Re: [gNewSense-users] KFV: Detecting sourceless firmware

[Brian Brazil]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Peter Lutz <address@hidden> wrote:

The main point of KvF is to find these sourceless blobs, and you should be looking at the entire file in any case.

While we have scripts that apply heuristics, they're never going to be as good as a human.

Brian

And these sourceless blobs will just look like a big string of hexadecimal numbers, right? Does this ALWAYS mean its a non-free, sourceless blob? Are there any circumstances where I'll see a long string of hex and it might be something else? I just want to be absolutely sure I'm doing this right. :-)

Yes:
1) Source is in a nearby file
2) 'Blob' is well commented
3) Blob is log tables, bits in a byte, inverse square, jpeg header and other lookup tables (lots of these)
4) It's an init string, not a blob (i.e. no changes possible, hard to distinguish but they're usually <64 bytes)

Brian