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"Ndless" for HP Prime - Printable Version

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"Ndless" for HP Prime - Artifix - 02-12-2015 06:33 PM

Hello, I was wondering, is there a program like ndeless for TI nspire that would work on HP Prime? Perhaps one that would even use apps that are already made for ndless? I know the latter sounds quite stupid even for someone who is new to using graphing calculators, but still just a thought.

Thank you!


RE: "Ndless" for HP Prime - debrouxl - 02-12-2015 09:21 PM

Quote:is there a program like ndless for TI nspire that would work on HP Prime?
Nope.
It's been over a year since it was shown that one could perform arbitrary modifications to the official armfir.elf, over 6 months since the first crappy custom third-party armfir.elf PoC was done, several weeks since some hardware reverse-engineering was really started. All of those being performed by persons who have never been part of the traditional HP community.
But since the summer of 2013, when the Prime's firmware became freely downloadable weeks before the Prime hit the marketplace after the beginning of the school year in the Northern hemisphere, nobody made a PoC for arbitrary native code execution which can unleash the full processor's power from within the normal operation of the Prime's standard firmware.
The Prime's firmware certainly contains arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities, given that the Prime can be unwittingly made to corrupt memory / documents (sign of out of bounds memory writes) and to crash. This happens somewhat less frequently with the newest firmware versions, but still.

Why is there no Prime-based cousin of Ndless while the firmware contains vulnerabilities ? Because few people care, and nobody's spending time into it...
It took over two years and a half for the first arbitrary code execution PoC to appear on the Nspire series, though only several weeks after the decisive breakthrough of decompressing the second-stage bootloader, and from that point, the decryption of the OS. However, the Nspire was a closed platform based on undocumented components and using signed+compressed / signed+encrypted software updates, while the Prime's is one of the most open platforms for a brand-new calculator of the past decade: it's based on a well-documented CPU and uses unsigned clear-binary firmware upgrades.

Quote:Perhaps one that would even use apps that are already made for ndless?
That's unlikely to happen, given that a number of syscalls (e.g. the interrupt control, to begin with) exposed by Ndless are tied to the Nucleus base used by the Nspire's OS, while HP's Prime OS is not based on Nucleus.