I reverse engineered a motherboard

kazlauskas.me

107 points·mmastrac··8 comments

Seems like a misleading headline. He reverse-engineered some software to control some LEDs on his motherboard, I guess.

From the title, I thought he would be dumping the schematics+firmware+etc of a motherboard, which would be pretty interesting.

I agree the headline is misleading, but its a cool writeup nonetheless.

That's what I came for. Oh well. Suggest title change to "I reverse engineered firmware for motherboard LED's."

> Turns out the motherboard uses a proprietary Super I/O chip: Nuvoton NCT6795D! ... This chip is apparently made exclusively for MSI and MSI refuses to provide the specsheets for the chip

This is why exclusivity agreements suck for the user. It means the vendor gets to claim they can't release details of something for competitive reasons.

I'm glad OP was able to reverse engineer the driver to control the RGB LEDs. Now if only motherboard manufacturers would offer a cheaper board without an LED driver that most people don't care about...

> Could I debug a driver in a live system? Turns out it is possible, but not without a second computer with a serial header.

You can do kernel debugging over ethernet: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh...

What I got from this is that I need to check out RWEverything and x64dbg... the former looks neat and the latter which looks a lot like a modern OllyDbg.

Congrats accomplishing what you wanted to.

Oh yeah OllyDbg, such a versatile RE tool at the time. SoftICE was nice and all, but OllyDbg was definitely an evolution when it comes to user-mode debugging.

I recently did some reverse engineering with x64dbg. Amazing experience. It has code flow graphing like ida, has selection decompilation, and a bunch of other features.

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