Enabling Faster Security Assessment of Re-hosted Firmware

Abstract

The rapid growth of the number of IoT devices and their intrinsic correlation to everyone’s life poses critical security challenges. The security, safety and privacy are constantly under attack due to the huge number of easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities in these devices. It is straightforward to notice how a careful analysis of IoT devices is more topical and urgent than ever and it is important to adopt effective vulnerability assessment methodologies in order to identify and thwart many types of cyberattacks. In order to perform traditional analyses on the firmware, however, it is important to emulate the latter in a controlled environment: a process called firmware re-hosting. In this paper we discuss the limitations of the existing re-hosting approaches when dealing with vulnerability assessment and we propose a novel methodology to speed up security analyses and allow the application to firmware of traditional security tools, such as binary fuzzers.

Publication
2022 IEEE Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, Intl Conf on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Intl Conf on Cyber Science and Technology Congress (DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech)