Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

This is part of the Bambu Lab Authorization Control System article.

Bambu Connect is an Electron App with Security Through Obscurity principles, hence it is inherently insecure.

🔔This is a user submitted guide

This article is a guide.

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The purpose of this guide is to demonstrate the trivial process of extracting the "private keys" used for communicating with Bambu devices to examine, and challenge, the technical basis for Bambu Lab's security justification of Bambu Connect.

To read the main.js for further analysis or extracting the private key stored by Bambu in the app:

1. Use the MacOS .dmg file, not the exe. Finding the needed decryption code is easier in the .dmg
2. Extract bambu-connect-beta-darwin-arm64-v1.0.4_4bb9cf0.dmg, in there you can find the files of the underlying Electron app in Bambu Connect (Beta).app/Contents/Resources folder.
3. The app uses asarmor to prevent easy reading, the key is stored in ./app.asar.unpacked/.vite/build/main.node and can be extracted. Unpacking app.asar without fixing it first will result in an encrypted main.js file and 100 GB of decoy files generated, don't try it.
4. Load main.node in Ghidra and Auto-Analyze it. Then search for the GetKey function, or press G and go to 0000b67e
5. Write down the hex key, and as of 19 January 2025, it is B0AE6995063C191D2B404637FBC193AE10DAB86A6BC1B1DE67B5AEE6E03018A2. You will need to follow the previous steps to get the current key if the provided one does not work.
6. Install the npm package asarfix and use it to fix the archive: npx asarfix app.asar -k B0AE6995063C191D2B404637FBC193AE10DAB86A6BC1B1DE67B5AEE6E03018A2 -o fixed.asar
7. Now you can extract it in cleartext with npx asar extract fixed.asar src
8. ./src/.vite/build/main.js is minified, use any JavaScript beautifier to make it better readable. Interesting user code including the private key is at the end of the file.

Extracting certs and private key

The private key and certs are further obfuscated, to get cleartext you need to do: Encrypted string from cy() -> ure(string, key) -> RC4 decryption -> decodeURIComponent() -> final string.

Example Python reimplementation to extract the secrets, easy to run. Copy the content of t from function cy() in main.js and paste it here. After running, you have a private key from Bambu Lab.

import urllib.parse

def cy():
    t = [
		# copy from main.js
	]
    return t

def ure(t, e):
    # RC4 implementation
    r = list(range(256))
    n = 0
    s = ""
    
    # Key-scheduling algorithm (KSA)
    for o in range(256):
        n = (n + r[o] + ord(e[o % len(e)])) % 256
        r[o], r[n] = r[n], r[o]
    
    # Pseudo-random generation algorithm (PRGA)
    o = n = 0
    for byte in t:
        o = (o + 1) % 256
        n = (n + r[o]) % 256
        r[o], r[n] = r[n], r[o]
        k = r[(r[o] + r[n]) % 256]
        s += chr(byte ^ k)
    
    return s

def lt(t, e):
    r = cy()
    n = t - 106
    s = r[n]
    s = ure(s, e)
    return urllib.parse.unquote(s)

def extract_certs_and_key():
    try:
        result = {}
        result["Are"] = lt(106, "1o9B")
        result["fre"] = lt(107, "FT2A")
        result["private_key"] = lt(108, "Tlj0")
        result["cert"] = lt(109, "NPub")
        result["crl"] = lt(110, "x077")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error extracting certs/key: {e}")

    for key, value in result.items():
        print(f"{key}:\n{value}\n")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    extract_certs_and_key()