Breaking What You Own: AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering

Description

I bought two security cameras. They work fine - through the manufacturer's cloud app. No local access. No RTSP stream. No way to integrate them with my own home automation. The cameras are on my network, in my house, and I can not talk to them. So I gave an AI agent a network probe, a web browser, and 15 iterations. On iteration 15, it pulled a 2560x1440 HEVC frame from both cameras.

Then I pointed a similar agent at a database engine's source code and told it to find data corruption bugs. It read the simulator source, ran 230 differential tests, reviewed 3,000 lines of WAL internals, generated its own attack ideas, and started writing crash-recovery tests - without supervision.

This talk is three stories about using AI to reverse engineer things you own, use, or depend on. Cracking a checksum algorithm on physical documents. Reclaiming local access to locked-down hardware. Turning an autonomous agent loose on a codebase to find bugs that traditional fuzzing misses. Reverse engineering has always been about freedom and understanding - from Compaq cloning the IBM BIOS in 1982 to farmers jailbreaking tractors at DEF CON. AI is compressing months of that work into hours. That changes the assumptions your systems are built on.