EPIC Erebus is a small, portable, and easy-to-use M.2 FPGA board specifically tailored for PCIe research and DMA attacks.

In addition to supporting most of the capabilities of other PCILeech-compatible hardware, it is well-suited to embedded, stand-alone operation. We’re also working on a completely open PCIe implementation that will allow us to tinker around with the lowest layers of the PCIe protocol in a way that’s impossible on devices with hard PCIe implementations.

Investigate the Inner Workings of PCIe

EPIC Erebus is designed primarily as a PCIe DMA research device. We aim to deliver it with a bitstream that, out of the box, allows standalone operation for memory acquisition and match/patch functionality. We hope to support tethered operation over USB in the future.

If you’re interested in digging deeper, the gateware, firmware, and software are all open source and use an open toolchain, making it incredibly easy to make even deep protocol-layer modifications to how PCIe works—or doesn’t—or shouldn’t.

Even if you’re not interested in PCIe, Erebus will operate as a tiny ECP5 dev board you can keep installed inside your laptop. Alternatively, you could adapt it to any other high-speed serial interface with mechanical adapters and the appropriate gateware.

Features & Specifications

• M.2 2230 (A-E-key) form factor
• Lattice ECP5 FPGA, either ECP5-25 or ECP5-5G-85
• 128 or 256 Gb DRAM
• PCIe Gen1 or Gen2
• microSD slot or 8 GB FLASH
• USB 2.0 or 3.0 connectivity
• Adaptability to a wide array of PCIe interfaces

Open Source

EPIC Erebus is open hardware and uses an open-source toolchain. Furthermore, you can flash it with our open-source gateware. Although we don’t have much to share yet, you’ll be able to find more information soon in our GitHub repo.

Interested in This Project?

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