Anyone Can Hack IoT Even Easier Now - A Beginner's Guide to AI Augmented IoT Hacking

The speaker revisits his earlier DEF CON talk on IoT hacking and argues the barrier has dropped further now that AI agents can handle much of the groundwork. He lays out a beginner workflow: a kit of about twenty dollars (a multimeter, a USB-to-serial adapter and a flash programmer), then a cheap router or camera running embedded Linux as the target. Firmware can often be downloaded from vendor support pages, or read off the board when it is not.

He then separates the tasks AI does well from those that still need a person. Models are strong at reading scripts, logs and decompiled code, but they misjudge real-world severity and tend to chase privilege escalation on single-user root systems. Soldering and probing remain manual. He presents Wairz, an open-source MCP server he built that unpacks firmware in Docker and gives an agent reverse engineering, taint analysis, emulation and fuzzing tools. He also describes a fleet of Raspberry Pis that lets agents reach serial consoles, power relays, Wi-Fi access points, BLE, a rooted Android phone and SPI or JTAG interfaces.

As a test, an agent picked a cheap router, recovered its UART password, traced a custom web server to an unsanitized system call and a stack overflow, and built a working exploit that the speaker verified by hand. That yielded three CVEs. He closes with cautions about hallucinations, data handling and authorization, and points to a free UART course and a hands-on workshop.