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AVR Development & Reverse Engineering

AVR is a family of microcontrollers developed by Atmel (now Microchip Technology). It is most famously known as the architecture powering the original Arduino boards (Uno, Nano, Mega).

Toolchain Setup​

To compile and flash C/C++ code for AVR devices without the Arduino IDE, you need the standard GNU toolchain.

# Alpine Linux installation
apk add avr-gcc avr-libc avrdude

Basic Commands​

  • avr-gcc: The C compiler.
  • avrdude: The utility for uploading code to the microcontroller's flash memory.
  • avr-objdump: For inspecting compiled binaries or hex files. 
    # Disassemble a hex file for ATmega328P (avr5 architecture)
    avr-objdump -j .sec1 -d -m avr5 foo.hex

Reverse Engineering Tools​

When dealing with unknown AVR binaries, the following tools are useful for disassembly and decompilation.

Disassemblers​

Decompilers​

  • Hex-Rays / IDA Pro: The industry standard for professional binary analysis; supports AVR with specific plugins.
  • Ghidra: NSA's open-source reverse engineering suite, which has excellent support for AVR architectures.

Resources​