Security by obscurity is dead

How LLMs can take over hardware

6 November 2026Devcon, Mumbai

Péter SzilágyiDark Bio

I have a compute module with secure-boot. Let's look at the firmware!

Firmware binary... that's a lot of binary...

"Doesn't look like anything to me!"

Let's disassemble it... that's a lot of assembly...

"Still doesn't look like anything to me!"

Need help?Let's disassemble it! Wait... what's all that red?What do we have here? It contains an LZ4 error string.Can I run the red through python-lz4? Ha!Still a red block standing. Hmm, what do we have left?A proprietary code chunk? Let's rewrite it in Python!What does it do against red? Heh, magic code goes brrrr!Let's get rid of all the boilerplate. Ah, much better!What strings do we have? Carve the related code out.Let's turn the chunks into a call graph! Lookie there...Middle checks secure-boot! Code after is "unreachable".What's in our toolkit? Ugh, too many options...Let's find memory safety issues (out of bounds calls).Let's find liveness issues (infinite loops).Let's find structural issues (bad if conditions).Let's find code logic issues (plain programming bugs).Let's find architectural issues (component dissonance).Let's find known vulnerabilities (thank you error strings).Let's filter out unexploitable ones (side effect benign or crasher).Let's filter out dangling ones (some pre-condition neutralizes)Static analysis done. Let's simulate ALL the code!Let's recombine the vulnerabilities into an exploit!

LZ4 decodermagic codesafetylivenessstructurallogicarchitecturalCVEspotential vulnerabilityunexploitablefunctionalityidentifiedstringdecoded executableunidentifiedexecutablenot executable

15 zero-day vulnerabilities 3 secure-boot escapes 1 hour on $100 sub

"All your base are belong to us"

Thank you

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your own agent

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Péter Szilágyi

peter@dark.bio

@peter_szilagyi

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@dark_dot_bio

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Sure, it's your hardware!