I had an obscure Alcatel modem/router laying around with undocumented hardware, where even the mainboard's CPU/SoC serial etc didn't return any results from any search engines.

Soldered UART pins on it, plugged my USB adapter into my computer, then asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware blob. Took DeepSeek v4.1 flash around an hour to get a full OpenWRT build-and-flash pipeline up and running, using an isolated podman build container and everything.

The outdated OEM Kernel made it easy to identify the SoC hardware. drivers and proprietary Wi-Fi and Bluetooth driver mods (not really legal btw, because they "conveniently forgot" to publish GPL'd source code). Driver mods were successfully reversed through analyzing the .so and .ko files with frida in another podman container.

Overall took me less than half a day to do all this, and now I have OpenWRT running on that device, compiled from source with the upstream modern kernel.

To me, observing all that, and how quickly it found encryption keys, signing mechanisms, encodings, binary formats, instruction sets, disassembling it etc by just looking at the hexdumps ... this would have taken me weeks if not months.

And now comes the kicker, all that cost me 0.86$

AI and reverse engineering is like tap water now. There's no reason to not consider using it, because it's so accessible. There's just absolutely no point in proprietary hardware and software anymore.

My current project after this: I've soldered the UART pins to a proprietary Xiaomi smartphone I had laying around, and I'm currently letting it reverse engineer the baseband firmware. Let's see where this ends up ...

Man, that way I'd love to repurpose my Tokio Techbook (ARM wm8650, armv7?) with PostMarketOS, but there's no easy way to flash it...