Day 4: Reverse engineering the Mistake

Published by

B2ASoftware

on

February 9, 2024

Hi Friends.

📊 Daily Stand-Up: Yesterday I made a mistake. Lucky for us, we are agile so mistakes are an expected and accepted part of the process.

I discovered the mistake almost immediately after posting yesterday. I had all the features, parameters and requirements but didn’t evaluate any unknowns for potential spike work. For those saying huh? in their heads right now, basically I didn’t think about how to control the client’s hardware. While bluetooth protocol is universal-ish, bluetooth receiver commands are unique to the receiver. As soon as I realized this, my stomach dropped as I didn’t know the commands for the receiver and tearing it apart and googling every number I could see resulted in nothing.

In order to tackle this obstacle, we needed to roll up our sleeves and dive in as Lead Engineer. We contacted the client to see how much they knew about the receiver and they did know the model number of the chip, which was impressive, but ultimately didn’t get us the information we needed. It was time to utilize our infosec background.

The short version is we turned on bluetooth traffic logging on the cellphone, opened the client’s old app and captured traffic to the receiver. We pushed those logs to the laptop and analyzed them with wireshark. Eventually through trial and error, we decoded the on/off and main commands.

Today’s todo list will look very familiar. Now that we have a firm handle on features, parameters, requirements and unknowns, we need to step into our UI/UX role and create some primitive designs inspired by the app we downloaded (Burger King Method). After that we’ll want to act as the Delivery Manager and flesh out our timeline and milestones informed by the above and our sample app.

🎵 Playlist: Blink-182 (Yes I’m reliving the 90’s, sue me)🎶

🧠 Mental State: Motivated after yesterday!

🛠️ Tools: MacBook Pro M2, Ipad Pro, Pixel 6, Intellij, Flutter, Kinesis-Advantage2-Ergonomic-Keyboard, Chat GPT

💡 Inspirations: Mississippi State Cyber Security courses

📚 Resources: