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EC Hacking - Your Laptop Has A Microcontroller - Hackaday

The article discusses reprogramming the Embedded Controller (EC) in Framework laptops to enhance functionality, such as repurposing the Caps Lock LED. It explains the EC's role in managing lower-level functions like power management and keyboard input, and highlights the challenges of accessing and modifying EC firmware due to proprietary restrictions from manufacturers. The piece concludes with potential applications for open-source EC firmware, including bug fixes and custom features.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
8 views19 pages

EC Hacking - Your Laptop Has A Microcontroller - Hackaday

The article discusses reprogramming the Embedded Controller (EC) in Framework laptops to enhance functionality, such as repurposing the Caps Lock LED. It explains the EC's role in managing lower-level functions like power management and keyboard input, and highlights the challenges of accessing and modifying EC firmware due to proprietary restrictions from manufacturers. The piece concludes with potential applications for open-source EC firmware, including bug fixes and custom features.

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Lê Trung Hòa
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HACKADAY

EC HACKING: YOUR LAPTOP HAS A


MICROCONTROLLER
by: Arya Voronova 22 Comments

June 7, 2022

Recently, I stumbled upon a cool write-up by [DHowett], about reprogramming a


Framework laptop’s Embedded Controller (EC). He shows us how to reuse the Caps
Lock LED, instead making it indicate the F1-F12 key layer state – also known as “Fn
lock”, AKA, “Does your F1 key currently work as F1, or does it regulate volume”. He
walks us through adding custom code to your laptop’s EC firmware and integrate it
properly into the various routines the EC runs.

The EC that the Framework uses is a MEC1521 chip from Microchip, and earlier this
year, they open-sourced the firmware for it. Now, there’s a repository of
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microcontroller code
advertising cookies. Learn that you can compile yourself, and flash your Framework OK
more
laptop’s motherboard with. In a comment section of HackerNews, a Framework
representative has speculated that you could add GPIOs to a Framework
motherboard through EC firmware hacking.

Wait… Microcontroller code? GPIOs? This brings us to the question – what is the EC,
really? To start with, it’s just a microcontroller. You can find an EC in every x86
computer, including laptops, managing your computer’s lower-level functions like
power management, keyboard, touchpad, battery and a slew of other things. In
Apple land, you might know them as SMC, but their function is the same.

Why have we not been reprogramming our ECs all this time? That’s a warranted
question, too, and I will tell you all about it.

WHAT’S THE EC’S JOB?


The EC controls a whole bunch of devices in your laptop. Not devices connected to
USB, LVDS/eDP or PCIe, because those would fall within the purview of the chipset.
Instead, these are devices like power switches, the charger chip, and various
current monitors, since these have to work correctly even when the chipset and
CPU are powered off. But of course, it’s not just power management – there’s a
whole lot of things in a laptop you need GPIOs for.

Generally, anything that you’d


control with a digitalWrite or
monitor using a digitalRead ,
measure through an ADC, or talk to
using I2C – these are things
handled by the EC. Thus, the EC
reads battery state and charger
voltages, drives the fans with PWM
and takes temperature
measurements from various
sensors. The laptop keyboard is a
key matrix, and the EC scans that
matrix and processes key presses,
forwarding the key events to the
chipset that your OS then reads.
Whether your touchpad is PS/2 or
I2C, the EC handles it and exposes The EC of a EEE PC 701. This one even has some
extra signals for media buttons that were left out in
itByto theourOS,
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website
advertising cookies. Learn more hardware! OK
Your laptop’s power button is connected directly to the EC. As a result, your EC is
the first thing to get powered on; and if a broken laptop of yours has no reaction to
the power button, it means the EC can’t do its power management job for whatever
reason. In fact, if you check Framework laptop’s recently published reduced
schematics, you’ll see that the EC has it own separate power rail coming directly
from the battery.

How does it even talk to the chipset? For about two decades, ECs have been using
the LPC bus – a four-bit wide bus superficially resembling qSPI. Apart from ECs, it’s
only really been used by TPMs in the recent times. LPC uses frequencies from
25MHz to 100MHz. Thus, if you want to put a logic analyzer to your LPC signals and
capture some packets, your typical cheapo 25Msps LA won’t do, but an off-the-
shelf FPGA board or a way faster LA will work wonders, and there’s a pretty cool
paper using LPC manipulation and an FPGA to extract keys from TPMs.

LPC is about two decades old, and is a direct successor to the ISA bus – in fact, in
some laptop schematics from 2003 you’ll find the EC connected through ISA
instead, but it’s all LPC beyond that. However, recent ECs talk eSPI instead, a qSPI-
like interface meant to replace LPC, and the Framework EC talks eSPI, too.

OF COURSE, THERE’S FIRMWARE


INVOLVED
Every EC has firmware, and every laptop (and desktop, and server!) has an EC. The
EC firmware is nearly always closed-source. As such, the EC firmware is one of the
binary blobs we tend to miss when talking about proprietary parts inside our
computers. Often, the EC firmware is stored on the same SPI flash chip as the BIOS
– other times, there’s a separate external or on-chip flash, in which case, you
typically have an UART bootloader you can reflash your EC through. All of that
depends on which specific manufacturer and model of the EC you have.

Often, your EC is built on something like ARM or 8051 architecture, other times it’s
something more obscure like CompactRISC. The common thing is – at most, you’ll
get a binary blob when it comes to your EC’s firmware. At some point, when Google
got into laptop business, a group of their engineers presumably said “enough”, and
open-sourced their EC code – which is what Framework has been building on when
it comes to their own EC firmware. Last year, System76 opened up their EC code,
too. Unfortunately, the situation remains dire for other laptop manufacturers.

Could your
By using our EC get
website backdoored?
and services, Not
you expressly likely
agree to the–placement
it tendsofto
ourbe harder to
performance, modifyand
functionality and
update EC firmware than it is to do the same with BIOS images. Now, could you OK
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yourself modify your EC’s behavior? It’s at least technically possible, and I’d argue
that you should have always been able to do that.

SO, WHAT ABOUT HACKING?


Of course, with every subsystem of a laptop, you’ll find a subgroup of Thinkpad
enthusiasts that have already dug deep and used it to pull off some fun and useful
things. The EC is one such aspect, and they sure have something to offer –
reprogramming keyboard layouts and removing battery locks, mainly. With
keyboard layouts, they’ve managed to make older (and apparently more superior)
keyboards work with newer laptops, with a tutorial talking about how specifically
you need to insulate certain pins, and a super convenient way to flash the changes.

The battery part is more vital, however – you can more often than not live with a
subpar keyboard, even on supposedly otherwise-stellar ThinkPads. The problem is
the “genuine” battery check in the EC, which doesn’t let you charge (or even
operate from) the battery if it doesn’t pass. This isn’t just limited the third-party
battery options, in case that’s what it sounds like – such checks also prohibit use of
Lenovo batteries that were just meant for a different kind of Thinkpad, but
otherwise mechanically, electrically and electronically perfectly suitable.

My personal fight against the modern laptop

There’s a video on how ThinkPad EC hacking unfolded, and I recommend you


check that one out to see what’s up. Now, Lenovo didn’t seem to like that people
were
By usingswapping keyboards
our website and services, youand enabling
expressly agree to use of third-party
the placement batteries
of our performance, that Lenovo
functionality and
themselves stopped
advertising cookies. selling ‘genuine’ counterparts for anymore. So, at some point,
Learn more OK
they decided to close one of the most comfortable ways for EC firmware updating,
and release a BIOS update citing “security improvements”. The relevant CVE says
this:

“ A vulnerability was reported in various BIOS versions of older


ThinkPad systems that could allow a user with administrative
privileges or physical access the ability to update the


Embedded Controller with unsigned firmware.

If you ask me, this description is bonkers. This sentence essentially means “the
laptop’s owner can flash EC firmware not approved by Lenovo”. I do wonder what
led to it and what the possible justification might be, but in the end, whatever the
reason, it’s a distraction from what I believe. That is, updating the EC firmware on
one’s own laptop should be possible, and Lenovo closed a user-friendly way to do
just that.

Also, without doubt, not all manufacturers respect your right to repair when it
comes to ECs. As an example, for almost a decade now, Dell has been shipping
their laptops with ECs that have encrypted firmware, keys fused inside the EC. This
has been a particular problem for Dell laptop repair, as EC die every now and then.
While you can buy a blank EC and reflow it in place of the Dell’s dead one, it won’t
have the decryption keys Dell flashes into the EC at the factory, and therefore won’t
run Dell’s encrypted firmware. Modifications are off the table here – it’s not even
possible to source a fitting replacement for the EC when your laptop is broken,
even though the chips themselves are abundant.

WHAT CAN YOU DO NOW?


Now there’s three manufacturers that have open source firmware for ECs – Google,
System76 and Framework. What could you do with this firmware, though? As with
any underutilized area of hacking, it will take time to realize its full potential.
Remapping keys is not the only thing – you could implement a 80% battery charge
limit for cell longevity if your laptop’s manufacturer didn’t provide you with one, add
extra layers to your laptop keyboard without any need for OS support, maybe
tweak your fan curves. Or, indeed, you could add some GPIOs inside your laptop,
for whatever sensors or buttons your heart desires.

You can
By using ouralso fixand
website bugs, which
services, crop up
you expressly in to
agree ECs every now
the placement of ourand then, and
performance, can be
functionality andquite
advertising cookies. Learn more
annoying to deal with – imagine keyboard keys getting stuck every now and then, OK
seemingly randomly, and that’s exactly what happens when you have an EC bug.
Bug fixes or improvements, just like with any firmware currently closed to us, we
won’t see a slew of cool hacks starting tomorrow, but there are definitely cool
things on the horizon when it comes to EC hacking.

Posted in computer hacks, Microcontrollers


Tagged embedded controller, eSPI, Framework laptop, LPC

← THE ORIGIN OF THE FRESNEL LENS

THE WONDERFULLY WEIRD WIREFRAME GAME BOY THAT ACTUALLY


WORKS →

22 THOUGHTS ON “EC HACKING: YOUR


LAPTOP HAS A MICROCONTROLLER”

ec says:
June 7, 2022 at 7:46 am

> “the laptop’s owner can flash EC firmware not approved by Lenovo”
Don’t see how it’s limited to just the owner.
These are business laptops so it’s expected of them to plug up potential security issues,
evenour
By using onwebsite
old models.
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> Dell has been shipping their laptops with ECs that have encrypted firmware, keys
fused inside the EC
I’m actually surprised there are manufacturers that don’t do this.

Reply Report comment

Arya Voronova says:


June 7, 2022 at 8:18 am

The ability to install your own OS, disable Secure Boot, or plug in random USB
devices is also a ‘potential security issue’. It is inane to view it this way, however.

We are talking about “physical access” threat model when it comes to the
specifics of this hack. The laptops affected fail this model on many fronts already.
This is not a decision taken with a sane threat model in mind.

Properly working on your product’s security takes consideration – this ain’t it.
Google hasn’t fallen out with Big Security crowd after open-sourcing their EC
firmware, neither have System76 or Framework. You’d notice that if you looked.

> I’m actually surprised there are manufacturers that don’t do this.

Well yeah, not everybody makes such moronic decisions. Dell’s consumer-grade
laptops go to waste because the EC can’t be replaced without a donor. All the
other manufacturers don’t feel the need to do that, and sometimes they’re fine to
distribute an EC firmware blob, even.

I gotta be really adamant on this. We shouldn’t give excuses to manufacturers’


bullshit decisions. We’re doing each other a disservice if we accept their excuses.

Lenovo closed this way of updating after their community has embraced this way
to give old laptops new life. I prefer this to be emphasized quite clearly. There’s
nothing good about this restriction for us, and it’s not justifiable security-wise.

Reply Report comment

Dissy says:
June 7, 2022 at 9:17 am

“Lenovo closed this way of updating after ”


Lenovo is a special case. They keep their BIOS (and thus EC) firmware
encrypted to protect their system backdoors.
They use the UEFI together with a Windows feature called the ‘platform
binary table’ (WPBT), to inject backdoored software such as SuperFish and
even
By using our install
website and custom rootexpressly
services, you certificates
agree so they
to the persistofacross
placement fresh windows
our performance, functionality and
advertisinginstallations.
cookies. Learn more OK
It’s really fascinating to read about this level of hardware integration.
I wouldn’t expect they care much about the EC firmware specifically, but
being in the BIOS updates it comes along on the encryption ride either way.

Reply Report comment

Arya Voronova says:


June 7, 2022 at 9:27 am

Ohh that’s interesting! so that’s how they made SuperFish possible,


ugh. Got any links that you liked talking about this? It’d be cool to
learn more, I wasn’t aware of these aspects!

> BIOS (and thus EC) firmware encrypted

This, I don’t understand. The EC firmware may stored in the SPI chip
alongside the BIOS (idk if Lenovo does this often), but if what you
mean is that they do encryption-at-rest for BIOS code somehow (not
something I’ve heard about), the EC code would still be executed by a
different CPU, aka the one in the EC – just stored in the same chip as
the BIOS?
…update encryption? I know they do update signing, but… encryption?
You’d need to flash decryption keys into the PCH or something, then.
Or perhaps the EC decrypts data before passing it to the PCH – but
then, that’s easily sniffable and moot, unless a secure channel is
overlaid over LPC/eSPI/whatever. Can you help me understand that –
perhaps any links that’d help here, too?

Reply Report comment

Dissy says:
June 7, 2022 at 9:55 am

Sorry, I was referring to the BIOS updates they push out. Lenovo
has a userland updater service that handles decrypting their
BIOS blobs and doing the install to the system. I’d assume they
are certainly signed as well.

Once it lands in the flash chip I couldn’t say.

Report comment

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Dissy
advertising cookies. says:
Learn more OK
June 7, 2022 at 10:40 am
As for links to more info, I first heard about it from a BlackHat
conference talk in 2015.
Some useful search terms are “lenovo service engine”, “uefi
windows platform binary table”, and also “uefi wpbbin.exe”

That last one is the name of the executable that the BIOS
injects, from the UEFI data, which windows auto-runs early on in
the boot process. Searching just the exe name fills the results
with all sorts of AV pages and “what is this file?” pages that look
quite shady.
This prefix returns stuff about lenovo and asus which looks
useful, but was just the first thing to come to mind.

Report comment

Mike Massen, Perth, Western Australia says:


June 7, 2022 at 7:48 am

Interesting post, didn’t realise so much work had got into opening the system up to
mods, cool !
Hmm, have a few systems, worth going through the code make sure no vulnerabilities
or hidden Bitcoin IDs ;-)

Thanks for posting :-)

Reply Report comment

Arya Voronova says:


June 7, 2022 at 9:18 am

Glad to hear you liked it ^__^ It’s really fun what can be done! [DHowett], for
instance, is working on new key handler code for the keyboard, and already has a
proof-of-concept working. From here, one of the possible routes is that you could
implement keyboard layer declaration parsing, QMK-style – maybe with easy user-
space updates, too!

I have healthy respect for “hackers’ projects might be never finished”, so don’t
treat this as any kind of promise on [DHowett]’s behalf =D But it’s definitely an
idea that’s just begging to be implemented, and something we can only work on
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aftercookies.
the ECLearn
firmware’s been opened!
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Reply Report comment

ec says:
June 7, 2022 at 7:56 pm

If laptop keyboard custom firmwares become a thing, my X260 could use a


menu button…

Reply Report comment

Arya Voronova says:


June 8, 2022 at 5:56 am

same! my laptop could use a few custom buttons, too.

Reply Report comment

Dan says:
June 7, 2022 at 8:23 am

> This sentence essentially means “the laptop’s owner can flash EC firmware not
approved by Lenovo”.

It also means that a bad actor with physical access can flash firmware (e.g. keylogger)
onto your laptop; maybe the “cleaner” at the hotel you’re staying at for that important
business/political trip; stuff like that happens. Which for some people is a concern,
though admittedly not most of us.

But it also potentially means there’s other security flaws including other routes to install
firmware.

But there might be worse issues. If it controls the battery charging, it could potentially
be abused to turn a laptop into an incendiary.

Given that thinkpads are (or at least were?) highly regarded in big enterprises, I suspect
the security issue might be the real motivation here.

Reply Report comment

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Arya Voronova says: OK
June 7, 2022 at 9:04 am

The ability to drum up security concerns doesn’t make you security-savvy.

“To turn a laptop into an incendiary” is a wild and baseless speculation. Please do
check a laptop schematic sometime, and read some datasheets of the ICs in it.
There’s a myriad of protections against such failure modes, not just for malicious
intent, but because hardware fails, and you need to protect components from
each other if one of them goes haywire. Physical access can circumvent all of
these protections – and it doesn’t need the EC being in the picture for that.

You can still override CC/CV charging with physical access, you don’t need an EC
firmware mod for that, even – there’s a lot of things you can do with physical
access. Furthermore, the things you *can* do through the EC power-wise with
firmware alone, without hardware mods, are actually quite limited. This is because
of the internal protections of the charger and power path ICs – the circuits are
designing for being switched on and off, not for short-circuiting into each other or
something. Plus, the battery itself also has protections for things like overvoltage
and short-circuit.

If you’re interested in how much you can actually do through the EC firmware,
reading the code for System76 and Framework laptops would give you a good
start on what’s actually possible.

As for “other routes”, I’ll quote the article, and expand on the implications of what I
hoped you’d notice when reading it.

> one of the most comfortable ways for EC firmware updating,

“one of the most comfortable” is the key part. You can reflash the Lenovo ECs
through other ways still, with physical access. They closed down the specific way
to do it that was comfortable for end users. For a bad actor with physical access,
evil maid style (that you’re referring to), it’s still possible to do flash firmware, using
i.e. the UART bootloader of the EC.

They closed the specific way to update firmware that was used by Thinkpad
enthusiasts to replace keyboards and batteries, without a sane security
justification to do so, and that’s quite apparent to me.

Reply Report comment

Foldi-One says:
June 8, 2022 at 6:51 am

Being business machine ‘sane security justification’ has both a different


scale and meaning to home computer vendors – and because it was the
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advertisingmethod so well
cookies. Learn moreloved and documented it may have been a legitimate victim
OK
of its own success with exploits being seen that do merit the change.
It might just be anti-consumer BS, but equally when you are shipping
thousands, millions or maybe even billions of units, many with support
clauses and some degree of liability ‘fixing’ this may actually be 100%
required, as its made exploits for your giant cash filled business clients
harder, may have actually be required to keep certain clients – like Military
and government organisations are often rather picky (with good reason) and
thus it keeps you in business.

Reply Report comment

Bill Stewart says:


June 13, 2022 at 4:55 pm

Yeah, the descriptions in the security community have mostly been about Evil
Maid Attacks installing keyloggers or whatever.
I’ve had a lot of laptops over the years, ranging from little ASUS portables to Dell
and HP, that are excessively over-concerned about what power adapter is
plugged in and whether they’re willing to let you use it to charge your batteries or
not.
“Oh, noes, this 65W USB-C or (110W 19.2V barrel jack charger) doesn’t look like
OUR 65W USB-C (or 90W 19.2V barrel jack charger), so its electricity might be
inadequate to run your laptop! So we’re not going to let you get any power from it
even though you’re desperate and want to get something done even if you can’t
run Crysis 24 hours straight!”

Reply Report comment

Daniel says:
June 7, 2022 at 8:40 am

Won’t be long before someones got a string of WS2812s hooked up to it and are using it
as a monitor to browse the desktop :D

Reply Report comment

Arya Voronova says:


June 7, 2022 at 9:28 am

=D
By using ourwith the and
website Framework exposing
services, you expressly24 GPIOs
agree to the(keyboard
placement ofcontrol pins), I sure
our performance, hope and
functionality
advertising cookies.does
someone Learn this!
more OK
Reply Report comment

Myself says:
June 7, 2022 at 10:16 am

So many cool repurposed-hardware ideas seem to require cooperation from ECs and
bootloaders.

You want to turn an old laptop into a remote solar-powered piratebox-style information
kiosk? Gonna have to mod the EC to understand charging from a PV panel that doesn’t
behave anything like a normal brick. You want to power off when the battery is on a bad
trend, but automatically power back up when the sun returns and SoC climbs above a
certain point? Again, the EC controls all that.

For the era before USB-C “docking stations”, docks were a many-pin connector with all
sorts of signals on it. And ISTR many of those signals are bus-switched under the EC’s
control. So if you don’t need the dock, you could repurpose that connector and signals,
if the EC would help out by switching them over to your new peripherals when desired.

Shall we talk about fingerprint-readers and stuff? Imagine integrating the FPR into a
hardware security token, resident entirely within the EC and TPM. I wouldn’t trust a
manufacturer-proprietary integration as far as I could throw it, but an open and auditable
firmware for same would be a gamechanger. Especially if I can solder-out the write-
protect pin for the EC flash IC after burning it.

This truly is an exciting frontier. Unfortunately it moves very fast, and mods developed
for one machine are likely to become substantially or entirely obsolete in the next
model, entirely based on the manufacturer’s whim. I think that’s part of why we don’t see
more hacking here already, but then, ThinkPad owners are a special breed.

Reply Report comment

Arya Voronova says:


June 7, 2022 at 12:26 pm

You get it – this is a wonderful assortment of EC hacking examples! So many fun


things can be done with EC firmware that’s modifiable and trustworthy. And.. give
us an expansion header with some fun pins, too :3 I.e. an ADC channel, for
instance – I want to add potentiometers to my laptop!

As for mod obsolescence, if the firmware is open, it should be way easier to port
mods from generation to generation. Thinkpad stuff was complex to figure out, in
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part, because it relied heavily on RE and patching – otherwise, the keyboard mod
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described in the Thinkpad video would take minutes to perform. So, we get a
lower barrier of entry, and with sources being available, we also get “apply
sourcecode patch to new revision” kind of portability!

Reply Report comment

The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren says:


June 7, 2022 at 1:26 pm

“And.. give us an expansion header with some fun pins, too :3 I.e. an ADC
channel, for instance”

Do you recall the “Geekport”?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Inc.

Reply Report comment

t says:
June 7, 2022 at 1:30 pm

I should have included the Geekport description.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox

“An experimental-electronic-development oriented port, backed by three


fuses on the mainboard, the 37-pin D-Sub “GeekPort” provides Digital and
analog I/O and DC power[13] on the ISA bus:

Two independent, bidirectional 8-bit ports


Four A/D pins routing to a 12-bit A/D converter
Four D/A pins connected to an independent 8-bit D/A converter
Two signal ground reference pins
Eleven power and ground pins: Two at +5 V, one at +12 V, one at -12 V,
seven ground pins

The pinout:
http://www.hardwarebook.info/GeekPort

Reply Report comment

Bill Stewart says:


June 13, 2022 at 4:50 pm
By using our website and services, you expressly agree to the placement of our performance, functionality and
The modern
advertising cookies. version of the Geekport, of course, is the Raspberry Pi’s
Learn more OK
pins, either 26 or 40 of them.
(Or using USB to connect to whatever, of course. Lots of Arduinoish
things, a few WS2812s, etc.)

Reply Report comment

tttt56 says:
June 8, 2022 at 5:44 am

your disc have microcontroler, so big! linux fit

Reply Report comment

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