# PFES-ENG-001 — Firmware Acquisition

**Status:** Active / stable foundation  
**Knowledge Cycle Stages:** Acquire, Preserve

## Purpose

Obtain firmware-related engineering artifacts while preserving their original context and provenance.

## Engineering Problem

Firmware arrives through vendor update utilities, archives, hardware dumps, memory captures, manufacturing tools, and community collections. Each source preserves different engineering information.

## Historical Engineering Evolution

Early work focused on obtaining binaries. Engineering experience showed that update mechanisms, resources, wrappers, compression, metadata, and packaging history may be as valuable as the payload. Original distributions became canonical artifacts.

## Engineering Discoveries

- Original vendor packages contain knowledge not reconstructable from payloads alone.
- Acquisition provenance may be partly automated.
- Acquisition is an engineering activity, not merely downloading.

## Architectural Decisions

- Acquire originals whenever possible.
- Preserve source, filename, timestamp, and retrieval context.
- Never overwrite acquired artifacts.
- Automation must preserve provenance.

## Knowledge Produced

- Original engineering artifacts
- Acquisition provenance
- Recovery inputs
- Initial artifact identity

## Knowledge Consumed

- Archives
- Hardware dumps
- Vendor distributions
- Community submissions

## Current Engineering State

Current methods include automated archive downloading, manual collection, flash dumping, and memory extraction. The existing downloader can often recognize model and firmware revision before extraction.

## Engineering Lessons

- Acquisition quality determines every downstream possibility.
- Original artifacts may later be required to rebuild a vendor utility around a modified payload.

## Negative Knowledge

Project Frankenstein no longer assumes:

- A recovered payload makes the original utility disposable.
- Acquisition source can always be reconstructed later.

## Current Implementations

- Automated archive downloader
- Manual corpus curation
- Hardware and memory-dump workflows

## Future Implementations

- More complete provenance automation
- Pre-recovery family classification
- Acquisition confidence models

## Open Questions

To be expanded during engineering review.

## Why This Chapter Exists

If acquisition loses context, later stages cannot recreate it.
