, by default. Any of that only gets used to tweak/report various things with a rather basic human-readiable protocol. (It has built-in functions to make it more secure; I just don't care on my home LAN, or on my pop-up LANs in the field. A sane person with a professional role would have it locked down and on its own VLAN/VPN, but for me and prototyping: Telnet is actually pretty good.)

I designed none of it. I just bought it, and make good use of it. New, it was a mid-4-digit box; used, they're not so bad. (And I use it every day and like it quite a lot, hence the reluctance to go harder on the potential root shell hack.)

My box, as it sits, just does general-purpose GUI-connected DSP stuff with near-realtime tweaking. I'm in the process of getting it to grok OSC, and thus Reaper or whatever, so it has a better control surface for live work.

It has a USB interface that my Linux box treats as a sound card, which works well. My main reason for wanting to get root is to examine (solve?) its ~5-minute boot times.

5 minutes in a live sound environment is the difference between having a large, active, and involved crowd, and having everyone get bored and find something else to do.

Anyway, the FPGAs here just exist to behave as DSPs and...well, digitally process [audio] signals. It works well; I really just wish it booted faster.

And that may be its downfall. :P

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But enough about that.

What's your device do? What are your plans and dreams with it? (Do I want one?)

I've built a very small amount of hardware. At least at the level of custom PCBs and some code, it's been richly rewarding even when I screw it up, and it makes me feel like I'm on top of the world when I get it right.

Can you tell me about your widget?

The sales volume is low, and the development cost is expensive, so the cost to purchase is also expensive. It's an interesting thing to think about, market-wise.

SoundWire. That's an internal[ish], hard-clocked, multipoint, digital audio bus, yeah? I don't know much about it. Looks like it's mostly useful for OE car audio applications?

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This box I have is just a finished, retail-product, general-purpose pro audio DSP with a good amount of practical analog and digital audio IO. There are many others like it in the marketplace that do very similar things, but this one has a CVE that I want to exploit for my own purposes. :)

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I really hate being secretive. I strongly prefer to just chat about stuff here, or there, or anywhere.

But even though I'm just some dude in Ohio, my HN comments consistently show up near the top of Google search results when looking at specific topics that I've covered, sometimes just in-passing, so I'm inclined to keep the details to myself for now.

I mean: In the grand scheme of things I haven't even been posting regularly here for very long, but more than once already I've Googled a question and found a link to an answer in my own comment here.

That can be problematic.

This is a great forum for open discussion, and for releasing information, and it is absolutely the wrong forum for secret skunkworks.

If I had a spare box so I could afford to potentially fuck this one up forever, I'd get on with it already. And then, of course, I would publish the results.

I wish I could spill the beans already and maybe get some great help from someone here who does this stuff routinely, but that scares future-me. If the devices can be rooted, then I want them all to be rooted (if useful) -or- better-secured (if not useful).

That sounds fine, except I don't want them to become botnet members, either.

It's a dilemma. There's a lot of this shit out there in the world that doesn't get updated.