HOW TO – Reverse engineer a missile launcher toy’s interface

Craft & Design Fun & Games Technology
HOW TO – Reverse engineer a missile launcher toy’s interface

Usb Missile Launchers
Nitro writes

A fairly in-depth technical report by the security researchers at TippingPoint was released on how to reverse engineer the proprietary protocol for controlling a USB missile-launching toy system. They develop an iPhone application to control the device. ‘The hardware is coupled with a simple GUI controller written in Delphi (MissileLauncher.exe) and a USB Human Interface Device (HID) interface written in C++ (USBHID.dll). The toys lost their allure within minutes of harassing my team with a barrage of soft missile shots. That same night I thought I would be able to extend the fun factor by coding up a programmatic interface to the launchers in Python. … One interesting thing is that we have a lot more granular control of the turret movement now than we did with the original GUI. I wrote two simple loops to count the number of possible horizontal and vertical ticks and the results were 947 horizontal and 91 vertical versus 54 and 10 from the original GUI respectively. Granular control allows you to slowly and quietly reposition the turret for stealthy attacks.

2 thoughts on “HOW TO – Reverse engineer a missile launcher toy’s interface

  1. eggspanther says:

    Rockit!
    motion-sensed-targeting
    webcam in the ceiling
    Wii controller
    poisoned darts
    spider-legged bots, turn-based

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