porting Dropbear to the Wii

Matt Johnston matt at ucc.asn.au
Sun Mar 15 16:32:50 WST 2009


Hi,

It certainly should be doable, though I don't know what the
Wii platform is like. Take a look at common-session.c for
the main select() loop - if the Wii doesn't have posix
sockets then you'll need to replace that and other calls to
read()/write() and setting up non-blocking sockets.
Dropbear doesn't use threads so you'll be OK there. You will
probably need to generate your own entropy for the PRNG -
moving a controller around for several seconds and hashing
the output is a popular way.

For a client you'll also need a terminal emulator. Writing
one from scratch would be non-trivial I think, though some
may already exist for the Wii? Otherwise I guess you could
port PuTTY or something similar. (In which case you might
want to look at its SSH code instead).

Have a look at PSPSSH, a port to the PSP that might have had
to solve similar problems.

Cheers,
Matt

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 02:47:49PM -0600, Jonathan Glines wrote:
> Hello everyone. I'm a freshmen in college and need to write something
> security-related for a class. After discovering how easy it is to
> write homebrew for the Nintendo Wii, I set my sights on writing
> something for that platform. Since SSH pretty much rules my life, I
> decided to look for relatively simple SSH client I might be able to
> port, which brought me to Dropbear.
> 
> Now, I know the Wii isn't exactly POSIX compliant; I don't think
> there's much of an operating system to speak of. Any port of Dropbear
> will probably end up being more of a fork then a port. However, there
> is an FTP server and a few other networked apps written for the Wii,
> so I'm sure an SSH client is possible. But is a Dropbear port
> feasible?
> 
> I'm worried about the POSIX libraries that I won't be able to use,
> such as network, time, threads, and entropy. Plus, I'm not well versed
> in this stuff to begin with. But this is stuff I would really like to
> learn, especially the networking. What parts of the code do you think
> I will have to rewrite?
> 
> Anyway, I just started this yesterday, and I'm not sure if I can do
> it. Any tips, criticism, or words of encouragement would be greatly
> appreciated. I'm prepared for blood and sweat if I'm going to get this
> to work. ;)
> 
> Regards,
> Jonathan
> 


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