GoKawiilEverything I own, owned
August 23, 2026
Over the past couple weeks I’ve been doing agent-driven reverse engineering of peripherals that happen to be within arm’s reach. From those devices, I’ve come away with a full plaintext command shell inside my microphone, a webcam whose activity LED I can switch off while it records, and a key light that hands out memory writes to anyone on the WiFi. Peripherals have proven to be an ideal target for agentic RE - they’re tiny computers attached to my computer, with a data connection to the host and usually a firmware update mechanism, so an agent has something to iterate against. The net outcome is better control and understanding of my machine.
My process was pretty much the same for each of these devices: grab a copy of the device’s firmware and associated update tool from the manufacturer, throw it into my reverse engineering environment, tell Claude Opus 5 what my goals are, and let it churn. Depending on the device, the goals were somewhat different, but they usually looked something like:
In this directory is the firmware and update utility for ___. The device is also attached to this computer, and you may interact with it in non-mutating ways. Exhaustively document and cross-validate the entire firmware, including the following goals: * reverse engineer the firmware update format and update protocol * implement our own update utility * determine the security properties of the update protocol, including checksums, signature validation, secure boot * use static and dynamic analysis to determine all protocol surfaces and completely enumerate functionality * find any hidden or debug functionality in the product and how to access it
Depending on the results, there were different directions of follow-up, but you should get the general idea. Let’s run through the list - each device links to a GitHub repo full of generated-slop docs and scripts, most of which have been validated live against real hardware. I’ve also included the effort each device took, pulled out of the Claude Code session transcripts. “Churn” is the time Claude was actually working, with the long idle gaps removed. “Prompts from me” is every message I typed, including the one-word ones telling it to keep going. All five devices together came out to about 13 hours of churn and 98 prompts, spread across two weeks of evenings.
Everything I own
Insta360 Link webcam
GitHub repo - 3.7 hours of Claude churn, 33 prompts from me
I use an Insta360 Link webcam, which is a nice gimbaled pan-tilt-zoom camera that does face tracking for automatically framing the shot. I wanted to know if it was possible to subvert the activity LED, like in the classic iSeeYou exploit.
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