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But also if you're working on a local device, any Chinese model will agree to it most of the time.

How do people actually do this kind of work?

I can imagine working on the dumped firmware or update package.

But against the TV over the network without closed loop or access to RAM how could the model find and develop exploits?

I think in this case, the Tizen OS (by Samsung) on these TVs has a developer mode where you can use their Samsung Debug Bridge CLI tool on another computer to connect to the TV and get a regular Linux user shell. From there, they found a local privilege escalation bug to get root. I don’t know the exact details but a lot of smart devices get poor security support, so you can just shotgun different known vulnerabilities and get lucky with one pretty often rather than needing to develop a novel one.

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