053 - It's Hammer Time!

Hello, everyone. I'll work here in the editing room. Just want to apologize. I recorded with my webcam microphone once again I try to clean it up a bit But yeah, either way Jen and hash to most of the talking so I think you're really gonna enjoy it Hello and welcome to the on-name reverse engineering podcast. I am your host Albro and with me it here is Jen Jen still Jen. We're still you're still not good at intros. Nope, but we'll get her right one day Maybe we'll actually write a script. And with us today we have a very special guest hash Tell us tell us about yourself. Who are you? What do you do? So I'm hash I'm a reverse engineer based in Dallas, Texas. I'm pretty well known for smart meter hacking But I've kind of done some other stuff in the past like reverse engineering the LiDAR on the needle vacuum cleaner and some other random things like that. Welcome cool. You recently gave it talk at the remote icon of the Hackaday I guess Supercon remote version about you know the smart meter hacking. I think that's I guess I'd seen some of you work before Like in the news or in YouTube Yeah, but but I guess most recently that's where we saw you in and we're really excited to have a chance to chat Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, I think I think the the thing for our audience to know is that if you really want to be on the show you can DM us or you could just be presenting at a Ramota con and we'll probably see Yeah, I got a Twitter DM. That was awesome. Just like hey, you want to be on this show. I was like, oh that's super cool It was really there's just not enough time in that session to go through everything Tell us a little bit how you got started in reverse engineering Yeah, so I mean, I've always been interested in how things worked ever since I was a kid and And it kind of I take anything apart, you know when I was probably three or four years old old enough to hold a screwdriver I you know I went in the garage. I got one. I had my little toy I saw my dad in the garage working on his car I grabbed that little toy and tried to put the screwdriver in it But I was holding the toy up and kind of pointing the screwdriver towards my face as I was trying to put it in and and as it slipped It hit me in the eyeball one of my eyes on the side and you know freaked my mom out had to take me to the hospital and Luckily, everything's fine But I mean since I can hold a screwdriver. I've been trying to take things apart and and ever since then it was always a lot of it You know mechanical pieces were interesting But I was always interested in electronics My parents didn't know anything about electronics and you and a radio control cars, you know every every holiday anything I could ever get a radio control car I probably had 30 or 40 of them growing up and so I take them apart and wonder like how does this thing work? And what are all these little parts and go to Radio Shack and you know and when there was Radio Shack And it actually sold parts and look at all those things and try to buy them and build circuits and I think a lot of it was fueled from movies and things like that as well You know back to the future and short circuit and all these kinds of different movies and TV shows were very electronic techie oriented it seemed at the time at least the things I like yeah And so you know that's that's a lot of what got me into it was just trying to understand that stuff and then wanting to make That stuff myself and and so there was no internet, you know I'm I'm 42 at this point like so when I was a kid It was like you went to the library and there was six books on electronics and I checked out all six of those books Repeatedly and tried to teach myself electronics from books at the library or whatever you could find right you know Nobody knew anything about that that I knew in this small town in California that I was in at the time So so it really it was just a passion to try to learn and and understand So it sounds safe to say you were not growing up in Silicon Valley then because no I was I was in I was near I guess Silicon Valley. I was in Modesto, California. Oh, yeah Yeah, which has nothing to do with electronics whatsoever. No, but people regularly commute from there now Absolutely. Yeah, but that wasn't anything that anyone I knew was doing And so yeah, it was just it was really a desire to to learn and to be able to make these things myself So I have to ask then was it how effective was it to check out the books from the library versus going to Radio Shack and maybe buying one of those like experimental kits Yeah, so I had some of those I had all the little forced mims. I think the third electronics You know like little different things about five five five timers and all that stuff A lot of it was, you know, try to first teach yourself schematics and what are these things and how to read them after looking all these parts I used to had a little junkie soldering iron and I would and I didn't have much money So I would just everything I took apart. I just scavenge parts right so I'm desodering every I mean I still have up in that cabinet behind me a little bin That's from when I was a kid that has all my resistors and capacitors like I just can't throw that stuff away It's like you know, it's like there's a lot of hours of effort to take that stuff out, right? You know, that's valuable right now, right? It's probably some good stuff in there Yeah, and just supply chain wise, but but yeah, it was Compared to how easy it is to find information now and things it was a very different way to learn But you know, it definitely teaches you persistence for sure. Oh, yeah Yeah, so that's some incredible persistence there, especially because you didn't have a parent that was No, yeah, no neither one knew about anything at one point. I had a neighbor that used to have an electronic store And the first computer I ever got let me think is that yeah, he had a sinclair ZX81 to the little touch membrane computer and and it was in the top of his garage And I used to mow his lawn to try to get some radio shack money and I was like I want that computer And I think he made me mow his lawn like 30 times to get that computer and he gave it to me after a couple of mowing sounds like I'll mow the rest on credit, right? And and then and then he also sold me this guy was pretty smart a black and white TV a Little one, but the TV was huge. It took like 9D batteries Box but a tiny little screen on the front of it and so the sinclair ZX81 trying to teach myself assembly from a book To that screen. I mean it was like, you know, you look back and it's like no one I don't know if anybody today would like sit around and try to fumble with that for weeks and weeks and weeks to teach yourself assembly, right? Yeah, but yeah, that's that was how I did it. That was my first computer to oh, yeah, the first one I perk on them Yeah, and it was painful. I think I told Alvaro this when my when we were cleaning out my dad's place As he was downsizing we found it. It was all night in a nice container and like We had to toss it like We also tossed a bunch of governor 64's don't tell people We kept the amiga though. Yeah mine. I think I destroyed at some point because I took it apart, you know, my my desire Was further ahead than my skillset. Yeah, and so I took it apart and I was and I didn't quite know and you know You couldn't just go online and google and find data sheets for everything and what's the pin out? I had kind of the schematic, but I didn't really have any data sheets on these parts Unless you were to write to accompany you they'd mail you the data book or whatever and I didn't even know that until later in life that that was even an option Um, and I I think I was trying to hook up LEDs to it. I wanted to make a nightrider light, you know, but yeah Back and forth and so I just you know, I wanted to make that so bad that drove I don't know how many years of learning and different things hooking LEDs to parallel ports on computers and trying to program that you know using Basic and out, you know, eight eight eight comma two and whatever that to turns I mean, you know all that stuff drove trying to make that light all the way to learning about pick microcontroller and programming those I mean, you know, it was like it's interesting these little things that You know hit you in childhood or whatever that drive so you know learning for so long Well Did you end up going to school for electronics or we just mostly self-taught and what with that? Yeah, so I would say so I I graduated high school. I went to college. I was going to get a degree in electronics engineering Which kind of foreshadows? I was going to get a degree in electronics engineering And so I went I went to school for a while and And you know, it took me probably 10 or 15 years to figure out why I never got it Which I kind of did at one point But I ended up dropping out because I got a job at this company We had moved from Modesto to Fresno and there was this there was kind of two companies in in that city You could work for if you're interested electronics and I worked at both of them And so the first one I worked at was this small company. I got a job there a buddy of mine just said I was working in an arcade fixing video games And he said hey, there's this company. They posted an ad in the newspaper Which is how you got jobs in they posted an ad in the newspaper and they said you know They're looking for some electronics people and you have to know how to use an oscilloscope And I thought well, I don't have an oscilloscope And so I quickly read and try to figure out what is an oscilloscope and how would you use it? And I went and applied for this job And I got I got the the job of this company after after talking to him and everything and I was going to school at the time And once I got the job of this company they would let me use any piece of equipment in there I mean it was a free for all work as many hours as you want right and and so I was kind of in heaven and And I what I realized is and I saw you end up dropping out of school I worked heavy at that job I got another job in engineering department the other company in town and moved up throughout there and and basically designed boards for them and program microcontrollers All this stuff and I realized when I was a kid The thought I guess at the time what had been put in my head is that you're going to school to learn how to do this And and the the challenge was I had spent so many years learning about electronics all the stuff that is I got to school It felt so slow and and and it was so far And even when you were getting to the advanced classes it was it felt so far from what I had done And and at that point the internet had existed the internet existed for a few years And I was on it and at this point I could find anything I wanted to learn and stay up all night long and learn about it And so for me I was like I don't understand the value of this thing that I'm going to because it's not going to give me What I thought it was going to give me I can already get that And so you know the value of the degree itself aside and you know what it can help open doors to get jobs and things like that It just I could not see I already knew how to do the thing at one point I did go back to school one of the guys it was my engineering manager He encouraged me hey you should go finish your degree you know you're really sharp You know these things you should have it like don't so I went back and I was taking a digital logic class and And it was such a breeze and it just and and that kind of solidified it for me that I don't need this And I also am not sure that engineering is the path I want to go And I ended up moving over to sales engineering and the more of a sales kind of operations side of the businesses that I'm in And I realized that I enjoy Technical things I enjoy reverse engineering But I can make kind of my my value at work is a little different And I can add more value in other areas with kind of using this analytical mindset And so I ended up just I was like that's it not interested in the the degree in the degree anymore And kind of moved on But for me it was yeah, I think that the What drove me was I feel like you have once you have an engineering degree Well, then you know everything and it's a real nice. Well, that's not the case and it's just constant learning forever and And so I moved on for me. Yeah, the other thing that that I like about this is that there seems to be this You know misconception that a lot of the reverse engineer. It's this is all they do you know for for work for fun That that's kind of your life and and it's really nice to hear you know kind of examples. There's like no no no like You might be a fantastic reverse engineer, but for your day job you do something completely different separate You still have tons of fun and enables you to do all these other things and you don't have to burn yourself out doing one thing like 24/7 I would agree with you on that one too. Just there's two things like I think I feel like during that time period that you're mentioning It was when you could still have somebody who did not have a degree who was self taught Who could still be hired and and make Fairly broad progress on their career without having the degree Um, and you're absolutely right. There were I met many people In in my career or even at school that like they already knew all you know how to program they already knew electronics They were they're just for the paper just because it it was like a safety for them, but they could have easily You know been designing boards and doing all that because for a long time you didn't need to have a degree to do that And now these days they won't even let you like look at a board I've never learned how to make a circuit board Oh, yeah, they don't teach you that at all Yeah, they don't teach you idea that yeah a lot of people I saw that would go and myself include is you felt like you were going to get gated in your career Like I'm going to get to a certain point and that's just going to hold me back the same way a lot of times comes in MBA If you're on a management track moving up high and it's like okay Well until you have that like you're gated your progress and and there was just something fundamental about me that disagreed With you know something holding me back and I said okay if if I'm at a company where that's the case Then I'm at the wrong company because if you know if the if the output in the outcome is less important Then you know the kind of the paper trail that somebody has then that's just not a place for me It's fine for that to be a place for other people that's just not my place And and that's what I realized like you know if it's not working for me I should move on to somewhere else I think a lot of people don't realize that until much much later in their lives because yeah I have my MBA I don't do anything with it It just helps me talk to like cross-functional teams a lot more effectively Yeah, and I think there's value in studying you know, it's like that's it's structured learning You know and so and and I always I think I've just had a challenge with structure I like unstructured learning unstructured challenges and that's why I think there's a place for everybody Yeah, I think a lot of people that have the structured piece I can help them when they get to the unstructured challenges There might be the piece that doesn't feel good And I'm not looking to put all that structure in place and build the great presentation I can just help refine it you know, and so that's why I think there's everybody's got their piece You know that they fit in the puzzle. Yeah, I feel like this is exactly why you got into reverse engineering The reverse engineering is exactly like going against the grade and kind of deconstructing what why is this like this? How does this work? How can I make it do what I wanted to do? I think that's basically what your career is but it sounds like Yeah, and also you know, it's there's a lot of decisions that are made along the way And especially after you work in companies you understand You know why things are kind of done and budget constraints and time constraints and all these things that drive decisions and parts availability and And so you can kind of look at something with that mindset and say okay Maybe why were these decisions made how did these parts get on the board and then and then what's needed from a manufacturing standpoint testability standpoint, you know people laugh like why would they leave the JTag header or all these things It's like well, yeah, because you're trying to make a hundred thousand of them or a million of them And you got to flow them through and every second you can shave off is good and so there's all these things and you know And so so you know that going in like here's the kind of limitations these guys have they can't just hide everything And yeah, and the more you learn about even that how how products are made can help you with reverse engineering right outside Just the very technical things once again stuff that they do not teach you when you're undergrad or even your graduate school About manufacturing anything Truly don't because what you'll find out is like oh the reason why that JTag still there's like they didn't want to remove it Because of they needed for manufacturing they didn't want to pay the extra step for the money to like basically put some Some glue over it epoxy exactly to Office gate it. Yeah, so now that like everyone's fallen asleep in the audience when we change I don't know people people we usually get feedback the people enjoy certain some of these like other things Cyber yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so I'm a big fan. Yeah, I'm a fan too, but like you know at the same time. I don't know Yeah, the people will comment regardless. So Before before we saw all your work that led up to Ramota con um You had this project Uh around the xv 11 lidar and this reverse engineering project. Why don't you tell the audience about it Yeah, so I kind of always been interested in robotics That goes back to like that short circuit movie and there's a picture of Johnny five up on my wall and you know and yeah and all that stuff and um And so right before that the Xbox had released that 3d Sensor whatever that thing was the connect right and then and then there was this yeah There was this challenge put out like a bounty to reverse engineer that connect and I think it was like 10 grand or something It was a pretty good amount of money and and so and because they wanted to use that device You know more for open source projects and things because it was a low-cost sensor that had these really cool You know 3d structured lighting um and so at the same time the robotics community there's a thing called Ross the robot operating system And a bunch of these other you know sites that are kind of into robotics to sell servos and stuff said Nito this company had released this robotic vacuum cleaner that as opposed to like a rumba or something that just drives around haphazardly all over the place and figures You'll cover the room eventually if you just aimlessly drive around in a kind of pattern Nito had put a lidar which uh, you know Basically a laser sensor that scans around in a circle and makes a map of the room And they would they would make a map of the room and then they would intelligently drive around kind of zigzag back and forth To cross the floor most efficiently and so what that means is that they could you know put it a higher power motor in it To vacuum better and use less battery power and all this but that that whole robot was like I think $400 Including the laser scanner prior to that the lowest cost laser scanners were $10,000 7,000 dollars wow that would do a light our scanner So they basically drastically reduced the cost there was an IEEE paper that the guys that um I think it started that company or whatever wrote about this low-cost light our sensor So the robotics community said hey if we could use this low-cost light our sensor in all of our other stuff Wow, that would really advance the state of all these things. Yeah, so they put out this bounty And I think it came on hack-a-day is probably how I heard it pop up and and I you know I'd work on all these different projects But I saw that pop up and I thought like maybe I could do that like it kind of speaks to what I What my strong points were embedded devices and and microcontrollers and these different things and so but it was 400 bucks and I I was When was this this was quite a while ago? I had one young child and a good-sized house payment and so just dropping 400 bucks You know, it was like I'm like, hey honey, you know like I don't know But yeah, yeah, but I still work when I'm done Yeah, one would hope So what I did was it was this is over the Thanksgiving holiday I you know like 10 years ago or whatever it was I bought it off of Amazon because I was like okay I could return it if I need to because I can take things apart very well And you never know I was in there, right? So that's it that's a skill in itself sticker removal There's no sticker on there Oh, no with the stickers on there every single one was removed perfectly all cataloged so I could replace them on there You know perfect-sized screwdriver so you can't even tell the screws been marred to take the whole thing apart strip it down Remove this light our sensor and try to reverse engineer it and so So I basically worked on it 24 hours a day over the Thanksgiving vacation because everyone around the world on this and there was a number of people on these different forums trying to reverse engineer the protocol figure out how it worked everything So I pulled it apart. I built this kind of jig so I could have it almost like on jack stands if you think of a car Lift it up to like so the wheels could spin I put my rope on how big is this big like it's not that big But it's like it's like on my desk Yeah in in my office and it's kind of on jack stands So it's little wheels can turn so it can think it's driving around and I built a structured walled environment around it So the laser sensor would always put out the same readings so that I wasn't getting shifting readings trying to figure out what's going on right um So I did that I ended up working with a few different people that were writing some Python programs and things like that And got the protocol figured out like in the middle of the night and I'm putting a forum post up and I'm recording some video Late night trying to show like I got it you know 211 a.m. Or whatever like I you know Did I win the prize or not and woke up the next day to find out like yeah, I indeed did win it So means I got $400 was the bounty so me and my robot was free So I could keep you I got to send it back to amazon or whatever and try to put it back together um and so that was it was super fun and then I just ended up doing like on on hackaday You'll see more kind of reverse engineering on that and went down this whole path of learning the robot operating system and trying to build simultaneous localization and mapping algorithms and stuff like I don't know just like a crazy rabbit hole That went I went down because of this one thing right like probably here or more spent working on that stuff Just because of that um that I just randomly kind of happened upon to be like well, maybe I could win this bounty right or win the Thing was more about winning the challenge right 400 bucks big deal for how much time you spend on it, you know That's pretty cool Now I have two follow-up questions You mentioned that you're really good at removing the stickers perfectly taking apart The screws so they don't look marred Let's say I wanted to do this in my own spare time so I could return all these messed up products that I messed up Back to amazon without any questions out What what is that? Hypothetically speaking because that's not that's not who I am This is practically used and it's a defcon at the tampravident village. They actually have contests too Oh, I didn't even realize that was a thing. Oh, yeah. Well, that's like your competitive. So let's hear let's hear the hot tips here Yeah, I mean, you know, I think a lot of it um You know, it kind of came from You know, as a kid they they used to put stickers over screw holes and things and that's how they hide it or or do the warranty thing And so then it came down to like you know What can you do can you heat it up? But most of the time it comes to just warming something up Sometimes you get those stickers that when you peel them up They just completely shred into pieces or they're made of some kind of fragile material But yeah, most most places aren't using stuff like that unless it's on something really really secure. They're trying to protect And so usually if you're a lot of times it's not so like you if you can peel it up But it ends up with some little marks on it or it looks a little crinkled when you peel it up But if you reapply it if you you can kind of smooth things out as well So you can kind of just you know, it's it's almost like a you know a little bit of an art to try to place it back on and and smooth out But mostly heat it sounds like is probably one tip. Yeah, yeah, I was like a hairdryer Yeah, I I usually have a heat gun because of like you know, heat shrink tube and stuff like that It's just whatever heating sources around but something that's very gentle You know patience slow and patience is always valuable because once you it's like it once you got too much heat Well, it's to you know game over right whatever it's messed up. So you have to you kind of have to feel out what's what's going on For some of the more though the tamper evidence stickers like the ones that rip out and say void or or whatever The way I was taught in it the some of these things in defcon acetone and syringes and you can inject acetone under the sticker Or you can probably do IP like alcohol as well and it it'll kind of Unstick but the glue is still there. So the sticker once the the astronaut evaporates Still it's sticking again. So you can put it right back after but it like you say patience slow and steady is the biggest deal Like even if you have all this other chemical anything reverse engineering is usually by three of them Yeah, yeah, right. Absolutely. And so it's the same thing You know if it was something I was going to actively attack on some other I you know, it's like you only have one That's that's a whole channel. Yeah, that's what I was saying Yes, back to the fridge problem that uh l and i have it or book. What is it? So there on uh elicia white who does the embedded systems podcast when she wrote her book um We one of the questions at the end of her book is the refrigerator problem like how to determine the lights on and off and one of the aspects of is you get bonus points If you don't destroy if you only If you do all your testing using one refrigerator as opposed to like infinite. Yeah, number Yeah, yeah, because reverse engineering it's like most of the time like I tell people It's like whatever it is you're trying to do by two or three of them And if if you can't afford two or three of them then you probably shouldn't be working on the first thing because Yeah, you know, it's it's going to get destroyed in the process Yep, that definitely happened with those LED purses those like uh That i think that that that's also with the bunny long recommends like you know take one apart completely Then you can look at the traces you can look at the components you can do then you have a second We really poke at with like soldering stuff and trying to intercept things or inject And then you have the the pristine one where you can verify this is for like exploits or for trying to do from our extraction That kind of thing you'll have like a a brand new one that you can test your learnings if you will Yeah, absolutely. I've followed him for a long time like he's really he's really good You know and all the way from my god is hacking the xbox book and all these things that I really encourage people to read Because it really walks you through and the same thing with these smart meters that I'm doing you know I have a ton of them ton of them But rip some down to circuit board so you just have a bear board to tone out traces and random things like that right Does that mean that you're going to have a book on this? I don't know if I have the I don't know if I have the patience for a book I'm a video oriented. I would say I would I would make a whole video series probably before I would write a book If someone that likes to write books I would say you need to go to the partner with somebody that likes to talk about smart meters Then maybe we got like a man. I think yeah If you just have like you have to it was it is it ritmo like the national month of Writing writing yeah, you just find some person who's really interested in doing a book And then you and the air together for that month and just Make a book or do that in Google YouTube transcriptions Chapter one Yeah, cuz I have to agree with you like after like the first page. I'm like this is taking too long. Can I just transcribe? Oh god, but there's a book. I just got recently I was actually tweeting about it. Callin of women At the other the one him and this other guy. I was checker remember his name wrote that book's amazing It is I'm just reading it and I'm like the amount of time that must have been spent to write that book is of you know Otherworldly, I got the early digital one. I was going through that the pictures are Really really helped demystify yes absolutely helped demystify a lot of the issues What's the second author's name since we name check one but nothing Jasper Van Woodenberg and Colono Flynn the hardware hacking handbook Which is available on no starch. That's it Except no substitutes Yeah, you should give one Elvaro. I'm surprised you don't have this one. I'm behind on life Like I will I have the digital copy. I'll I will lend you my digital copy. Oh, no, I don't mind. I don't mind getting it But there's another hardware hacking um book and I think it's like a multiple um I'll have to find it but yeah, yeah, someone uh I tweeted about it someone asked me like you know Is it is it worth it or whatever and I said look just for the fact that it's structured Information that has been kind of reviewed and put all in order and and I was reading the thing from front to back Even the stuff that I kind of already thoroughly feel like I know just because it's like these are two people that are amazing That took the time to condense us down into a book. It's like there's possibly something I have to learn there You know, it was good. It would like I really felt like yeah exactly like you you think you know some of the things But there's there's there's little extra sprinklings of extra knowledge in there. They're totally worth it Yeah, it's a gem. It's gonna be a classic, I think Don't quote me. Well, feel free to come in this point. It's gonna be a classic It's it's it's being recorded So I had a second question about the light art now There's a problem that the I robot vacuum cleaners have and it's it's quite well known Where it it yes, though it's method is to bump into things, but you know some things are more Less elastic less firm. Let's just say and what ends up happening is those things. Yes, very smearable So Does it do uh does need to actually solve for the poop problem? Yeah, so so I will say since I'm not a representative of the company I can't be Can't be wish for sure what I can tell you is that if it does drive over poop it'll leave nice structured lines on the carpet as opposed to Structured ribings, so you will know where the poop was initially and then it'll and which path the robot took to fully kind of rid itself Of the poop it won't be randomly distributed. Yeah, it won't be a random distribution of poop. It'll be very structured There's just like my nightmare. That was my nightmare in all like I think this is this is why the robot revolution The automated home has not really taken off is because we haven't solved for these types of issues That are naturally going to happen. It's solved for it's solved for small small groups, right? Like me pre dogs Yeah, and cats and everything sure that's easy. People who live alone. Yeah. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, hopefully I'll go there's a buyer of it. Yeah, you're good You're smart with slores Like Yeah, people who are dedicated to their jobs like all the time, but also are really concerned about cleanliness then yes, you I guess you're in the target market I don't remember which TV show is oh, oh, I think I was watching Maybe either maybe one of you to have watched this, but it only had one season a Toto Castro's I'll turn on a I'll turn a little Latino man, which tongue tongue twister for me, but he had one episode where he was a Android and he made him like a very error prone because it made it more comfortable for the humans And had really bad self-esteem. So, you know, there wasn't a chance of them having a robot uprising Emo robots It was a very yeah, it was very emo and he went to the kitchen said, oh, I'm really bad And then like suddenly he got like he's like, I don't know how I'm gonna take over the world and then like all the other like there's like a Roomba and everything like they're just sitting there like yeah, like kind of rumbling with him Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah, I have not seen this I'll find a clip maybe if we can find a clip online because it was it It's a really brilliant show particularly if you're Latino, but like for anyone who's immigrant, but this this one I think Really hit me right in the heart It sounds like that big The in them I've read the book, but in the movie version of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy There's this kind of big like depressed robot that wanders around. Yeah kind of sounds like that guy Yes, which was voiced by the late um professor Snape. What's his name? Oh A Rick yeah own Rickman he voiced him God that works out But yeah, there's a long history of sci-fi movies with really depressed robots involved I guess this is a strategy for the future So I'll take it that that problem has still not been solved It is about the way we're watching Roboticist to solve this particular issue It's the key is to get all the engineers that work at whatever the company is two dogs That are not potty trained and they will solve that problem very quickly So there's one guy that I that I ended up so there was there was literally one guy at Nido That when we were doing all that reverse engineering that company actually thought it was really cool What we were doing which was nice you know as opposed to maybe how other companies view it And so one of these guys when I was reverse engineering the board and I'm taking pictures and we're all trying to figure all the stuff I ended up I found the pin that if you shorted it to ground it just wipes all the firmware out of the thing I was like dang it right my main board and this guy was so cool He was on the forums he reached out to me and he said hey if you ship the board back to me I'll reprogram it and ship it back to you so that you still have something to work on you know And I thought I thought that was really that was really cool that guy. Yeah No, that's really nice. Yeah, my impression having known some of the Nido people Was yes, they were it generally a pretty family family oriented a close-knit group of people who are pretty Yeah, I feel like most engineers would be fine with it It's usually a management and the business that they're like no intellectual property Yeah, this is why we have that people probing around randomly Yeah They were probably forced to put that in there to like you know have like some legal coverage for trying to protect their I don't even think it was it's complex or is uh it's well thought out as that I think it was literally just a jumper that was that it was unlabeled and I found I figured out what but you know What it was and then labeled it for everyone That's pretty yeah, that is very valuable for for the community. Yeah, be curious, but not curious over here On that jumper. Yeah So I think I think there are probably people in the audience that have been They're tired of hearing all these things which I think it's been fabulous Yeah, but we want some smart meters is what you're saying yeah, we want some smart meters stuff At the intro jump to 47 minutes and 32 I just started doing the bookmarks now for writing I don't know if you noticed Jen on the last I saw that Oh, yeah, yeah, that was the first time we've done it so oh, that's cool because we had a really long episode Well, I know I listen to the whole thing I it was fun. I just started doing a different editing program and it was very easy to do with that But anyway, yes smart meters how did you end up Doing that Yes, I'll say it started one way and then it kind of has turned into something completely different. I guess has all things to you so When I moved to Dallas Like I said, I was kind of from a smaller town in California. I moved out to Dallas and and I thought wow I'm in a bigger city now I wonder if there's other kind of like-minded hacker-ish type people that are out here And so I ended up like searching around and I I think I found somehow this group on meetup That was called the Dallas hackers association and and I started I went out to that you know You meet in person once a month and people would just mostly cyber security people that we're talking about different things And so I went to that for a while and and it one of these meetups They talked about they were talking about kind of communication devices like if you know and protests and things like that So it was protests in different areas probably around police related things or something and and people you know Potentially shutting down the cell phone network or having these stingray type devices that can listen to things and And so what happens if they're disrupting kind of lawful protests using these means and and we were kind of chatting Meet some of these other guys and thought like what you know what other kinds of networks could you build that a group of people could build And there's Wi-Fi and there's all these things and could you Bluetooth between devices and and I thought like A power meters communicate and it's not likely you would black out a city to stop communication and and so what if you could build a device that could Communicate across the power meters network that they have and so I decide to start to go back and research like How does this network work and could you build a device to do this and And as I started to to research it and and try to understand this I read some interesting things that you know They use what they call a geographical routing protocol Which is how these meters send their data back so that they're they're somehow location aware And and they transmit to say I want to go back to wherever the power company is and and they say send a message It's somehow embedded in that message it knows which direction to go to get back to the power company Which which other meters in this huge mesh network they'll form a big mesh network Which other meters should relay their messages that are in the proper direction and the ones that are not in the right direction Just kind of ignore the message and say oh, I can't help you get closer right And so that made me think like well, you know, maybe we could I could craft a message somehow that could hop on to this network Have maybe a TTL, you know, that was just the right number so that it gets discarded before the power company ever sees it And you kind of end up riding on a network without anyone ever knowing and and I equated it I gave kind of an in-person presentation to the Dallas Hackers Association that was never made Public because at that time I was not talking about anything like this publicly at all for fear that just, you know The government would descend upon you and you would be disappeared, you know, and that was it And yeah, and and you know, and that's even pre-taxant like that was my California mindset They just critical infrastructure. You should not touch at all. We're talk about publicly Yeah, and so I equated it to like, you know, freight hopping, you know Like a train's going across town somebody hops on the train They hop off the train at some point that didn't do any Dave. They didn't hurt me thing No one no one lost anything by that event, right? It's just someone was able to move across an area And and so I did a lot of research kind of in that direction just to understand this network and how it communicates and everything now February of this year It was kind of the great blackout in Texas and and a bunch of us lost power for a long period of time and and it you know It's kind of a scarring event like and and that's when it was right around that time. I realized that You know, and I've been looking at these meters for kind of a years up until this point on and off And I realized, you know, we need more people need to be looking at these things publicly And and talking about it and and presenting how they work and putting it out there so that you know if there are issues or anything that's Wrong that that everyone knows like it's it's wrong to ignore it and to not look at it to have this weird stigma around it And so it kind of started as a fun thought experiment of like I wonder if you could craft a message and hop it across a network And then as power went out and I realized like I don't know for these guys really know what they're doing around here or anywhere It became more of a journey of you know, it Are these systems secure? Are they being upgraded as frequently as they should? Are they being taken care of and Who's really looking at that and how much does a public know about how these systems actually work and how much of the people that even run the systems and own the systems know About how they work when you get all the way to the edge, you know, and it's these networks that are kind of private and undocumented and you can't find anything out there about How they work what the protocols are anything you have to reverse engineer the entire thing So it seems like you're kind of taking the stance that many people in the security community have taken regarding voting machines Which is it is a public good these public utilities and we should understand What's going on with them how they're protected how they operate For the benefit of the public who is the primary user of them Yeah, I mean, I think it's you know, it's Critical you know, they get it's in the name right. It's critical infrastructure if it fails It's a horribly vent and it seems to be that the thought is that no one should touch them or talk about them publicly Or no one does for whatever reason maybe for fear of companies wanting to silence you or things like that. Yeah But but you know all of us know the more something is attacked the more it's looked at the more resilient it is By the nature of having to withstand the attacks and withstand the scrutiny of eyeballs on it And so when you remove both of those elements you have a recipe for a disaster right over a period of time Things become easier to hack the longer something exists in the world the easier it is to hack right because All the other technology that's needed to hack it advances it becomes cheaper to buy all these software to find radios all the tools You need used to be tens of thousands of dollars 10 15 years ago now. They're sub thousand dollars and imagine how much they'll be in five or 10 years Right it'll be dirt cheap, you know to get this stuff and and so it's you know to me It's important that that stuff's looked at right. Yeah, so I've kind of focused in that direction now Yeah, I really actually you made a really good point that I I didn't touch upon when you had mentioned it when you were talking about like Getting that job where they wanted you to have an oscilloscope and you're like, oh, I'll just read up on it That for a long time access to a oscilloscope with such with such a gate to the industry. Oh, yeah Because those were hundreds of thousands of very few people had them and just so like you mentioned the fact that Access is so readily available now you can buy the consumer public can buy them pretty inexpensively now means that yes It's a lot easier to go ahead and hack Yeah, I mean today anyone that wants to own an oscilloscope to sit today can like there's no reason you can You can get them for like 30 50 bucks on Amazon for the really tiny ones But you can analyze things and see what's going on when I was a kid It's like I had a logic analyzer that was that little thing for radio shack that had a red LED a green LED for higher low And the little LED that said if it was pulsing or not and I would try to decipher serial protocols and write my own Serial protocols and figure out the bottom right and everything with no oscilloscope and trying to just do the timing I mean you talk about like that is hard, you know You just in a slow scope and measure the waveforms and be like oh, I'm off by a little bit Let me tighten up my loop or whatever, right? Yep. Wow. Absolutely. Yeah, it is amazing to like you really hit on the point Which is like yes the the ability the tools that are there as well as the scrutiny so when I think about Windows The operating system today and the amount of shitty scrutiny well the amount of shitty Marketing that they've had or publicity that they've had because they've been hacked. They're so easy to hack and so on There's really made them have to be on top of their game in terms of security Yeah, protection et cetera, et cetera Not saying that they're perfect today, but now the the scrutiny is now turned towards like all the Vulnerabilities in Mac, which is historically been seen as more secure But now we're starting to find more screw more security holes there So it's doing a lot more updates to protect itself. I hear this another podcast and it's like attacks Always get better. They will never get worse, right? Yeah more computing power like you say cheaper equipment new algorithms like It's it's never kind of get harder to break into or break something. It's always going to get easier with time Yeah, it's always better better faster cheaper, right? And so they the tools in there and that's why you know Military and everything spend a ton of money to stay way at the cutting edge of technology or 5G comes out or something that's You know way a much more advanced technology because the then the the attacks and the cost of attack is greatly increased And that but that doesn't last forever right the cost of attacking frequency hopping Spread spectrum systems like what these power meters use used to be incredibly high They're they're across like 26 megahertz. They're hopping all the time every 700 milliseconds That used to be a crazy thing to try to figure out an attack now It's much easier and I've written stuff using free canoe radios software to do it using pretty moderately costed SDRs and some even lower costed ones and and that's you know That's basically not valuable at all anymore as a way to obfuscate stuff in yeah in that sense and so yeah And then like I say you know going another 5-10 years from now who knows how how cheap and easy that'll be a raspberry pie or something that can Do all of that maybe with some built-in RF hardware who knows you know and the meters are gonna be the same Most likely probably so the ROI the return on investment for power meters is 15 to 20 years Oh, wow. Yeah, we buy it. It needs to sit in the field for a minimum of 15 years That's how that that's how it's costed right and then and then hey if it can last 20 years what the hell right better Better ROI so you know think of any microcontroller and think of it 15 years from now and you know as the bootloader held up Can you dump the firmware out of it? Is it still as secure as it was? What about just microscopes and scanning electron microscopes that can look at that level of you know The however many nanometers the the you know the silicon is anything like that all the stuff you would need to attack that 10 years from now might be way more accessible available on eBay Some college is selling their old equipment for scrap that you can pick up And now set up a lab in your garage. Yeah, there's a ton of ways to attack that stuff right and so fundamentally I kind of think that business model might be flawed right and so there's probably a lot of things that you kind of discover along the way That it just you know as I dig into a more and more you see all these interesting things you mentioned You know that the you know the future we're gonna have A more of these devices can be available in the market and that means you for example You can buy more of these on eBay and and and start looking at them so so I guess that just I want to ask how did you start looking at these? Did you immediately think oh can I just buy a note power reader on eBay and it's gonna work or what was your Approach to start looking into this you you were interested in it, but how did you go about? Okay, I'm gonna figure it out Yeah, so I you know, I'm a Yeah, I I don't know touchy Philly's not the Rayward. I need to take things apart and I like hardware right so I can read a little bit And read you know spec sheets or whatever, but I want to take something apart and I want it and so the first thing is it well How do you get one of these things to start analyzing it and and so it's not you know anyone can get one right now Like they're on the side of every home and business and they are not locked right like there's a little security tag So the power company knows if someone's tampered with and tried to take it off But it's pretty easy to unplug and just walk away with it So if you wanted to just acquire hardware like say I was you know malicious attacker You can just go get one. They're super easy to get and no one's watching if you take it or not But I wanted to make sure that I was doing everything on the up and up and I could actually talk about what I'm doing publicly Everything you'll see in my videos from Faraday cages to all these things to having an amateur radio license Everything I've done has been to ensure that I can openly talk about this and someone can't just attack and shut down What I'm doing over some little kind of thing right so I thought okay Well, I can't take one because that's not gonna work out I can't just steal one and I can't look at the one on the side of my house because it's like a cable box You know at least if you're renting it like I don't own it even if it's on my house So I thought well where could I get these and and so I kind of defaulted to eBay from buying cell phones and older kind of things and Just shopping around and so I went there and I typed in like smart meter and I was just amazed at how many of these things were for sale And even the one that I needed like Landis and gear focus AXR dash sd like that specific model and a whole bunch of different ones from different cities All for sale on there along with a bunch of other hardware you see that I've managed to acquire if you're watching these videos like modems and collector devices and all these other things Um, and so yeah, I was just boggled and so This was a couple years ago. I bought one and then I just started buying more and more and more because they were pretty low cost and I bought with the intention of Especially once I realized I was going to put this stuff on YouTube and once I realized I was going to talk about it publicly I basically just bought as much as I could figuring that source might get shut down. Oh good by someone I don't know who it's it'd be a tough challenge right basically stocked up before either I stocked up to have everything I would ever need so if someone says that source dries up That's not my problem anymore, you know, it's so but it hasn't dried up at all, you know There's still you can hop on there now and there's all kinds of power meters and different Some of the really good things that used to be there. I bought all those but you know, but there's the other still a good amount of devices on there Yeah, I get I had going back to some of your discussion around like how we're how I guess municipalities or utilities are Emeritizing the lifetime Of the meter itself of like 15 years like that's really Short compared to let's say what's typically happening for particularly in power utilities? It's seen so if you look at California PG&E itself has had basically some stuff has had not been replaced and it's over a hundred years and we've had like numerous Failures that have caused fires and so forth and so on so like I think it's the problems even worse like some stuff Just there ain't nothing on there and the smart meter the smart meters themselves. I thought it'd have only been World out in the last 10 to 15 years anyhow. So yeah, it seems to me like this is a problem where either you You basically have to require these companies To do this on a regular clip or you have to basically make them um Companies run by local government To force them to have that kind of regulation and I yeah, it's it's a huge that's a huge challenge It's probably you know, it's like I could I could speculate on things But I'm definitely not one to discount the level of challenge of what this is right in the cost and ultimately that cost is You know born by the consumer themselves So if we want new meters every two years guess what you know, it's like that's rolled into the power bill Like it's not like they're free or something, you know And then you have to say well, what's the value to the consumer of of these things because that's the question in the consumer ass Like it might be making your life easier and you more profitable as a company But does that really do anything for the consumer? But to your point about other things like the really big transformers and all that stuff Yeah, the ROI on those is much longer than 10 or 15 years You know, and and I think it's the challenges is they start to slap on these kind of network enable the stuff or internet enable these different devices That's when it becomes you know when the ROI those calculations probably have to be different Because you can't network enable and internet enable things and expect that even if the hardware would last a hundred years That that you could you know that that should be the way it is that you should have some really yeah Well, yeah, and that you know that knowing that it will be hacked if you deploy some system like that That there's only so many firmware upgrades. You can do there's only so many of these things before It's just the attack surface will be too great and that the way to attack it, you know, so So yeah, that's a that's a really it's definitely a big challenge But I think that's part of the thing is that it's it's not being highlighted I think because people aren't openly attacking it and is you openly attack it and say well if Some ransomware actor or someone else wanted to come in come up with a firmware You can update the firmware on these things over the air wirelessly And you can attack them a bunch of different ways if somebody wanted just you know say We're gonna black out a part of the city and we'll black out the rest of the city unless you send us You know 500 bitcoins, right? Like as that becomes easier to do You know it and and the barrier to entry of the hardware and everything else becomes lower Becomes an attack someone's willing to do and because these things are rolled out all over the place It's like if you figure it out in one area And you could probably figure it out in the another area too and so There's a there's a guy That um who worked in IT at a large corporation. I know but before then he was working for I don't know if his department of I think his maybe department of energy and all he was doing as an IT person I guess he also he also went was a regular at At a black hat But he was saying how like the government has a entire side or team of people who are Mostly volunteers shockingly All they're doing is protecting our electrical grid from count for from counterattacks or from attacks And that was gosh 2009 2010 when he was when I was talking to him about this so no doubt it's gotten really worse and we're way past I would imagine we probably already had that type of ransomware attack Yeah, and when you look at you know there's there's all the skated devices and there's a whole other group of people that are Looking at skated devices and and they ride on kind of the internet and what attacks can be done there and Wow devastating those things can be attacking those types of systems I focused more on the wireless side and this other part of the network that I felt like was being ignored And I also always enjoy wireless because and I think it's good for people to know You know, it's like if I didn't want to publish anything. It's like you can it's if you're smart You can attack a wireless system with no one ever knowing that you're doing it Especially if you're just receiving you could completely reverse engineer a protocol attack something without anyone or not attack it Right, but understand how it works without anyone ever knowing you're doing it Which is different from an internet based attack where you're sending packets across a network and people could see what's happening And you have to you have to go to a lot of steps to bounce things through or whatever. Yeah, you're on it though But when you talk about wireless things, you know, especially old school days satellite TV or you talk about you know these kinds of networks I mean you can just you know you can sit around and just hack that thing all night long and think about it Even if you go to transmit, you know, it's like can they try and you'll eat and figure out where you're coming from and all these things It's like not really unless they're prepared and they they know what you're doing so yeah, so it you know It is you know, it's a different kind of attack surface and so people you know It's good to help them understand these people that are that make the decisions to buy these things and roll it out like what You know what it really is. It's not as secure as you know a lot of times as people wish it was You know one of the things that um going back through your videos um earlier this week I thought I thought was interesting is that they you know if they wanted to they could tell What what appliances were running in your household and You know naturally like to some people they'll be like oh, so what This is like really a benefit to the whole community in terms of making sure That people aren't consuming more than their fair share of power especially during let's say the summer or the winter Do you have any evolving thoughts on how they might end up using that or you know like Like how fine grain can they make this information be because like it's kind of disturbing if they know that you're charging your phone all the time I guess or if you're maybe bitcoin mining maybe I don't know or making NFPs Yes, so I think um so the meters like there's so many different manufacturers of these things And then on top of that like the you know the the boards and kind of the the different technologies that they're using like as far as How they transmit I guess you could say um, there's just a lot there's there's not really any I mean there's standards kind of that they apply to but everybody's got their own Um, and so there's a lot of a lot of different ones out there so the ones I've looked at these ones by Landis and Gear I kind of research and to see well, what are the newer models are coming out with And so some of the newer models there's a company called Sense I want to say it is they sell like a current measurement deal You can put on your house and it'll it'll give you those levels of kind of very fine grain power readings So they're reading it like you know 15,000 times a second they're measuring current usage and very fine Um, this company sense and so they can tell you like oh, you're running your um You're your refrigerator or your air conditioning unit or which air conditioning unit or you're you're drier or something like that because They can look at the signature kind of the device has on the power line as it turns on and so they they create a they can capture it You know have a snapshot of what that signature is basically looking fluctuations of the power lines And then figure out kind of from sending all that data probably back to whatever cloud they have Um, what what matches like oh, that's the same song refrigerator. That's the way they turn on or whatever else So if you look Landis and gear as a company, I believe you have to fact check this yeah, but I would say they have an investment in sense Or they acquired them one or the other and so they incorporated a very similar technology into their latest meter It's called Ravello um, and so when you look at their marketing videos um for Landis and gear and their spec sheets They talk about basically the exact same specs as what Sense had on their current detection thing So that the meter itself could detect all these things and and so they're talking about ways to deliver to the consumer Maybe knowledge of what devices are turning on how much power are using when you're using it all these kinds of things Everybody's got a desire to create some kind of api go system or something I would say I think a lot of that stuff is it's just it's kind of you know marketing to try to get the consumer on board to maybe say Hey, here's why we should get new meters because when you look at these meters that came out It was like oh the consumer's gonna have all this information and they'll be able to you know save power and everything else And we'll have portals for them to look at this stuff And most of that stuff never seems to materialize, you know, it becomes a great You know marketing effort to sell whatever it is. It's like oh your car has bluetooth this yada yada yada Really, you're just going to the store and back and you don't use the other hundred features that the salesperson's talking to you about I think these systems aren't really that much different, you know They need to help regulators justify why should we spend tens of millions of dollars or more to upgrade? And it's like oh the consumer's gonna love it. They're gonna have all these portal features and they'll save power and things and You know, I don't know how much of it like how much how much value is it in a power company? If you teach everyone how to use less power like that sounds like it cuts into profits a bit, you know Yeah, to be honest with you like I That's the way like I was very skeptical and dubious that any any consumer would find A thermostat sexy or useful, but you know we got nest So I think something so like when I looked at nest like when I had I had a nest at another house now I have like three air conditioners and the ROI on nest for me is not so hot with three of them But the value for me in nest was not all the learning and everything I had it it never like You know, it never quite figured it out, but it was great to have an app on my phone that I could lay in bed and adjust the temperature Like before I got out of bed and so I think there's certain things that definitely resonate Like being able to program that have it turn things up and down And but I'm not I guess it all depends on how it's rolled out. Yeah, and what the value is I feel like the kind of what you were getting at is on one hand It sounds like you have this one company. I don't I'm confused about which one was real Oh, Revello, it's lambda-sing gear then yes, and they call that sort of line of me So yeah, so I'm kind of wondering if what's actually happening is like hey consumer put this thing at you know here And then we'll give you personalized or so you know update so you can help save the planet Meanwhile all your data is getting siphoned and siphoned up for their machine learning out there to go Yeah, okay, there's a whole lot of Samsung's a whole lot of this and then the other and then they end up using that data to feed a new thing that's going into smart meters That's more on a b2b side. So that's what I'm kind of wondering is if they're kind of like they have the consumer front and then a separate b2b for For the people who are rolling out these meters for sure It's it's quite possible that the you know data could be sold of you know what what kind of a person is this like What do they use how many devices they have do they have a Tesla or not like that's going to have a certain kind of profile, you know, I have welders, you know when you start welding that's a certain kind of you know high draw or whatever and right now You know that's you don't really have that granular detail what they have is oh this person kind of uses a lot of power And they could probably tell a car because that would have a certain profile of a good amount of power usage over a period of time But you can't tell the very granular things and these these devices as they advance, you know It gives you it gives whoever can receive the data. So this is assuming that only the power company gets the data, right? Yeah, they they know they have these great vaults that they store your data in and never show it to you really just gonna say And we all know how that ends you know and and like I can tell you that that data is probably transmitted back wirelessly somehow and you know how how secure is that you know and who who you know Can your neighbor with an SDR receive all that stuff. So I kind of wonder you like that like okay? So we have consumers who don't want to pay extra for anything Power companies are like okay, we got all this extra data Consumers don't give a rat's ass. They're still going to use as much as they want Okay, what if we sold this information to third parties and this is kind of where I'm wondering if what happened in Texas that February night is that people had enough information to go. Oh the load here is going super super high Why don't I start buying up stock or selling shorting this or that or the other in the market So I can make a little bit of extra money because I know shit's going Crazy on the grid right now Yeah, and you know when I mean, that's like kind of the the in-run deal way back in California I was in California when there was like I'll do the air quotes right now, you know the blackouts That really weren't blackouts at all. It was people playing with demand in saying if you can shut off power here That looks really good and we can sell it for a higher value over there And there wasn't really anything going on when you read you know back to some of those kind of you know blackouts and quotes right It was in-run playing games and traders, you know selling power for more money because they were removing Supply from the system so that the demand would go up and you could sell it for a higher value I don't think that's I think out here what happened is just people aren't doing then they are building the systems resilient enough like these You know, we know it gets cold A couple times. It's already happened. It's going to happen again And you know until and it costs money to invest for the really bad times And so it's just a simple analysis that I'm sure they teach in in school. Oh, they do Hey, you know if it if it all if it doesn't happen that often And when it happens it only costs you ten million dollars in fines or fees, but it costs 20 million dollars or even five million to do the work Well, if we're not sure, you know, it's like it's just a simple. It's a spreadsheet You know, so it is literally a spreadsheet. It's called expectancy theory And so what you do is you take the monetary value of what it would cost should this event happen Times the probability of that and then you compare it against the remaining probability times what it would cost Otherwise, and then from there you add those and that's how you kind of know which route to go in your decision In a business class making with this decisions And it's important for people to understand yeah all like company cares about is money Like everything else is marketing and ways to hire employees and everything At the end of the day And so if you allow the market to make the decision the market will make it based on what the market cares about Which is investor return right and and and in this And then and our capital society we are required a corporation is required to return value to The stockholders and to the owners of the company not to anybody else. So unless you legislate it as such That's it. It's not gonna happen. Okay. We once again went ethical and would way off of that now about tools So Because this is what I like so so you got these meters How how did you go about figuring out the protocol? You've mentioned SDRs You've mentioned Fairly key just but what was the process of like okay? I've gotten these things from eBay How do I figure out what this thing is transmitting and what does it mean? Yeah, so it it happened kind of over a good period of time I would say when you like some of my early tweets I think I have one that says like hey, I'm working on reverse engineering Smart meters and it's a good way to learn software to find radio and C++ like I'm kind of always looking for a reason to learn Something and a project is a good way to focus yourself down like oh, I got to I got to meet this goal whatever it is And so I'll learn what I need to to solve this problem And so for me that's you know, I enjoyed so I start focusing down and so And I always I always wanted to reason to really dive into software to find radio and good new radio and and other Tools like that and so when I started with the smart meters the first step was Just receiving the wireless data and like I said they're hopping around all over the place There's basically 240 channels so you can think of it like you know radio stations You know you flip from one to the other and you choose what you're listening to and it stays in its same spot These things the meters the radio stations hopping around on you every seven tenths of a second it goes to a new channel It has 240 different channels that can pick from between basically 902 to 928 megahertz So the first step was trying to just receive some of those packets of data and figure out what is even going on with it What's the how's it encoded what's the you know the bitrate all these things? And so I used a few different devices the first one that I actually was able to receive some data with was like that that Michael Osman the great yeah, no it was the oh That yardstick the yardstick one so the yardstick one uses the same transceiver chip that the Smart meters use this Texas instrument CC 1020. Yeah, so you can just use a little Python script I would just set it to one channel and eventually the meter will hop to the channel you're listening to and transmit If you just let it sit there long enough because it In order to pass you know FCC certifications everything you want to hop equally across the entire band So you don't really want to favor one channel So you just pick a channel and let it sit there and you'll hear data from meters around you And so I I start capturing some packets and then it was using tools like come now it would probably be universal radio hacker To take that There's another one It's not a bot line It's another one it's a visualization tool It'll come to me It'll come to me probably in a minute it and and you can basically you can capture some spectrum And then you can look at it and I've used that with some software to find radio stuff to capture the spectrum and then look at You know how it's modulating what the the bits are but with the the first way I figured out was what that yardstick one And so I was able to get the the kind of the bits out of it see what they were and then you know kind of stare at the The ones and zeros until you figure out. Okay, this is the the header This is a bit of a preamble. These are these different pieces and it was really just capturing quite a few packets some google searching I did manage to find one Like analysis that had been done by some other power company and they had some hints in there About like what the header is and some other stuff that kind of helped me get those pieces figured out initially So I would say a lot of software to find radio as far as tools like angels if you look at my stuff hack rf blade rf I have a an edis usrpb 200 That one really lets you receive and all of them with most of software to find radios is just how much bandwidth do you want to receive at one time? So you can listen to kind of all the hopping so that as far as tools What's the other one in spectrum in spectrum? Yes Yeah, I just wanted so are these all great scott gadget ones or no, so the yardstick one and the hack rf are great scott gadgets And then the blade rf is new and yep, I think that makes that one Edis which now is owned by national instruments makes the usrpb 200 Yep, that one I like a lot. That's a good tool to work with It's a little pricey, but it's um, it's it's still yeah, it's still sub it's sub thousand you can maybe get him used on ebay I got mine for like 500 on ebay I want to say and I just really really wanted one so I kind of ponied up and then I also have you know A silo scopes logic analyzers. I've heard a number of people mentioned the the salee. Yeah, that one is I like theirs. I like their software It's pretty good. I have A bus analyzer I've been using that more recently one of these big old i-squared c_i_s_p_i That was good. I captured some of the traffic between like the microcontroller and the transceiver the radio transceiver chip um What else do I mostly focus on that would say the big old stuff is real I really like I've used their their stuff for usb Analyzer. Yeah, and it does a great job Yeah, it's real it's real nice I mean, and that was nice to just confirm that they do hop every 700 milliseconds and I was capturing all the channels They hop to to try to do an analysis on the frequency hopping side like could I also build a frequency hopping thing to To hop along with the meter they hop they hop based on their network ID and part of their kind of mac address Is how they determine their hop pattern? That was the question I had was what what how did you figure out the equation there? And so I didn't so so what's really interesting is I still don't know how they hop what I did was I built a receiver that no matter where it's hopping it receives every single transmission in that whole range Yeah, so so basically on the receiving side it doesn't matter where it hops I receive everything and I decode all those messages and I can tag it with the the frequency It was received on and the time and everything and then just very recently I built a transmitter so you got to think like so I can receive the meter anywhere it goes But how do I talk back to it? I have to know where it is when it hops to send it a message And so what my thought was is well could I build a transmitter that just transmits on all 240 channels simultaneously So no matter where it is it gets my message and so I just did that like a couple weeks back And so I have a transmitter now that when I send out a burst on all 240 channels simultaneously I've verified it with hardware I have here no matter where I set the modem to on any channel It receives my message every time I transmit it So now I have a mechanism where I can basically feed all this data to like a Python script As a message is received from a meter I can receive it Parsit build my response Transmit my response back within that window And I now have a way that without ever figuring out what the frequency hopping pattern is I can talk to anything that's frequency hopping It's like you're in a horror film So you have 240 of your friends each one is picked you're all back to you know You're in a circle with your backs to each other facing out And you hear some ominous voice telling you something And then you guys all decide what you're going to say back and everyone shouts in their different directions The same thing at the same time And I can parse all those messages simultaneously and put them down and then send a blast back And so to me so that's basically kind of rendering the frequency hopping portion of that protection useless So now it's okay you know there's a couple of other pieces they have some You know some little things they use like any network communication where you have kind of like What's it called it's like it's almost like some sync information so they have advertising channel basically Well, it's like well, they don't have that but they have kind of like encounters. They're incrementing and these other things So when you communicate with them you can just buzz it with garbage data You know you have to build a response and so and I've figured out quite a bit of that already So I'm working on a script where I can basically receive it parse it into the different pieces like the The receiving ID the transmitting ID all these other parts so I can craft a response that the meter is expecting It's got a properly signed CRC on the end of it and all these things And then see how it responds when you're not just buzzing it with garbage data But you're really crafting a response that it's expecting to see and so can I flood that Network can I send it all kinds of garbage? So in my own kind of little network that I've built in my house That's the test that I'm doing like what does it do when I I set up a meter I have a device that is basically simulating the the other side of the network the meters trying to talk to and then when I put Myself in the middle of that or along side of it What happens if I just start flooding packets into that network or if I I send things or can I change the time times really important when you're building power Like what happens if you set it back by a day, you know, and so any broadcast the time routinely that the meters Then make sure they're set to the proper time because for all of them to hop 700 milliseconds everything they all have to have the right time right and so there's probably a ton of different kinds of attacks It can be done there that I'm just now at the point where Me or anyone else can initiate those similar kinds of attacks using these software tools that are kind of freely available See keep saying your network How big is your network? Are we literally talking just one? Yeah, you're big array of antennas to like basically take in every single channel out once and then just one meter or How many meters do you have in your network? well, so I could probably have like 10 because I have a lot of meters Um, but right now I've just been doing a couple inside of a Faraday cage and then um, and then in antenna coming from the Coming from the software-defined radio yeah into there and it transmits and so it's it's very small like, you know kind of unassuming looking because you can surprisingly you can transmit it on 240 channels from just one little antenna sitting there like you know It's not it's not as crazy science fiction looking thing that's coming at you It's a very small thing that you would never guess that it's it's doing all that right and so for a network What I need is any one side that's running kind of this collector device That the meters trying to talk to and then the meter and and those two need to kind of like when I'm listening to the data I need to hear that they've kind of had a handshake Like I can see the sending and receiving address and I can see the meter sends a message to it It sends a meter back and they kind of discover themselves and then a piece shows up in this software that I have kind of some debug tools for So once I see that that kind of connections made I can have two three or four meters in there that all kind of join this little network And then now that they're on a network. They've synchronized time. I can try to send some attacks And it would be I feel close to if I was attacking a My own meter network say that was in my neighborhood. Yeah, or some other network So that's what I need it. I need something that formed that little Simulated network. Otherwise, I'm just kind of trying to attack a meter. They can't find its network And so it's not the same as what it would be like looking at a you know devices on a network. Yeah, it's funny that you talk about It's not a ridiculous like antenna array because just like in your video you're like Once you know to what you know what you're looking for just driving around you start seeing them everywhere and like the antennas themselves are not Big there like everything is kind of blends into the background as it is So that that works for them, but it also works for you Yeah, 900 megahertz. It's like those aren't big antennas like you know same thing like you look at Wi-Fi You know a 2.4 gig antennas a little a little antenna 900 megahertz is only a bit bigger And so it doesn't it doesn't take much for for that set to send it because it sends these very short bursts They can kind of be high-power bursts which travel quite a long ways and it and it doesn't take much because it's just little Little packets of data that they're sending So for that for that particular Range the 902 to 928. I think you said megahertz range Is there anything particularly special that the FCC has a license for is that like is that just where? Yeah, so it's like an unlicensed Industrial scientific and medical that's what ISN stands for I think Band and so basically like you know a lot of a lot of different frequency ranges Someone has to get a license whether someone has to be on like you look at cellular carriers and everything They spend billions of dollars to buy frequency ranges With this 902 to 928 it was I think it came about quite a long time ago And it was a way for there to be these little devices that could communicate that you know, they have to be FCC certified But there's no licensing requirements, which means you're in an unlicensed band So you have to figure out how you get your traffic to travel across without other people stomping on it Because anybody can be in there, you know power meters and all these other things are in that same band That's part of the reason that their frequency hopping and doing all this other stuff so they don't want channel isn't good It just hops to another channel and so You know, in that sense it I think it all comes down to cost It's much cheaper to do that than it is to put 3G modems or 4G modems which might be way more secure Inside of power meters, but then you have to pay all the cost of all these devices on a cellular network and everything else versus And yeah, and some if you look at outside the us a lot of them are 3G or 4G in the meters like it's not they don't they don't go with these kind of mesh Private networks that there's no documentation for they want public standards They wanted to ride on a cellular network or something, which I'm sure has its own Challenges, but I think this is probably probably costs cost driven on these So I want to talk about a different kind of network and you've mentioned wiki and and I've also seen on your youtube videos the it's recess Sim I don't know what it's called but it's like a Yeah, yeah, so it's called it's called richessum richessum and so I'll tell you I'll tell you how it came about Yes, please. Yeah, particularly the pronunciation Exactly, so richessum is Latin for moving moving backwards Right, which is what reverse engineering is it's us instead of forward engineering I thought it was an acronym Yeah, nope, it's it's just and it also happened to be a dot com that was available which is basically what drives everything is what's available That's right, you know, um, and so I liked and so I had to look up the pronunciation and and I get it It's everybody says recessum and it's a challenge. So I try to say richessum As much as I can in whatever videos, you know, so that's its own kind of challenge, but it it came about is you know Uh, I felt like I was always reading about these different people. I'd read about Travis good speed or yeah Chris Girlensky or there's this guy Chris Tarnofsky. Yeah, oh, he's got a he's got a few views. Yeah, dude's awesome I love watching any video that guy has. He's so passionate about silicon. I saw I'm so alive Had a hard ride out here. Both right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, so And you're always seeing this stuff. It's all over the place and I was like, you know It'd be nice if it could be if we could at least have a place where You can find out more information or more people come to one spot to share about reverse engineering And so when I did the Nito XV11 I created a wiki. It was like XV11 hacking.com. It's long gone Because I you know because that site I was using someone else's wiki. It was a company Um, I forget wiki spaces or something like that. Yeah, it's long gone um, but what I did is I created this wiki and I started documenting what I was finding on this robot and a ton of other people joined this wiki And they were documenting and we were all filling out this thing. I was like, wow, this is so cool And it went away and I was bummed and I thought, you know, I'll build a wiki But this time I'll own everything about it so that no one can shut the thing down, right? So it runs media wiki now I pay for the hosting, you know, I've got kind of cash set aside for you know 10 15 years worth of hosting costs So it's not like it's going to go down for some reason and I just let anyone join for free There's people hacking and reversing during radio songs, which are like those weather balloons that go up and when they come down They don't care if you take the hardware and keep it so these guys go hunt weather balloons And they're reversing during the hardware and they have a whole page on the wiki documenting it And so it's a way to try to, you know, centralize some of this information For anyone that's into reverse engineering to say, hey, who are other people that are doing it? Can I document my stuff there and share images and data and everything And so that's kind of how it how it came about is I wanted a spot to put that and I want to spot other people could come to as well And there's also a discord, right? Yeah, um and so I I created that because I'd started with the forum I think the forum still up But it just didn't seem to it didn't seem to jive that well, you know And so I created a discord after somehow else getting on discord and there's a ton of people to join that channel too We chat about reverse engineering power meters and another, you know, any random thing somebody wants to To you know talk about and so I kind of created some links off of richesum.com At the bottom it's just kind of a landing page and you as a you click a link you'll go to discord or go to youtube or the wiki or those things And so there's a number of us in there that will chat about the, you know, anything exploits we're finding for Smart meters whether it's how to dump firmware in the chips or or anything else and that's some that's actually been really good as a way to To communicate with people That's awesome. Yeah, I it's It's so nice to you know be able to communicate and get help from like-minded people these days and and I feel like Early days we had IRC we had forums. Yeah, and then I feel like we lost it for a while And it's kind of coming back and in the ways of discord and I mean IRC never left but a lot of people left Yeah, yeah Yeah, and I was on IRC early days and in different kind of channels and it was same thing It was a great spot to go and ask questions and you know and find out stuff And so same thing with discord. You know, it's let people come in ask questions help direct them to whatever You know if they want to you know join the wiki It's like hey, you know no problem creating a count there and share stuff and and so yeah, that's been that's been pretty fun Awesome. Yeah, I love hearing about this stuff So we've talked a co- like throughout this entire podcast that you've mentioned many times that you've gone a lot of stuff from eBay and from some of our pastest john McMaster's in particular He said that there's a lot of power and going to eBay to getting some of your equipment one You know, what are you know how I guess I guess a wonder is like, you know How difficult is it to find what you need on eBay? Is it worth it or the price is better and Did you ever figure out where all of this stuff was coming from like how are people just having like meters that they're just selling Yeah, so I think I think um, so I would say yes. I believe eBay is a good way to find things So I would say I think part of what happens is Um, you know, there's a disposal issue So if you're a company and you have to give rid of stuff you usually there's not a trash can They let you put it in like you have to responsibly dispose of things And so maybe it's an e-waste company and if you're an e-waste company It's like well you also are trying to make you're making money when you someone pays you to take the stuff But if you're a smart e-waste company you're making money also in the disposal that stuff And maybe you're disposing it on eBay like if there's not an agreement that says you must destroy this hardware Well, then you're going to sell it for as much money as possible. So I think a lot of times Um, this stuff is you know, a company's trying to get rid of it But if they're not watching how they get rid of it, it can just land on eBay Um, if they say you can haul it away and do whatever you want with it. It could land on eBay Maybe some inner pricing Employee that they say hey, you can have all this stuff if you want it. They take it home and it lands on eBay So there's a lot of stuff that probably you know, people aren't expecting to be on eBay Maybe shouldn't be on eBay, but it ends up there Um, you know outside of you could say like the stolen items or something like this like I think these are most of This stuff is probably not stolen at all. It's just people just want the stuff to go away And they aren't thinking of where it could go and they aren't thinking that someone else might be able to do something with it like Hey, if somebody took this apart, perhaps there's secrets in it like there's a serial eEPROM in the meters It has a bunch of data in there. It happens to have There's five passwords five different levels of security if you connect to the optical port on a meter So if you if you hook up there's open-source software to do it But you need a 20 character password to access it Those are all five plain text in the serial eEPROM in the meter So if you can get a meter from wherever it is you want to do you dump that there's all the codes in there You use those to access the thing on the front right? So they're not thinking that they might not know that data is even there How many other things are there like I have one of these handheld meter readers that you people use to walk around I just got this the other day. I'm working on making a video for it. I haven't made it yet I it has a compact flashcard in the back of it. It's just in it. It's never been white It came from Chicago about five years ago, which I can tell you because there's a bunch of Chicago names and addresses Of all the people that it was reading along with notes. What kind of great notes would you want to know as a meter reader? The gate code to access this house is list Um There's dogs in this backyard and they will release some right lame text in the five I'm so curious. I got I got five more that I bought on eBay this week that are showing up So we'll see what those five have, right? I got it. I got it. They're normally two thousand bucks brand new I got it for $30 because it said it was not working Um, and all I had to do was take apart the battery hook it up to my power supply charge the cells back up boots right up windows CE Um, the classiest of our tosses I'm telling you and it works and and so there's nothing wrong. They works great, right? Just somebody was disposing it. We don't need these anymore. Now we've switched to smart meters And all the all the information's still on it. That's that's what everything you you buy on eBay, right? Here's a bonus question. What would you recommend to to utilities companies who maybe is are thinking about deprecating some of their older gear that they should do prior to handing it over to e-waste companies Yeah, I mean you probably You didn't need to be well, this is with anything electronic anything that has a memory chip and it whatsoever if it's You know, you need to positively destroy that information like you have to knowing you have to it has to be part of the Supply chain life cycle that's something that stores data gets destroyed like if I throw away a usb key It's thrown away in powder form, right? Like it has been annihilated like it does not get you know You don't just toss it in the trash can or whatever because you know that even if you delete data It wasn't really deleted Who knows what other hidden sectors are there that store stuff and everything else so I think you know It has to be part of the disposal can't just be like it goes away And you have to you have to really I think make an effort to understand What are these things what pieces hold sensitive information just as they could have done everything the same except for take out the compact flash card And dispose of that by smashing it with a hammer and then say everything else goes to the e-waste company This thing goes to a special company that is part of the signed agreement They must destroy all the data or their life right financially liable, which is the only driver that causes yeah I would agree with you. Yeah, I'm kind of wondering if this should be part of The documentation for the product itself coming from the original Manufacturer says when you're ready to dispose not that they probably would have this information like after 15 years But it just seems like this is like hey when you dispose I mean when you look at your toothbrush if you have an electric toothbrush it tells you how to get the battery out I don't think anyone does that but you know what I'm saying, which is like here's the way to you know deprecate I'm looking forward to this video. I'm so looking forward. I'm so I'm so I'm so frightened to find out like does is it from my old neighborhood? I think before shadowing the future a bit and that You know possibly countries like air you know areas like the EU where they have you know GDPR and these data privacy things I mean it could be that part of the requirements in the future are what pieces in this does this device store Information and if so where and how and how does one dispose of that information like as part of the like you're saying when you receive it Like what you know does this thing you know store information and how does someone properly dispose of this device without leaking information That is not something like that anyone knows like or that that is part of it when it comes out like you know Somebody has to kind of take it apart and figure it out versus it just being a part of the the process Yeah, in my mind there's like an even simpler way of doing them all simpler But if if the data on the Flash memory whatever flash isn't cryptid you just need to destroy the key and you don't actually have to destroy the physical device But you know this is all implementation specific Um, and you know that they don't actually destroy the cubans the same but And then the question too is yeah, what what's the sensitivity level of that day to you know Because if it's if it's sensitive enough someone will figure out a way You know, then you're counting on that the key would never be discovered via some other worlds. Yeah, obfuscation Yeah, and so so if it's yeah, if it's Depending on how sensitive that data is maybe it's just you got to hit it with a hammer like it's hammer time And then the thing goes in the trench, you know Well, that kind of goes back to like what I was suggesting which is or what it was about to suggest which is Maybe you as a company like you know you need to like trash all the all these usb drives or whatever Maybe this is where you guys, you know declare it, you know What's the name um what's the name of that movie that my judge movie office space day where you just take it out just like you did that printer And you just like look guys go we wild. We know it's been really stressful just Or get we'll get a shredder And then we'll take everything out but because because at least that seems like we you can get everybody Everybody's mind around Why it needs to be done, but also kind of making a vent out of it Yeah, I think it was bunny that talked a lot about you know Just even devices like your keyboard and all these other things that all have everything as a microcontroller in it has memory It could be storing a number of keys that you're typing just as part of its own data logging process and everything else So you don't realize like inside of a laptop or inside of your phone How many you know, it's not just the hard drive right that knows information about what's been going on And the same thing with that device. He just came. It was it called the precursor or something I think it is that you know, it's it's a little it was on Maybe we'll crowd supply their work on it right now. Yeah, exactly where where you know It is meant to be more of a trusted device for communication and then it connects over an untrusted you know by fire something else But that you can say hey, I know how this thing works I know if it's been tampered with it. I know where it stores information things that usually is completely abstracted away from the user Right, they have no idea where any of that stuff is yeah Okay, yeah, you base a great treasure trove of whatever you buy probably has the original data on it because nobody selling on eBay is usually if it's critical stuff like that They're not the original owner and they don't care what's on it. They're making a bot somebody else needed to do that Yeah, they could have bought it from one of those like You know what he called storage units that you just see you see a storage wars. Yeah, they got a whole storage unit Oh, what are these power meters slapping on eBay, right? Who's this guy in Texas? He'll buy it Just keep slapping them on eBay, you know, I would love that like I've never seen the the TV show storage wars But I would love it if it was just like you know, you have a storage you you have a entire storage unit company somewhere in some really geeky place And you just keep an open one after the other and it's just all like classic vintage computers Power meters Old laptops like oh my god I'd just have if I won I would just have to keep paying storage fees because I want to keep all that stuff. I want to keep all that stuff like I was gonna ask like how did you it all kind of started with you buying one Nito robotics vacuum cleaner, you know, you know, and It's funny like now like where are you keeping all this extra stuff? And it is a source of issues kind of the same way that people who are really into analog synthesizers And they have to figure out where to put it and still like it's starting to get like yeah I have a rack in the garage and I'm storing stuff and I have an attic and yeah, it just it takes over Everywhere you are. Yeah, I don't have one of those Because I live in the bay. It's kind of a gift and a curse Yeah, well, you know, Texas. Yeah, they have basements Okay last question and this is for all all the money. This is like the million dollar question You know, you're pretty resourceful. I mean, you know how to use ebay to find out the really interesting stuff apparently Yeah, just like any reverse engineer If you were stranded on a post-apocalyptic island What would you bring with you? You know, I heard this on the other show and I was like oh my god Like I've dabbled in like wanting to be like a survivalist like you know bear grills or something And then and I quickly realized like no if that's not me and so I was like, you know, probably I'd probably take you down to the most basic level and it would have to be Like water, you know, like what what am I going to do to have like purified water because I was thinking like oh, you know Maybe you bring a chainsaw or something, but it's gonna run out of gas and like you know And so if you're like as long as you can you know or it was either water or fire It was one of the things or something fire. Yeah, I need I need to be able to like fire because I'm gonna freeze to death Or I'm gonna die of you know thirst because there's no clean water and so it's you know, and so I'm Probably I'd probably bring something make fire if I'm thinking about because I hate the cold like I if I'm freezing Everything else is a problem. So I Would be high, you know, I'll just yeah, I could just burn my surroundings, you know I think I'd probably be pretty happy this this also presumes that you would probably also, you know If you couldn't find food, you're just gonna na on wood. It sounds like I'm telling you like I think as long as I can make fire I could barbecue whatever it is I catch like you know I think I'd I think yeah, the water's hard to do the the fire can be hard to do Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, yeah, the yeah, the start that that whole you know twist in the stick thing I encourage anyone who thinks that's how they're going to make a fire to go outside and do that right now And you will quickly bring a flint with you to that desert island You probably fall over like you know blistered and and crying Yeah without a fire without a fire You're better you're better off with like a magnifying glass or like maybe like Anything anything other than that twist in the stick Well, you got to do it like you have to have a long enough stick if you get it Yeah, they didn't make me do that in Girl Scouts and good They made me be nice to people And so cookies Both I mean those are those are both fantastic skills if you're nice to people and you can sell something you can go a long way in life It's not worked out well for me I have not maybe I need to get in on this eBay thing. Hey, I got these Got some clothes here In case the audience doesn't know I'm recording in my closet, so there's lots of clothes So we've uh, yeah, we've hit the end of the Of the episode where can people find you hash So I'm on Twitter as um at bit banging bites I'm on tiktok is at bit bang bites because apparently banging is a bad word on tiktok So if no one could find me if they search for my name, so I'm now bit bang bites on tiktok Um, and then if you go to the richessum, which I'll I'll just spell it R-E-C-E-S-S-I-M dot com you'll kind of find links to these things I have a youtube channel with the same name with a bunch of smart meter videos And then discord as you mentioned if you just want to kind of chat with me about what's going on I love chatting with anybody And then there's the the wiki so primarily twitter and tiktok and And youtube I'd say which sweet. Yeah, we'll have links everything with pronunciations There you go. Reach has some Hey audience if you have comments or suggested names for the show you can find us on twitter Because that's truly the easiest way to find us because we had a comment form We'll link to the comma for but we probably will never see it until years later and maybe one of us will be dead by that point Who knows start a pool now to figure out which one of us will be dead You can find us on twitter at unnamed underscore show Uh, if you still can't find us you can go to unnamedare.com I mean you're listening to this so hopefully you can find it So find us. Hey you have found them. If you made it this far and don't know who we are Well, maybe they're new you know anyway You can find me gen on twitter at rebelbot gen no underscores and alvaro where can people find you if they I'm at alvaropeo on twitter and alvarope.com Thanks to all of our patrons. Thank you so much We're trying to we're trying to record as much as we can, but you know schedule's Uh, so we're just gonna make up for it with awesome guests Really long episodes Uh, we got great feedback Well, I really enjoyed chat with you and I enjoyed listening to the other ones you had and I think you're doing a great deal Oh, thank you. No, thank you so much. This this this was really really fun We as as last time we went in directions. We didn't expect but in a great way as I I'm very very happy So I hope folks enjoyed as well. I'm happy too Just want to make sure that I'm not They don't cover crosses. No, I'm just happy I can see the face Confirm I can see both of these happy people. Yes, everybody's happy. Everybody's happy. There's no filters on No happy filters. It's it's really unfiltered happening. We'll put those on anyway. Thank you so much for joining us, Ash. Thank you. Okay. Have a good one You