The first optical mice had to be used on a specially printed mousepad with a printed grid that the four-quadrant infrared sensor could detect. Later, mice swapped the infrared sensor for an optoelectric module (essentially a tiny, very low-resolution camera) and a powerful image processing. [8051enthusiast] was lying in bed one day when they decided to crack the firmware in their gaming mouse and eventually start streaming frames from the camera inside.
Step one was to analyze the protocol between the mouse and the host machine. Booting up a Windows VM and Wireshark allowed him to capture all the control transfers to the USB controller. Since it was a “programmable” gaming mouse that allowed a user to set macros, [8051enthusiast] could use the control transfers that would normally query that macro that had been set to return the memory at an arbitrary location. A little bit of tinkering later, and he now had a dump of the firmware. Looking at the most abundant bytes, it seems to match a profile similar to the Intel 8051. In a fascinating blur of reverse engineering, he traced the main structure of the program back from the function that sets the LED colors for the scroll wheel (which is dependent on the current DPI setting). Unfortunately, the firmware prevented the same macro mechanism from writing to arbitrary locations.
Looking through the code, a good old buffer overflow exploit seemed possible, but it caused the system to reset via watchdog. So he took another approach, invoking recovery mode and loading an entirely new firmware on the device, which a set_report control transfer can invoke.
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