I was just reminded of this piece that I wrote ten years ago now. It is still just as relevant today as it was back then. If you are working on any kind of reverse engineered product for hardware, learn how to care about your users to keep them safe.https://marcan.st/2011/01/safe-hacking/ …
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My flasher not only had the two-copy safety that their design called for (but which their updater was not safely implementing), but also included a novel trick to provide *three-copy* atomic safety. Powering down at *any* time during BootMii installation is, in principle, safe.
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That one near miss was a bug in this stuff in some corner case Wiis, which ended up corrupting one of the (eventual) main copies. However, my code checked and refused to run if *any* copy was not valid, so the affected user could do no further damage. Their Wii was fine.
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All they saw was a first install attempt (I forget if it failed or reported success) that didn't work in practice, followed by all subsequent install attempts failing with a safety check error. After fixing the bug I added even more paranoia to make sure it didn't happen again.
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"loading unauthorized software on your wii has a high risk of damaging your hardware"
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Well, they technically aren't wrong. Statistically, most users were probably breaking into their Wii to pirate games, and *those* tools definitely weren't written by people following the guidelines I blogged about.
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