BootJacker: The Amazing AVR Bootloader Hack!

[Nytro]

BootJacker: The Amazing AVR Bootloader Hack!

There's an old adage that says if you don't know it's impossible you could end up achieving it. BootJacker is that kind of hack: a way for ordinary firmware on an AVR to reprogram its bootloader. It's something Atmel's manual for AVR microcontrollers with Bootloaders says is impossible (Note the italics):

27.3.1 Application Section.

The Application section is the section of the Flash that is used for storing the application code. The protection level for the Application section can be selected by the application Boot Lock bits (Boot Lock bits 0), see Table 27-2 on page 284.

The Application section can never store any Boot Loader code since the SPM instruction is disabled when executed from the Application section

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Here's the background: I'm the designer of FIGnition, the definitive DIY 8-bit computer. It's not cobbled together from hackware from around the web, instead three years of sweat and bare-metal development has gone into this tiny 8-bitter. I've been working on firmware version 1.0.0 for a few months; the culmination of claiming that I'll put audio data transfer on the machine (along with a fast, tiny Floating point library about 60% of the size of the AVR libc one).

Firmware 1.0.0 uses the space previously occupied by its 2Kb USB bootloader and so, needs its own migration firmware image to copy the V1.0.0 firmware to external flash. The last stage is to reprogram the bootloader with a tiny 128b bootloader which reads the new image from external flash. Just as I got to the last stage I came across section 27.3.1, which let me know in no uncertain terms that I was wasting my time.

I sat around dumbstruck for a while ("How could I have not read that?") before wondering whether[1], crazies of crazy, imagining that a solution to the impossible might actually lead me there. And it turns out it does.

The solution is actually conceptually fairly simple. A bootloader, by its very nature is designed to download new firmware to the device. Therefore it will contain at least one spm instruction. Because the spm configuration register must be written no more than 4 cycles before the spm instruction it means there are very few sequences that practically occur: just sts, spm or out, spm sequences. So, all you need to is find the sequence in the bootloader section; set up the right registers and call it.

However, it turned out there was a major problem with that too. The V-USB self-programming bootloader's spm instructions aren't a neat little routine, but are inlined into the main code; so calling it would just cause the AVR to crash as it tried to execute the rest of the V-USB bootloader.

Nasty, but again there's a solution. By using a timer clocked at the CPU frequency (which is easy on an AVR), you can create a routine in assembler which sets up the registers for the Bootloader's out, spm sequence; calls it and just at the moment when it's executed the first cycle of the spm itself, the timer interrupt goes off and the AVR should jump to your interrupt routine (in Application space). The interrupt routine pops the bootloader address and then returns to the previous code - which is the routine that sets up the out, spm sequence. This should work, because when you apply spm instructions to the bootloader section the CPU is halted until it's complete.

Here's the key part of BootJacker:

The code uses the Bootloader's spm to first write a page of flash which also contains a usable out, spm sequence and then uses that routine to write the rest (because of course you might end up overwriting the bootloader with your own new bootloader!)

BootJacker involves cycle counting, I used a test routine to figure out the actual number of instructions executed after you set the timer for x cycles in the future (it's x-2). In addition I found there was one other oddity: erase and writes always have a 1 cycle latency after the SPM in a bootloader. I fixed this with a nop instruction in my mini bootloader.

This algorithm, I think is pretty amazing. It means that most bootloaders can in fact be overwritten using application firmware containing a version of BootJacker!

[1] As a Christian, I also have to fess' up that I prayed about it too. Not some kind of desperation thing, but some pretty calm prayer, trusting it'll get sorted out

Posted by Snial at 00:14

Sursa: One Week Wonder: BootJacker: The Amazing AVR Bootloader Hack!