Firmalice - Automatic Detection of Authentication Bypass Vulnerabilities in Binary Firmware

—Embedded devices have become ubiquitous, and they are used in a range of privacy-sensitive and security-critical applications. Most of these devices run proprietary software, and little documentation is available about the software’s inner workings. In some cases, the cost of the hardware and protection mechanisms might make access to the devices themselves infeasible. Analyzing the software that is present in such environments is challenging, but necessary, if the risks associated with software bugs and vulnerabilities must be avoided. As a matter of fact, recent studies revealed the presence of backdoors in a number of embedded devices available on the market. In this paper, we present Firmalice, a binary analysis framework to support the analysis of firmware running on embedded devices. Firmalice builds on top of a symbolic execution engine, and techniques, such as program slicing, to increase its scalability. Furthermore, Firmalice utilizes a novel model of authentication byp...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: NDSS
• Authors: Yan Shoshitaishvili, Ruoyu Wang, Christophe Hauser, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna
• Keywords: Computer Networks, NDSS 2015