Comment by akoboldfrying
10 hours ago
Impressive work!
I have a side question. I looked into the linked Raspberry Pi hacking challenge, and there's something very basic I couldn't figure out: It looks like the relevant script in the repo just writes 0xc0ff 0xffee a few times to the OTP as the "secret" to unlock. But given that $20000 was up for grabs, this can't possibly be the genuine secret being sought to claim the prize. (Indeed, I can't think of a secure way to install a secret from a public GitHub repo unless it involves running on-device code that encrypts something using some other, factory-installed secret key, which is just kicking the can down the road.) And given that the OTP on a brand new RP23550 is initialised to all zeros, it can't be that the genuine secret is programmed in at the factory either.
What am I missing? How does the genuine secret get installed on a person's RP2350?
> If you think you have found a break email us at doh@raspberrypi.com with details - we will ship you a Pico2 with a custom secret hidden in it. If you manage to extract it, you win the $20,000!
Thank you, don't know how I missed that!