Speaker:: Adam Laurie (Major Malfunction) Title:: AI go Beep Boop! Duration:: 29 min Video:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tqqnkemYsg ## Key Thesis A lifelong hardware hacking skeptic discovered that AI dramatically accelerates electromagnetic fault injection glitching attacks — compressing six weeks of failed automated attempts into seven minutes — and then went further to have Claude design and implement a complete multi-function hardware hacking platform on a $7 Raspberry Pi Pico, replacing over $1,000 of lab equipment and making nation-state-level capabilities accessible to hobbyists. ## Synopsis Adam Laurie opens as a self-described hardware hacking skeptic toward AI. Hardware hacking requires physical lab equipment — oscilloscopes, FPGAs, power supplies, EM pulse generators, debuggers — and he couldn't see how AI could help with that. His conversion came after a business trip during which he left glitching scripts running against a locked chip for six weeks, returning to zero results. At the suggestion of Gadi Evron (who runs "Prompt or Get the F*** Out"), Laurie asked three specific hardware glitching questions to ChatGPT: where to position the EM probe, when to send the glitch pulse, and how hard to hit the chip. The AI's answer was precise: draw a diagonal line across the chip, place the probe 7mm from a corner, start at 500V and find the sweet spot where the chip crashes 50% of the time, then run from there. Laurie followed the instructions, came back 7 minutes later, and had a successful firmware dump. Six weeks of failure became a 7-minute success. Emboldened, he went further: gave Claude a description of his entire lab and asked it to design a unified platform. Claude produced designs for a Raspberry Pi Pico ($7) implementation that replaced all of his lab equipment: SWD/JTAG debugging, UART/SPI/I2C sniffing, 5-nanosecond resolution glitch timing, and eight hardware UARTs (normally a Pico only has two — Claude's solution was to flip between four alternate pin configurations per UART to get eight effective hardware UARTs). The live demo showed an STM32 chip protected with readout protection (locked). The Pico-based platform performed a known attack (STIMPico, based on PicoPwner framework): connecting over SWD, loading a payload into flash, triggering a brownout reset that doesn't wipe flash, then reconfiguring the memory mapper so the chip boots off flash it believes is SRAM, granting read access for a full dump. The system was designed to be deterministic rather than nondeterministic by using the Pico's ADC to measure voltage on the target and triggering precisely when the voltage hits the target threshold — eliminating the timing guesswork entirely. Claude also rewrote the Raiden Pico project (originally two engineers working full-time for over a year at IBM X-Force) in 3 days. The talk closes with Gadi Evron providing framing: this isn't just a cool hack, it represents nation-state-level glitching capability becoming democratized and disposable at $7/unit. ## Key Takeaways - AI can answer the three fundamental glitching questions (where, when, how hard) with enough precision to turn 6 weeks of failure into 7 minutes of success - Claude designed a $7 Raspberry Pi Pico that functionally replaces $1,000+ of lab equipment for hardware hacking - The ADC-controlled deterministic glitching approach (measuring voltage rather than guessing timing) is a significant architectural improvement over traditional timing-based glitching - Pico is disposable at $7 — can be soldered directly into test circuits, eliminating "spaghetti" wiring problems - Nation-state-level hardware exploitation capability is now accessible to anyone willing to work with Claude - Claude rewrote a 1+ year, 2-engineer IBM project in 3 days ## Notable Quotes / Data Points - 6 weeks of automated glitching → 0 results; ChatGPT advice → 7 minutes to success - Raspberry Pi Pico ($7) replaces $1,000+ of lab equipment - 5-nanosecond resolution timing on the Pico glitch trigger - Eight hardware UARTs on a device that only has two (via Claude's alternate pin config solution) - Raiden Pico project (1 year, 2 full-time engineers) rewritten by Claude in 3 days - The attack surface: "Glitching is a hobbyist's expensive hobby or it's nation states. That just became something everybody can do, and do it 10 times better." #unprompted #claude