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Aher.1
Visitor II
February 1, 2022
Question

Can we get information about the type of microcontroller directly from file *.bin ? I would like to know when analyzing the file *.bin what type of microcontroller is it intended for?

  • February 1, 2022
  • 5 replies
  • 1109 views

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    5 replies

    Peter BENSCH
    ST Technical Moderator
    February 1, 2022

    Welcome, @Aher.1​, to the community!

    Unless you have programmed it somehow, the BIN format does not contain address information where to load it to, nor the type of STM32.

    Regards

    /Peter

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    Tesla DeLorean
    Guru
    February 1, 2022

    The vector table, instruction mix and entropy can be quite effective at narrowing down the targets.​

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    Peter BENSCH
    ST Technical Moderator
    February 1, 2022

    @Community member​ Although this is correct, it involves a lot of effort and would only give a rough indication of the respective family, if at all, don't you think?

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    Tesla DeLorean
    Guru
    February 1, 2022

    I'm not sure it takes a "Lot of Effort", it takes knowledge and leverage, and the latter is really easy to find, you're using computers. And the former's not got a lot of the "How Do I" crowd in it. It also helps not to waste effort, ie Edison Approach

    Depending on what you're given to look at, visual inspection can eliminate a lot of CPU/MCU candidates. Now clearly some are going to be harder to deal with than others, but let's say a part's shipped in the billions, there's going to be resources and tools behind that. And a lot of repetition and duplication of basic templates, and libraries, by developers who are frequently lazy and under time pressure.

    If you can see it's a Cortex-M, the family/model of STM32 could be refined to very few potential candidates, along with the compiler and rough optimization level. The power of elimination and deduction can get you a long way.

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