About
A small shop that takes things apart.
Aberdeen Industries is a reverse-engineering and vulnerability-research practice. We work on embedded systems: the firmware and silicon inside the devices people rely on and rarely think about.
Most of what we do is unglamorous. Reading firmware. Tracing buses. Getting a foothold on a chip that wasn't meant to give one up, and writing the tooling that makes the next one quicker. We've been at it for over a decade, across telecommunications, industrial control, networking, aerospace, and ordinary commercial hardware.
Some of that work has been published or written about. Most of it never will be, and that's fine. The headline was never the point. We'd rather hand you a finding that holds up than a story about one.
We keep the team small on purpose. It means the person who scopes your work is usually the person doing it, and the answer you get back is the real one, not a tidier version of it. When something is solid, we'll say so plainly. When it isn't, we'll tell you that too.
That's the whole idea behind security without theater: less performance, more proof. We stay hands-on, at the bench, in the firmware, on the wire, because that's where the truth about a system actually lives.
Where the work lives
- Hardware reverse engineering
- Firmware unpacking & analysis
- Vulnerability research
- Embedded & IoT
- Industrial & OT
- Rapid prototyping
Selected talks & writing
- 100 Seconds of Solitude: Defeating Cisco Trust Anchor with FPGA Bitstream Shenanigans
- BADFET: Defeating Modern Secure Boot with Pulsed Electromagnetic Fault Injection
- PERCH: A Ghidra Peripheral Layer for Automated MMIO Mapping
- Zap Zap! Bang Bang! Defeating Secure Boot with EMFI
- SoK: Privacy on Mobile Devices, It's Complicated
- A Wearable Seizure Detection and Notification System
The public trail mostly ends around 2019. The work didn't stop, it just stopped being the kind you give talks about.