Ioannis Angelakopoulos (Boston University), Gianluca Stringhini (Boston University), Manuel Egele (Boston University)

Re-hosting Internet of Things (IoT) firmware can oftentimes be a tedious process, especially when analysts have to intervene with the analysis to ensure further progress. When it comes to Linux-based firmware, one crucial problem that current re-hosting systems face, is that the configuration of the custom kernels used by these systems, significantly deviates from the configuration of the IoT kernel modules used in firmware images. As a consequence, kernel artifacts, such as the memory layout of data structures might differ between the custom kernels and the IoT kernel modules. To analyze the IoT kernel modules within these kernels, the analyst often has to invest significant amount of engineering effort and time to align the offending data structures within the custom kernels. In this paper, we present FirmDiff, an automated binary diffing framework that enables analysts to effectively detect and align the misaligned data structures between the custom kernels produced by the FirmSolo re-hosting framework and the Linux kernel modules in IoT firmware. The goal of FirmDiff is to improve the configuration of FirmSolo’s kernels to closely approximate the configuration of the IoT kernels in the firmware images, such that the IoT kernel modules can be analyzed without errors. We evaluate FirmDiff on a dataset of 10 firmware images with 148 IoT kernel modules that crash during re-hosting with FirmSolo. Using FirmDiff’s findings, we identify 37 misaligned data structures in FirmSolo’s kernels for these images. After aligning the layout of 35 of these data structures, FirmSolo’s refined kernels successfully load 28 previously crashing kernel modules.

View More Papers

HistCAN: A real-time CAN IDS with enhanced historical traffic...

Shuguo Zhuo, Nuo Li, Kui Ren (The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University)

Read More

Why People Still Fall for Phishing Emails: An Empirical...

Asangi Jayatilaka (Centre for Research on Engineering Software Technologies (CREST), The University of Adelaide, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University), Nalin Asanka Gamagedara Arachchilage (School of Computer Science, The University of Auckland), M. Ali Babar (Centre for Research on Engineering Software Technologies (CREST), The University of Adelaide)

Read More

Secret-Shared Shuffle with Malicious Security

Xiangfu Song (National University of Singapore), Dong Yin (Ant Group), Jianli Bai (The University of Auckland), Changyu Dong (Guangzhou University), Ee-Chien Chang (National University of Singapore)

Read More

Abusing the Ethereum Smart Contract Verification Services for Fun...

Pengxiang Ma (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Ningyu He (Peking University), Yuhua Huang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Haoyu Wang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Xiapu Luo (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Read More