Learn, hack!

URL

http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/23C3/audio/23C3-1610-en-fudging_with_firmware.mp3

File name

23C3-1610-en-fudging_with_firmware.mp3

File size

39.0 MB

MD5

e74e46019bff74170a0fa769bea105c9

SHA1

abf456f6d8f2664cdd630af0fb0f7d75b8d67d31

This lecture aims at providing ideas and practical techniques about the reverse-engineering process of equipment firmware images. It touches upon data encoding, compression, bootstraps, deciphering, disassembly, and emulation. This lecture aims at providing ideas and practical techniques about the reverse-engineering process of equipment firmware images. It focuses exclusively on images susceptible to hosting an operating system of some sort. The approach taken here includes first a reminder about various data encodings for binary transfers, such as UUENCODE or Intel's HEX format. The talk goes on to further interpret the available data, would it be a bootloader, compressed or a filesystem. At this stage chunks of meaningful data should be available, in which useful information should be reachable. A more in-depth investigation is then conducted, down to executable file formats or various machine-level assembly bytes. If the operating system used was not determined before this stage, the talk mentions how to extract this information and presents which ones are likely to be found, but not necessarily well-known to the general public. Finally, a few questions about cryptography are raised, and an overview of disassembly and emulation tools is given, as they may well be the easiest ways to defeat it.