There will be a part 5!
Practical Reverse Engineering Part 4 – Dumping the Flash
Part 1 – Hunting for Debug Ports
Part 2 – Scouting the Firmware
Part 3 – Following the Data
In Parts 1 to 3 we’ve been gathering data within its context. We could sniff the specific pieces of data we were interested in, or observe the resources used by each process. On the other hand, they had some serious limitations; we didn’t have access to ALL the data, and we had to deal with very minimal tools… And what if we had not been able to find a serial port on the PCB? What if we had but it didn’t use default credentials? In this post we’re gonna get the data straight from the source, sacrificing context in favour of absolute access. We’re gonna dump the data from the Flash IC and decompress it so it’s usable. This method doesn’t require expensive equipment and is independent from everything we’ve done until now. An external Flash IC with a public datasheet is a reverser’s great ally. […]
More info:
http://jcjc-dev.com/2016/06/08/reversing-huawei-4-dumping-flash/
Pointers to 1-3 are also here:
Firmware Security 