I think it’s only a matter of time until there will be a root kit. From there the possibilities are endless, right? I mean I know elektron will not like this but now that we have linux … it’s literally only a matter of time.
What is your take on this? I wonder what one would find having access to the OS files / system. We know it runs some rust application and the sound server is pipewire. I wonder if there is an API to talk to the rust server. Also probably some kind of bus system like d-bus?
The Push 3 runs Ableton on Linux. The obvious next step is to put Tonverk on the Push, and Ableton on the Tonverk.
Doom
Abletonverk
I’ll check it out when you get there… in the meantime, you have an entire company working on the OS, you reckon you will do a better job?
I think this sort of projects only become relevant after the product has matured…
The recent firmware update gave us a glimpse at how the filesystem is setup under the hood
The squashfs archives appear to be vendor-modified, as they don’t extract with the standard unsquashfs tool, likely they have changed the archives header and possibly customized the compression approach used, if someone was inclined they could attempt to brute force that with sasquatch - but making the device unstable poking it isn’t something I want to mess with (not yet anyways, maybe later in the update cycle); I’m sure Elektron will be giving us relatively frequent updates in the coming months.
thanks - that’s probably one approach!
Do you think the firmware is now file based …maybe editable? Like … TOML based UIs where it’d be possible to inject a new knob into a menu for example?
I would assume the mb-image-release-esp5-mb.rootfs-apps.squashfs partition is going to hold the “Tonverk app”, but that is most likely going to be compiled code - I would absolutely not expect it to be easily modifiable like the markup used for the presets.
It’s more likely going to need immense effort, and unlikely to be useful to anyone other than those who relish reverse engineering compiled Rust/C++ code! (Unless Elektron open source like Synthstrom did with the Deluge, but that is many years down the road, and I doubt it would every happen tbh).
The biggest con we have is how there’s all of these devices that have Linux firmware, yet the consumer facing software for interfacing it with a computer and/or DAW, or even as software DAWs themselves, isn’t Linux compatible. Then again it does cost money to maintain software.
hmh, so maybe “glitching” the stuff in ram then? or is rust maybe very good at protecting its contents from external manipulation?
The squashfs files are very likely encrypted. The data looks random (which hints towards encryption), which you can check with the tool ent for example. If it weren’t encrypted, you could just mount the squashfs file in linux like this: mount -t squashfs mb-image-release-esp5-mb.rootfs-apps.squashfs ~/your_mountpoint
The keys needed for the decryption certainly live somewhere inside Tonverk, however there’s no currently no way to extract them.
All the other interesting files (*.fit, sw-description) are likey encrypted as well. Unless someone finds a way to access the console of a running Tonverk…
Send me your Tonverk, I will give it a try - and forget to send it back.
Make sure the hacked OS has timestretch, a room reverb, and parameter slides.
The rust language was designed to encourage “memory safe” code. That’s its default memory management strategy. We’re told this should eliminate memory leaks and buffer overflow attacks. But I only read about this stuff, and gave up learning rust before reaching the memory management part of the offical guide book (life factors and willpower; I can code in other languages).
I have also heard that linux isn’t the ideal operating system for audio, so the Elektron devs might have had to get fancy, or wayward with memory, to keep the DSP throughput and sequencer timing stable. But honestly I’m just guessing and the existance of Bitwig, SuperColider and Sonic Pi for linux make it very clear that it can do realtime audio when treated right.
Rumsklang is the room reverb (from tiny box to room size to outer space size). “Rums” translated to “Rooms”.
I can imagine the Tonverk devs smirking as they read this …
it seems like the whole platform is designed with security as a high priority …but they are probably smirking yeah … “just connect usb and send this magic packet”
I’ve had my Tonverk since Monday and from my experimentations, I was not able to get the Rumsklang to sound anything like a room reverb. I actually didn’t like it at all with percussion and was able to get better room-like reverbs from the Supervoid. The Supervoid sounds much better to me on the Tonverk.
Yeah I’m keeping my tonverk raw, on 1.0 fw so I can jailbreak it when it’s done!
that’s the spirit!
No complex operating system is ideal for realtime applications. Windows or macOS aren’t great at that as well. But since Linux is highly configurable and also has a realtime kernel available, it is probably the best choice.
This is not security, this is standard procedure. If you encrypt your hard drive on Windows, nobody will be able to access the data.
