Last week I got a message from my dad (who works with me at a client’s office) with an image attached.
I asked him to unplug it, store it in a safe location, take photos of all parts and to make an image from the SD card (since I mostly work remote). I have worked on many Raspberry Pi projects and I felt confident I could find out what it does.
At this point nobody thought it was going to be malicious, more like one of our staffers was playing around with something.
There were 3 parts:
- A Raspberry Pi b first generation
- a mysterious USB dongle
- a 16GB sd card (a fast one)
The number of people who can access this small cabinet is very limited. Only 4 people have a key for this room:
- The manager
- The groundskeeper
- My co-worker
- Me
None of them knew anything about this so I asked my IT colleagues and they were as baffled as I was. I heard of people getting paid to put things like this in places they shouldn’t and for this reason I was very interested in finding out what it actually does.
To help me solve this mistery I asked reddit and surely enough they identified the dongle as a microprocessor, almost as powerful as the Rasberry Pi itself: the nRF52832-MDK. A very powerful wifi, bluetooth and RFID reader.
This was – no doubt – to give the old Raspberry Pi a wifi and bluetooth connection. Great so now this thing has wifi too..
The SD card has a few partitions. Most ext4 (linux) and one fat16 (boot)
Great, time to mount it.
My debian box told me the first big clue: It’s a resin installation
WTF is Resin?
Resin (now renamed to Balena) is a paid IOT web service where you can generate images for IOT devices, deploy those devices and get updates and data from and to resin.
