attacking-hardware-interfaces

attacking-hardware-interfaces is a skill for Claude Code from trilwu/secskills. It costs 107 tokens per session (1,775 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A security-testing guide for examining the physical interfaces of embedded devices and circuit boards. It covers debug ports, flash storage, boot security, and some short-range radio designs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to locate UART, JTAG, SWD, SPI, and I2C connections; obtain console access; dump firmware; inspect secure boot; and test whether fixed radio codes can be replayed.
Why use it?
It helps assess risks that cannot be seen through the device's normal software interface, such as an exposed debug console or firmware that can be copied from a chip.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the secskills-offense plugin — 40 skills shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-hardware-interfaces
Any agent
npx skills add trilwu/secskills --skill attacking-hardware-interfaces
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/trilwu/secskills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install secskills-offense, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 40 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for attacking-hardware-interfaces

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-hardware-interfaces.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-hardware-interfaces)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-hardware-interfaces"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-hardware-interfaces.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 107 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,775 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00107 $0.01775
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00888
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00355
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00178

Measured 2d ago against content hash 9b9c6a45e323, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

attacking-hardware-interfaces scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

secskills-offense/skills/attacking-hardware-interfaces/SKILL.md · 136 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 136 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Attacking Hardware Interfaces

Physical access changes the game: the debug ports, flash chips, and boot process the vendor assumed were private are all reachable. The work is finding the interfaces on the board, using them to reach a shell or dump the firmware, and judging whether the device's secure-boot and RF designs actually hold. Almost everything here needs the device in hand and permission to open it.

When to Use

  • You have physical access to an embedded device or PCB and need to find its debug/serial/flash interfaces
  • Getting a UART console or root shell, interrupting a bootloader, or halting the CPU over JTAG/SWD
  • Dumping firmware off a SPI/I2C flash chip for analysis
  • Triaging a secure-boot / chain-of-trust design for bypass feasibility
  • Studying sub-GHz RF replay feasibility (fixed vs rolling code) in a lab

When NOT to Use

  • Analyzing firmware you already dumped — extraction, filesystem carving, binary analysis — is analyzing-firmware-images; this skill gets the bytes off the device and hands them there.
  • Wi-Fi attacksattacking-wireless-networks.
  • Bluetooth/BLE and NFC/RFID specifically — attacking-bluetooth-nfc.
  • Reversing a specific binary pulled from the device — analyzing-binaries.

Find the Interfaces

Boards expose more than they should through unlabeled test pads and headers:

  • UART. The most common win — a serial console, often a bootloader prompt or a root shell. Identify the four lines (TX, RX, GND, VCC) with a multimeter and a logic analyzer, then connect a USB-TTL adapter (FTDI/CP2102) and open the console with screen/minicom/picocom. Detect the baud rate (115200 is common) if it is not obvious.
  • JTAG / SWD. Full debug access — halt the CPU, read/write memory and registers, dump firmware, patch. Identify the pinout (a JTAGulator brute- forces it) and drive it with OpenOCD and an adapter (Bus Pirate, J-Link, Black Magic Probe).
  • SPI / I2C flash. The firmware lives on an external flash chip you can read directly — clip a SOIC8 test clip on and dump with flashrom via a CH341A or Bus Pirate, in-circuit or after chip-off.
  • Logic analyzer (Saleae, or sigrok/PulseView with cheap hardware) to identify and decode any of the above when the protocol or pinout is unknown.

Read the full file on GitHub · 136 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 136 lines · 107 tokens per session scan A 9b9c6a45e323

Subscribe to this mod's changes

attacking-hardware-interfaces is a skill published in the GitHub repository trilwu/secskills (134 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 107 tokens to every session and 1,775 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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