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Enabling Dynamic Flow Analysis for Bare-Metal Embedded Firmware Binaries

Project ID:

P16_23

Co-Principal Investigator(s):

N/A

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Houman Homayoun

Topic Areas:

Microelectronics Research and Development

Abstract

Embedded systems serve as foundational components of the technologies that pervade modern life. Given that an embedded system’s behavior is in turn defined by the firmware that resides in the system’s memory, it follows that bugs and vulnerabilities found in device firmware can become critical threats that have cascading consequences at both individual and national levels. Despite this reality, firmware security for many embedded and cyber-physical systems consistently remains unaddressed, making firmware bugs are all too common in the real world. Worse, many of them can be difficult to isolate and diagnose due to firmware programs’ tight coupling with hardware and temporal nature, necessitating more thorough analysis techniques. In traditional software, control flow graph (CFG) analysis and dynamic information flow tracking (DIFT) are powerful techniques for detecting and triaging vulnerabilities [1-3]; however, they have gotten less attention in firmware due to the inherent challenges of applying dynamic techniques to firmware. We propose the design and implementation of an emulation-based analysis framework that enables control flow graph analysis and dynamic information flow tracking for bare-metal embedded systems firmware binaries, which are particularly useful for detecting memory-based vulnerabilities and control flow hijacking exploits. Such a framework would be an invaluable asset to both embedded systems developers and security analysts for hardening firmware.

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