Dumping ID115 firmware

This repo contains a HOWTO on dumping firmware from a Nordic nRF51822-based ID115 fitness band.

See Raphael Baron's blog post which gives lots of hardware-level detail and shows how to get at the SWD pads. This is what mine ended up looking like:

These are shipped with flash readback protection on (UICR.RBPCONF.PALL = 0x00) which means directly reading out the flash isn't possible over SWD. However, you can still otherwise control execution.

See Kris Brosch's blog post at Include Security which is the source of this technique.

But briefly it works like this:

1. Find a suitable register-register load instruction.
2. Execute that instruction with an address in flash.
3. Read the target register, which now contains one word of flash.

(1) sounds tricky, but ARM is a load-store architecture and the Thumb instruction encoding can't encode a 32-bit address in a single instruction, so these instructions are abundant.

On the ID115 I found a suitable instruction at address 0x6de, which was just ldr r3, [r3].

Files in this repo:

• dump.rb reads out all of flash using the gadget at 0x6de. It's otherwise identical to the script from Include Security. This takes about 30 minutes.
• dump.bin is the original flash on my ID115.
• uicr.bin is the original UICR area on my ID115.
• openocd-stlink.cfg is an openocd configuration file if you use an STLinkV2 debugger.