porting Dropbear to the Wii

[Jonathan Glines]

Actually, concerning the terminal emulator, the printf library that
I'm using for the Wii supports VT terminal escape codes. I was able to
change the row and column with printf("\x1b[%d;%dH", row, column); and
set the foreground color to red with printf("\x1b[31;42m");. The
background color did not change to green like I expected, but I don't
think that is much of a problem. Is this fancy printf enough to
implement a simple terminal emulator? Or is it more involved?

Thanks,
Jonathan

P.S.
I've been reading through SSH's RFC and Dropbear's source at the same
time, and Dropbear's source is way easier to follow than OpenSSH's.
Nice work. :)

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 1:32 AM, Matt Johnston <matt at ucc.asn.au> wrote:
> 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
>>
>
>