Reverse engineering the Creative Katana soundbar to control it from Linux
Summary
Reverse engineering the Creative Katana V2X soundbar reveals a USB CDC ACM interface and a largely undocumented protocol behind the vendor's Windows app. The author documents firmware extraction, protocol analysis from ~100 USB captures, and a custom AES-256-GCM authentication scheme, culminating in a Rust-based Linux tool (v2x-ctl) to control the device and extract firmware components in a CIFF container. The write-up highlights practical hardware hacking with implications for vendor lock-in and device interoperability.