PinDown: Generalized Application Code Identification And Functional Component Analysis In RTOS-based Firmware
D.A. Prinsze (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
G. Smaragdakis – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Cyber Security)
Jérémie Decouchant – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Data-Intensive Systems)
Alexios Voulimeneas – Mentor (TU Delft - Cyber Security)
Andrea Continella – Mentor (University of Twente)
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Abstract
Small embedded devices are becoming more prevalent in the world with each passing year to improve our quality of life. However, as more devices are created, an increasing number of older devices are declared obsolete despite still being used. This results in an increasing amount of devices being vulnerable to exploitation due to a lack of security updates. Identifying these vulnerabilities manually without any system knowledge is an arduous task, and current state-of-the-art technologies do not perform generalized analysis in RTOS-based firmware. In this work, we present PinDown, an analysis framework that enables the automated identification of application code in RTOS-based firmware without requiring partial system knowledge. By identifying functions that modify the heap, we can identify RTOS components that can be leveraged to locate memory regions that host application code.