Someone has hacked John Deere tractors to fix them freely. The first thing he has done: run Doom

The obsession for ‘Doom’ to work on the most random sites is real. We have been seeing for years how the legendary game is used as proof (useless in many cases) that a strange device is capable of running it. Not for anything in particular, but because yes. It’s the ‘Hello World’ of video games, and today we have come across another funny example of this.

Sick Codes is a cybersecurity researcher who a modder of Doom, @Skelegant, has helped run the legendary game on a John Deere tractor. The process to achieve it, unlike other occasions, has not been easy at all, not so much because of the game itself but because of the jailbreak that had to be done to the tractor, which was the main objective of this operation, according to WIRED.

With epic just-in-time help by NZ based doom modder @Skelegant. She helped get this run using DeHacked Doom, since gzdoom was a mission. Together, we teamed up to make this happen. She is amazingly talented. pic.twitter.com/OfVDMvRhzR

— Sick.Codes (@sickcodes) August 14, 2022

A ‘Doom’ in things thanks to a much bigger problem in the background

Sick Codes is not an expert in ‘Doom’ nor a person who dedicates his time to this type of challenge. He is specialized in errors and vulnerabilities of tractors, which has earned him that last year, after exposing them, many farmers will contact you complaining that by showing them, John Deere could correct them.

This, which in principle is something positive, not so much for many owners of these tractors, who complain that they can’t fix their machines because the manufacturer software locks them. Yes, it is curious and funny that the fact of being able to block them is what has led the company to make some tractors that the Russian army stole in Ukraine unusable.

After discovering the problem, Sick Codes focused on hacking modern tractors, to support the right to repair movement that is gaining so much strength in the United States and in the European Union. It is in the North American country where one of the most crucial victories was scored, since it is legal to “hack” electronic devices to repair them.

Given the complaints of the owners in recent years, John Deere reported that there would be changes, providing more repair software to mechanics and thus prevent owners from having to take them to authorized workshops to overcome certain blockages. It is somewhat reminiscent of what Apple has done, which now allows anyone to fix their iPhone at home, if they can.

The researcher was already experimenting with them, thanks to counting screens and consoles of some tractors, although in the end has focused on the 2630 and the 4240, which have their own Linux. The latter, moreover, is the one in which the execution of ‘Doom’ has been achieved.

Sick Codes has spent a lot of time trying to get past the protections that John Deere puts in place so that only authorized agents can access the system for repair. After much experimentation, was able to restore one of the consoles by tricking a reboot check.

In that context, the system returned more than 1.5 GB of log files for diagnostics to authorized technical services, but it also offered a revelation: the logs they contained information about another potential way to gain deeper access to the system. And using physical access to the board, he soldered controllers onto the circuit and executed his attack. Two minutes later, a Terminal appeared.

I had got root access. Sick Codes hasn’t yet made public how it did it, but says it thinks it’s possible to get root more easily, and what’s even better for farmers’ interests: if John Deere were to fix the holes that have made this hack possible, it is unlikely that it would reach tractors already marketed.

Regarding the execution of Doom, Sick Codes has said that the help he received was to play it, but also in an unprecedented setting: a corn plantation, where you kill with a tractor. In the video we do not see the game in full screen, but with transparency, it runs on top of a terminal emulator. The game was run using DeHacked Doom.