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Don't Be Like Me: (The easy way to decrypt the firmware)

A project log for Chitu 3D Printer Mainboard Hacking

Studying the encryption on Chitu's 3D Print controllers

jc-nelsonJ.C. Nelson 09/19/2019 at 04:570 Comments

So, I may have noted that the Chitu board exposes Boot0. It's also a much later variant of the STM32F103, with FSMC support. I posted in one of the Tronxy facebook groups looking for dead boards to desolder so I could trace down SWD and see if there was an easier way to get at the flash.

But....

It turns out, there's no need to do this. As someone pointed out, all you have to do is pull the BOOT jumper, restart the board, and it comes up in DFU mode.

And read protection is NOT set.

Suffice it to say I extracted the Chitu bootloader. The encryption is complex (it is some sort of rolling encryption), but the firmware loads at 0x800880 (at least, that's where the bootloader tries to start it). There's a couple of things about this:

1. I've heard there's no firmware image from the Tronxy. There could be relatively easily.

2. We can get Marlin up and running just using DFU. I would still like to reverse engineer the bootloader to allow people to update without using the STM32CUBE programmer, but in essence, any DFU update will work.

So...I sort of spent a lot of time looking at hex dumps for nothing.

I mean, looking at hex dumps is always amusing, but I could have taken the fast train to getting the bootloader to disassemble. Sigh.

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