Right to Repair, Polish Train Hackers, and the NSA's Ghidra

Google "Polish train hackers" and you'll find dozens of articles in the tech press about this story. Here is the link to the one I read, which was translated from the original Polish. It's terrific. Compelling reading if you're interested in the misuse of Digital Rights Management or the Right To Repair movement. Or if you're into embedded systems development and troubleshooting. Or just if you're into stories of heroic efforts by engineers.

Polish embedded systems hackers use (get this) the U.S. National Security Agency's open source Ghidra tool, originally intended to reverse engineer binaries of computer viruses and other malware, to figure out why high-tech passenger trains, like in the video above, quit working after undergoing routine maintenance - following the train manufacturer's own two thousand page maintenance manual - by a third-party.

What did they discover in various versions of the train software/firmware?

• Odometer checks that prevent a train from running after a million miles.
• Year, month, and day checks that prevent a train from running after a certain date.
• Geofencing checks (naturally the trains have GNSS receivers) that prevent a train from running if it is within the boundaries of a competitor's maintenance depot.

I've used Ghidra myself, and written about it in my blog. The tool includes not just a disassembler similar to objdump, but also a remarkable decompiler that can translate machine code using common C compiler idioms and patterns back into C code. Ghidra understands a wide variety of Instruction Set Architectures. Just recently I've been using it to study the binaries of my own code compiled for a RISC-V target.

DRM and Right To Repair is a big deal in the U.S., Manufacturers of agricultural equipment, like farm tractors costing six figures, have resorted to similar shenanigans to prevent even the farmers who own the equipment from repairing their own stuff. So much so that Right To Repair legislation is coming to the forefront of both state and federal legislators.