Not sure where to post this: Other brand firmware hacking

[Acpawa]

I don't know in wich part of the forum should I post this, I wanted to know something, if I were to try to hack the firmware to other brand say Samsung, Olympus, Vivitar or Casio what kind of knowledge should I have, like coding software knowledge, C++, that kind of stuff, programming for sure, but I wanted to know what specific stuff do the people who develop the hacks have like Vitalyi, people of Magic Lantern, Someone 1.00 and the people who's reading and know how to develop firmware.

Thank to the people who can reply!

[nanomad]

The steps, for any embedded device hacking are almost always the same:
- Find everything you can about the hardware you have.  CPU type and instruction set are key.
- Get a firmware update
- Try to disassemble it. If it's encrypted try to decrypt and hope it uses a fancy XOR and not some kind of asymmetric crypto.
- Try to dump the firmware from the camera using a custom firmware updater
-

[a1ex]

Some nice articles:

http://www.devttys0.com/2011/05/reverse-engineering-firmware-linksys-wag120n/
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/41672

And have a look at CHDK thread for non-Canon cameras: http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?board=37.0

especially the GoPro thread.