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Rascals are always sociable, and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others company. Arthur Schopenhauer


Reverse Engineering Yaesu FT-70D Firmware Encryption

Ham radios are a fun way of learning how the radio spectrum works, and more importantly: they’re embedded devices that may run weird chips/firmware! I got curious how easy it’d be to hack my Yaesu FT-70D, so I started doing some research. The only existing resource I could find for Yaesu radios was someone who posted about custom firmware for their Yaesu FT1DR.

The Reddit poster mentioned that if you go through the firmware update process via USB, the radio exposes its Renesas H8SX microcontroller and can have its flash modified using the Renesas SDK. This was a great start and looked promising, but the SDK wasn’t trivial to configure and I wasn’t sure if it could even dump the firmware… so I didn’t use it for very long. Reverse Engineering Yaesu FT-70D Firmware Encryption

May 6, 2023
#reversing ▪ #hardware