Research on Prepakis Georgios | Kernelstub | Security Researcher

Reverse Engineering a 2012 Toyota Yaris: From OBD-II to Exploit Chain

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Chapter 1: Introduction and Laboratory Setup

I picked a 2012 Toyota Yaris for this project mostly because of what it isn’t: it’s not a flagship, it’s not loaded with the kind of aftermarket telematics and OTA update infrastructure that makes modern vehicles a moving target for remote attacks, and it’s cheap enough on the used market that I could buy one, break it, and not lose sleep over it. That’s actually the point. Cars like this one make up a huge chunk of the vehicles still on the road today, and the electronics inside them were designed in an era when “attack surface” mostly meant “whoever plugs a scan tool into the OBD-II port at a dealership.” Nobody was thinking about buffer overflows delivered over a CAN frame. That assumption, it turns out, ages badly, and this post walks through exactly how badly.

From Bits to Breaks A Low Level System Exploitation and Defense

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction and Scope

Here’s the core question driving this whole project: how do software and hardware actually interact once you strip away the abstraction layers that normally hide the messy details from you? Compilers, operating systems, and runtimes exist precisely so you can forget about page tables, cache lines, and instruction pipelines while you get work done. Attackers, and the researchers trying to stay ahead of them, don’t get that luxury. Every exploit involving memory corruption, firmware, or a leaky microarchitectural feature lives exactly at that seam between the code you wrote and the silicon actually running it. This research examines that seam systematically, aiming to produce techniques reproducible enough to be useful, rigorous enough to be academically sound, and constrained enough to stay ethically defensible.