NORbert: Open source SPI flash emulation

SPI NOR flash is a very common IC used as a boot medium for both BMC and Host firwmare. Data can be read bytewise and pretty fast. Writes on the other hand are much slower. NORbert is an open source RTL project with open source tooling that emulates this kind of IC.

The content of the talk will be about why you'd want to emulate a SPI NOR flash and why you need to use an FPGA for this. I want to touch on what similar tools were previously available (dediprog EM100 & Trammel's spispy) and how NORbert improves upon them. IThe talk will showcase NORbert's functionality like logging and automated TOCTOU (time of check, time of use) vulnerability exploits. Lastly I will talk about the co-designed rust tooling which works also on the web.

Link to NORbert: https://github.com/ArthurHeymans/NORbert