Hackers Discover Way to Blow Apple MacBook Battery
At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas Charlie Miller, the principal engineer for Accuvant Labs demonstrates the process used to reverse engineer Apples MacBook battery firmware and manipulate data. By doing this you would be able to render the MacBook battery useless. Miller says that Apples vulnerability is in the series of three chips that perform maintenance and safety operations. Miller discover that by using a default access key he was able to control the MacBook batterys and was able to access the MacBook battery chips on the ROM level. With this discover Miller found that he was able to brick the MacBook battery pack or even erase data. At the end of his research Miller was able to accomplish the reprogram of the MacBook battery to intentional overheat and combust but never blow up. This was because the thermal hardware cutoff switches would more the likely stop the battery cells from catching fire
Tell me what you were able to do with Apple’s laptop batteries.
It’s sort of complicated, but the way batteries get charged in your laptop is there’s a little chip in your battery and the computer talks to that chip to figure out what’s going on. That chip will tell it how much charge it has, how much charge it needs, how much charge it should give it — that sort of thing. What I figured out was how to change the software that runs on that chip.
When it comes from the factory, they don’t want you messing with it, so they set up passwords and stuff to prevent you from doing that. There’s two passwords, actually, and Apple didn’t change those, so you can just find documents on the Internet that said what those were and then I could change the firmware on the chips to make it (the battery) do whatever I wanted.
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