I got my xEM implanted on Saturday and my knockoff Proxmark from AliExpress finally showed up today. Long story short, I made the mistake of updating the firmware to the latest Iceman release, and nearly bricked my brand new implant! After a bunch of digging I stumbled across a post saying the Iceman branch had broken t5577 timings so I compiled and flashed the main branch, and fortunately I was able to use that to recover it.
Unfortunately, in the process of trying to un-brick my implant, I wiped it, which also wiped the traceability data. Is there any way to get that back? Or is my only option to copy it from another chip?
What exactly happened? Did it stop responding somehow?
The one from today? It doesnāt seem like them to release something with a known problem with such a common chipsetā¦
Could you link to that post?
Iām not sure thereās any way to get yours back, nor do I know how much they vary from chip to chip, but I can post the data from my xMagic if youād like
I seem to recall this was a problem for a very short time a long while agoā¦ I believe it was fixed fairly quickly. Possibly having to do with some kind of init process on the RDV4 if memory servesā¦ nothing to do with the Easy as far as I remember.
hmmā¦ yeah this rings a bell from 2018ā¦ also someone having an issue bricking an xEM hah!
ālf t5 detectā wouldnāt work, ālf t5 infoā would randomly alternate between sane but inaccurate data and random garbage, and ālf seaā wouldnāt detect any chips at all.
Yes. Iām on a MacBook Pro so I just cloned the Git repository, compiled it, installed it, flashed my Proxmark3, started poking around with my pile of fobs, and eventually my implant. Everything went sideways when I issued a ālf t5 wipeā command, thatās when it stopped responding consistently.
This is the post Iām referring to. After downloading, compiling, and flashing the main fork the ālf t5 detectā command actually detects my implant, ālf t5 wipeā cleared out all the garbage that was in there, and I was able to clone my work fob onto my implant. Unfortunately my traceability data was lost in that process, but at least itās not completely bricked.
I was able to duplicate the traceability data from my work fob onto my implant so ālf seaā actually recognizes it as a t55xx again, I just wish I had my original data back.
It was just implanted on Saturday, but this was the first implant my piercer has ever done, so it ended up being a bit on the shallow side. Iām hoping itās deep enough and doesnāt reject, suppose Iāll be finding out over the next few weeks.
Itās been installed for 4 days, conventional advice is that performance will improve for up to 2 months, with good/stable usability happening somewhere in the 2-4 week range in most cases, thereās a pretty good chance that the issue could be healing related
Hey, great guess!
The Iceman fork is still working fine on my PM3 with the latest dev build, on both my implant and my cards, somehow the issue seems to be with your implant or your PM3. hw tune might give you some insight in the latter case
She did pull up, or ātentā the skin, while injecting it, but thought she might have stayed too shallow because you can see the deep end of the chip through my skin. Then again that might just be because I have very little body fat and thereās not much there to hide it, idk. Iāll share a couple pics in a min.
Unfortunately I donāt have oneā¦I will have access to one in a couple days though, a coworker has one and we are both going to be on site for the same project later this week. I could give it a try then.
What about the traceability data? Any way to recover that?
My chip does have a siblingā¦ My boss decided to get one a year or two ago and purchased two just in case, but didnāt end up needing the second one. When I expressed interest in getting one myself, he gave his unused spare to me. Since they were purchased together, I would imagine the traceability data would be pretty close for the two.
āTraceability data is manufacturer-programmed (and locked) data that contains information related to the manufacture of the chip - presumably so that issues can be ātraced backā to the point and date of manufacture. It contains data such as the year and quarter of manufacture, the wafer number on which the chip was produced, and the die number on the wafer. The traceabiltiy data occupies blocks 1 and 2 of Page 1, and is normally NOT writeable, although some T5577 clones will allow you to overwrite these blocks. You can read the traceability data with the lf t55xx trace command.ā
