Phantom UART: The Silent Backdoor
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Problem Description
You have intercepted a mysterious diagnostic interface exposed by a PS‑MicroX SoC development board. The device provides access to UART, JTAG, SPI flash, EEPROM, SRAM memory, and even oscilloscope traces. Everything looks like a standard hardware debugging shell… except something is very wrong.
The dumps contain fragments of corrupted data, partial bootloader logs, and anomalous JTAG TAP results that don’t match any known microcontroller.
Rumors say this prototype hides a secret recovery backdoor used by engineers — one that was never meant to be documented.
Your task is to analyze the provided UART interface and the available memory dumps, uncover hidden communication paths, and discover how the device exposes the secret flag through its backdoor mechanisms.
This challenge requires strong skills in embedded forensics, reverse engineering, hardware interfaces, and protocol analysis.
nc 5.189.172.8 10009 || ncat 5.189.172.8 10009
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Frequently Asked Questions
This is a medium level problem worth 80 points.
This is a ctf challenge problem in the Forensics category.
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