MediaTek Wi-Fi chipsets power smartphones, routers and laptops, yet their firmware remains largely unexplored compared with other vendors. Deep access to this layer reveals how undocumented interfaces, debugging hooks and factory modes expose powerful capabilities for physical-layer research.

By reverse-engineering firmware architectures, command handlers and real-time operating systems, researchers can enable raw signal capture, inspect memory at runtime and activate advanced measurement modes. These techniques expand visibility into modulation behavior, channel effects and hardware acceleration paths while exposing practical constraints in drivers, encryption and platform security controls.

This session, led by Daniel Wegemer, senior security architect at Nvidia, and Edoardo Mantovani, security researcher, will cover:

• MediaTek Wi-Fi firmware architecture, loading process and command handling structures;
• Runtime debugging through logs, memory access and crash dump analysis;
• How to enable internal capture modes and channel state information for advanced wireless research.