Computer Hacking with Arduino UNO

Today I am going to explain another cool experiment done by me. Did you guys ever think about Computer Hacking with Arduino? Yes, that is possible.

Most people are misunderstanding Arduino with a Rasberry-Pi. There are lots of differences between the Arduino board and the Rasberry-Pi. An Arduino is a Microcontroller motherboard while a Raspberry-Pi is a general-purpose computer. That means an Arduino can only run one program at a time while a Raspberry-Pi usually with an operating system so that can run multiple applications. I think that explains it is enough to understand the difference between the Arduino and the Rasberry-Pi.

This is my Arduino UNO (ATmega16U2)

In this experiment, I am using an Arduino UNO board because I only have that board at this time. My final target is a sending some preloaded commands in the Arduino board to my computer through a USB Cable. In default, this Arduino UNO board is not supported for this kind an activity, so I have to do some modifications to get this job done.

My first problem was an Arduino UNO board is not detecting as an input device by the computer. So I have to change the firmware in Arduino UNO board to recognise as an HID Keyboard.

Then the second problem has occurred. When the Arduino UNO board is detecting as an HID Keyboard I unable to upload codes to the Arduino UNO board. This time my Arduino Software did not recognise the Arduino UNO board as an Arduino board. So again I had to flash the original (USB Serial) firmware and upload the codes. Then after that, I was flash HID firmware back.

In this time, I succeeded. I plugged in my Arduino UNO board via USB cable to the computer, and it executes commands automatically. I know most of you like to try this at home, So I decided to leave some relevant links for you but beware there will be some risks because we are going to flash firmware here.

How to update the firmware in the Arduino board -
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Hacking/DFUProgramming8U2

Keyboard and USB Serial firmware -
https://github.com/clasiru/Arduino_UNO_HID_Keyboard

Arduino UNO HID Keyboard library -
https://github.com/clasiru/UNO-HIDKeyboard-Library

So, now you can understand the potential impact on Cybersecurity from the Arduino or IoT devices. Other hands, this will be coming handy for your IoT related projects so worth to try.