Dolphin Developer Reverse-Engineers Wii U GamePad, Says it ‘Not a Very Secure Device’

<p>In an interview with <a href&equals;"http&colon;&sol;&sol;www&period;eurogamer&period;net&sol;articles&sol;digitalfoundry-secrets-of-the-wii-u-gamepad">Eurogamer<&sol;a>&comma; Pierre Bourdon&comma; developer of the GameCube and Wii Emulator called Dolphin&comma; revealed that the Wii U GamePad can be simulated on a decent PC&period; He and two other hackers managed to reverse engineer the device and&comma; after some time&comma; figured out how it worked and what features could be implemented into the system in the future&comma; should Nintendo choose to do so&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&&num;8220&semi;The GamePad is actually not a very secure device &lpar;compared to the Wii U&rpar;&comma;&&num;8221&semi; said Bourdon to Eurogamer&period; &&num;8220&semi;The device firmware is stored in an unencrypted Flash&comma; which allowed us to reverse engineer the binary code pretty easily&period; It is also using almost standard 802&period;11n&comma; which made things easy to experiment on a PC&period;&&num;8221&semi;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p><a href&equals;"https&colon;&sol;&sol;twitter&period;com&sol;delroth&lowbar;&sol;status&sol;332179135411654656">Last week&comma; Bourdon tweeted<&sol;a> his current progress on the GamePad controller simulated on the PC&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&&num;8220&semi;We modified wpa&lowbar;supplicant&sol;hostapd to have it work with the non-standard things&comma; and were able to pair a PC with a Wii U that way&period; This took us less than a week &&num;8211&semi; our time since then has been spent reverse engineering the custom communication protocol used between the Wii U and the GamePad&period;&&num;8221&semi;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Bourdon also discovered that the Wii U GamePad&&num;8217&semi;s flash could be upgrading&period; Meaning that Nintendo could add additional features to the Wii U system and the GamePad&comma; like cloud functionality and sending video and audio to the Internet&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Check out the full interview with Bourdon&comma; where he explains more of his findings about the GamePad&comma; some of which I may or may not have completely understood&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&lbrace;Source&colon; <a href&equals;"http&colon;&sol;&sol;www&period;eurogamer&period;net&sol;articles&sol;digitalfoundry-secrets-of-the-wii-u-gamepad">Eurogamer<&sol;a> via <a href&equals;"http&colon;&sol;&sol;www&period;polygon&period;com&sol;2013&sol;5&sol;16&sol;4336776&sol;wii-u-gamepad-reverse-engineering">Polygon<&sol;a>&rcub;<&sol;p>&NewLine;