Reverse engineering

Xbox

Huang has a long and noted history with the reverse engineering and hacking of consumer products. His 2003 publication Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering was one of the first published works regarding the reverse engineering of a high end consumer product. He faced significant legal pressure from Microsoft to not reveal the details of his exploits, and the book itself reveals that he had received a letter from MIT, where he was at the time a student, informing him of their disavowal of any association with his project. Additionally, his publisher John Wiley & Sons had rescinded their intent to publish the book.^[17]

In part because of this response by MIT to his work, when the Institute was again put at the forefront of controversy in their handling of the criminal prosecution brought against Aaron Swartz, and his subsequent suicide, Huang released the book for free through No Starch Press, remarking that "Without the right to tinker and explore, we risk becoming enslaved by technology; and the more we exercise the right to hack, the harder it will be to take that right away".^[18][19]

Printer steganography

In 2005, Huang worked with a team from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to develop code that interprets printer steganography markings.^[20]

Digital Content Protection

Huang created the NeTV in 2011, which was the first known public use of the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) "master key". The device uses the master key to implement a video overlay on existing HDCP-protected links, in a fashion which purportedly does not violate the DMCA.^[21] Both the hardware and firmware for the NeTV are openly available under the CC BY-SA license.^[22]

MicroSD card vulnerabilities

microSD cards: genuine & questionable

He has also used reverse engineering techniques to reveal why certain MicroSD cards are poor in quality.^[23][24] In 2013, he presented results in collaboration with fellow Singapore developer Sean "xobs" Cross revealing methods to load arbitrary code into microSD cards via backdoors built into the embedded controller.^[25][26]

Cell phone privacy

On 21 July 2016, Huang and Edward Snowden, in a talk at MIT Media Lab's Forbidden Research event,^[27][28] published research for an outboard computer embedded in a smartphone case, the so-called "Introspection Engine", that would monitor electrical signals received and sent by that phone, to provide an alert to the user, if their phone is transmitting or receiving information when it shouldn't be (for example, when it's turned off or in airplane mode), a feature described by Snowden to be useful for journalists or activists operating under hostile governments that would want to track their activities through their phones.^{[29][30][31][32][33]}

Novena

The open-source hardware laptop motherboard, Novena.

In 2013, Huang announced that he, again in collaboration with Cross, was at work developing a laptop called the Novena. The laptop is the first of its kind, in that the hardware and software are entirely open and only include components where the manufacturing companies do not require non-disclosure agreements to obtain the documentation necessary for design.^[34] In addition to the normal laptop components, the Novena motherboard also includes an FPGA, dual Ethernet ports, a three-axis accelerometer, and easily augmentable hardware.^[35] On May 7, 2014 the Novena's crowdfunding campaign reached its goal of $250,000 and went on to raise a total of $722,880 without taking subsequent pre-orders into account.

Writing

Huang is a contributing writer for MAKE magazine, as well as being a member of their technical advisory board. He has also written for Gizmodo and IEEE Spectrum.

He has also written extensively about manufacturing in China.^[36][37] In March 2016, Huang successfully completed the crowdfunding campaign for his book The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen, a manual written to enable the English-speaking electronics community to be able to navigate China's Huaqiangbei marketplace in Shenzhen,^[38] widely regarded as one of the world's premier electronics marketplaces and production hubs.^[39] He also appeared in Wired's 2016 documentary Inside Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of hardware.^[40]

DMCA lawsuit

In July 2016, Huang became a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that challenges the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In the complaint, the EFF argue on behalf of Huang (and his company AlphaMax LLC.) that the "anti-circumvention" and "anti-trafficking" provisions of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threaten free speech.^[41][1] The lawsuit, Green v. Department of Justice, is shared with plaintiff Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher whose work has a similar obstacle within Section 1201.^[42]

Huang and AlphaMax were seeking to develop the NeTV2, a digital video processing device that allows a user to record and modify video data from various sources, including streaming services and video games. The extant version of the device does not allow for the modification of encrypted video streams, but Huang and AlphaMax intended to add this as a feature by reverse engineering Intel's High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection copy protection system. Their concern, however, was that this would qualify as a breach of Section 1201 of the DMCA. In this capacity, the EFF's lawsuit is a preliminary injunction against that portion of the DMCA.^[43][44]

Discussing his motivations behind the suit, Huang said, "When I was a graduate student, I saw a generation of younger engineers growing up stunted and fearful under [the DMCA's] shadow ... In multiple startups since, I saw numerous, legitimate business opportunities stymied by the statute."^[45]

In July 2019, a federal judge ruled that the lawsuit could proceed.^[44][46] In 2021, District of Columbia Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan denied the preliminary injunction put forth by the EFF, citing that the Department of Justice, who were brought forth to defend against the case in 2016, had sufficiently demonstrated that the DMCA is a necessary amendment to existing copyright law, and that to this end it does not place undue or unwarranted restrictions on free speech. The specific assertion by the EFF and Huang that code qualifies as speech, and thus qualifies for the protections given to free speech, was not explicitly rejected in the decision, though Sullivan did remark that the Department of Justice "makes a compelling argument" against that assessment within the purview of the EFF's proposed injunction.^[43]