Absolutely wow! Thank you so much for the time you put in. I’m really under the weather at the moment, but even in better days wouldn’t have the kind of level of concentration to do this detective work well. I’m giving Kitz a very small donation as the only way I can think of to say thank you. I encourage others who are able, to do so too. See:
https://kitz.co.uk/sites/support.htm.
So very many possibilities can come from this, don’t know where to start. I’ll start to ponder this. Putting zip files inside the config might be a good way of injecting scripts, and whatever associated files, they need into the modem.
I was thinking about abusing an existing but here-unused element, but if it will tolerate alien elements then that’s superb. I see that doesn’t mind arbitrary child elements. Yay! I’m going to need that.
I have never tried putting comments in the XML config, for fear of bricking a modem. Mind you they’re always quite recoverable. The other thing I’ve never tried is
CDATA. I don’t know how much their XML parser is a complete standards-compliant implementation. Mind you taking that literally would mean the need to include code to handle crazy stuff such as DOCTYPE, needing a huge amount of extra unrelated new parser code code for pretty much zero benefit. So I think we could forgive the devs for ‘forgetting’ about such stuff that is never ever going to be used in this use-case. With the help of CDATA, I wouldn’t have to feel bad about the need to resort to base64-ing every piece of arbitrary binary data. ;-)
Perhaps something like:
<mynamespace:files>
<mynamespace:file name="destfilename.ext" path="/data/" >
<![CDATA[ … arbitrary bytes …
]]]]><![CDATA[> …more bytes …
]]>
</mynamespace:file>
</mynamespace:files>The namespace might be a bad idea, as the parser might not support them, although I need to remember that it might cheer it up if I declare the namespace properly though. Don’t really need namespaces though, as there isn’t going to be much danger of collisions anyway.
Perhaps there’s a far more intelligent way of doing this. I wonder about maximum length limits on elements, because if they’re a problem I would have to use meaningless chunk-sub-elements just to break a file up.
