Reverse engineering a clear-cased prison laptop #ReverseEngineering @zephray_wenting
Zephray Wenting bought a Justice Tech Solutions Securebook 5 prison laptop on eBay recently. What is a prison laptop? Much like their audiovisual brethren, these laptops lack basic features in the name of prison security, which in the case of this laptop means for example no USB ports. The laptop case is clear plastic so it cannot hide any contraband. Can such a locked down device be made to function as a regular laptop?
Inside this unit is an Intel N3450 with 4 GB LPDDR3, with SATA for storage and a special dock connector. Some laptops come with WiFi hardware installed, others are unpopulated. It appears that these Securebooks by default have a BIOS password that cannot be erased, even by removing it from the NVRAM (‘CMOS’), as it’ll return on the next boot due to an automatic BIOS reset. This was temporarily bypassed through a hacky external SPI Flash adapter, but the reward for all this trouble was a BIOS setup screen with just the ‘Security’ tab.
In a X (formerly Twitter) thread, Zephray goes through steps to gain access to the laptop and to change the BIOS software to allow access to arbitrary hard disks. It’s an interesting read about Reverse Engineering.
Read more in the thread here. And coverage on Hackaday.
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