CharizHard

A cutting-edge hardware solution designed to secure data exchanges and protect devices from hardware-based threats.

Features

This USB dongle features dual interfaces:

• USB Interface: The laptop detects the dongle as an Ethernet device, ensuring that the laptop’s internal network hardware remains isolated and protected.

• Wi-Fi Baseband Interface: This interface connects the laptop to a Wi-Fi network, while the dongle transparently manages a VPN connection to a secure VPN server, ensuring that all communications are encrypted and secure.

The primary goals of CharizHard are to:

• Secure communications: Encrypt and protect all data exchanged between the laptop and the VPN server, typically managed by the user’s company.

• Prevent hardware attacks: Shield the laptop’s hardware network interface, reducing exposure to physical attacks and vulnerabilities.

With CharizHard, users can trust that their data and devices are secure, providing peace of mind in an increasingly connected world.

This project uses the esp-idf version v5.2.3 for the standard esp32.

Drivers for the esp32 can be found on the esp-idf website.

Requirements

This project requires Rust, Python and the standard C toolchain. The standard C toolchain as well as git are assumed to already be installed by the user. If not, the user is likely on Windows and following the msys2 tutorial here should make everything work out of the box: Install msys2.

Installing git can then be done using the following command in a ucrt64 shell.

pacman -Syu && pacman -S git

The C:\msys64\ucrt64\bin folder must be added to the PATH environment variable.

Windows

Installing Rust:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Installing Python:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3125/

Linux

Installing Rust:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Installing Python: Using your favorite package manager, install python3.12 python3-pip or python312 and python-pip

Ensure the version is 3.12.5 as more recent versions have proved unstable.

Installing

This project needs to be cloned in your root directory, as the esp32 cannot handle long paths.

cd /

Install espup to get the esp toolchain required to compile on the xtensa-esp32-espidf architecture. Until this issue is fixed, ensure you install the 0.11.0 version of the binary.

cargo install espup@0.11.0

Install the toolchain and follow any additional instruction written to the standard output.

Do not forget to run the export.bat on Windows or ./export.sh on Linux situated in .embuild/esp-idf/v5.2.3/. Otherwise you will not have access to espefuse and espsecure

espup install

Clone the repository then cd inside. Note that the name of the folder must be short and located at the root of your filesystem. Here, we use chhard.

git clone https://github.com/indexds/charizhard chhard && cd chhard

Install the cargo-make binary to make the build process less of a chore. If not possible, the project can be compiled by running the commands found in Makefile.toml manually.

You're also going to need espflash and ldproxy as dependencies.

cargo install cargo-make cargo-generate cargo-espflash ldproxy

Then you're gonna need:

pip install esptool

All that remains is to install all remaining dependencies, build the project and flash the esp32 with:

cargo flash

or

cargo f

Monitoring

Windows

On Windows, you can install Putty here: Download Putty.

Then set the environment variable defining the port your esp32 is available on. You only need to do this once per terminal. Alternatively you can use setx to make the variable permanent.

set COM=COM{X}

With {X} being the port your esp32 is available on. This can be found in the device manager.

Then run,

cargo monitor-windows

or

cargo mw

Linux

On Linux, install the screen package using your favorite package manager, then run:

screen /dev/ttyUSB? 115200

Or set an environment variable for your ttyUSB like so:

export ttyUSB=ttyUSB{X}

With {X} being the port your esp32 is available on.

You can then run either of the following commands:

cargo monitor-linux

or

cargo ml

Menuconfig

To access the menuconfig tool, install the following dependencies:

cargo install cargo-pio

pip install --upgrade platformio

Then, run:

cargo pio installpio

You can now access the menuconfig tool using:

cargo pio espidf menuconfig

The tool will first download the xtensa-esp-elf toolchain which may take a while.

Troubleshooting

• If the compilation process fails to find libclang.dll or clang.dll, create an environment variable LIBCLANG_PATH with the path to your libclang.dll as such:

Linux

~/.rustup/toolchains/esp/xtensa-esp32-elf-clang/esp-clang/bin/

Windows

%USERPROFILE%\.rustup\toolchains\esp\xtensa-esp32-elf-clang\esp-clang\bin\

• If the program fails upon flashing the esp32, press and hold the BOOT/EN button on the SOC to put it in bootloader mode. Firmware should start flashing.

• If the program fails because of the path length to your project, verify that you cloned the project at the root of your filesystem and that the name of the directory is as short as specified.

• If the program fails for any reason related to Python, check that the version used by the program is a 3.12.x as Python >=3.13 is not currently supported.

• If the program fails for any other reason, try running your shell with administrator/sudo privileges

• Should the program have multiple dependency failures, try running cargo clean then rebuilding the project properly with cargo flash.

• If you cannot move the selection while in menuconfig inside an integrated terminal like the one provided by vscode, the correct bindings are J/K.

License

GNU GPL-3.0