Finding bugs in embedded external device drivers using emulation
Pages 129 - 132
Abstract
Embedded devices use not only the microcontrollers, but also external devices to realize their functions. Due to lack of external device driver, developers may implement their own one, which can easily cause bugs. Once bugs are injected, debugging is often performed using physical devices, and such debugging is one of the difficulties in embedded development. Emulation is a technique for detecting bugs without physical devices. However, to our best knowledge, no studies focused its capability of detecting bugs in external device driver. As external devices can be modeled by describing state transitions and constraints, it is possible to detect bugs in the operation of external devices. In this paper, we propose a method for detecting bugs based on constraints of state transitions by emulating the operation of a microcontroller including external devices. We also confirmed that the proposed method can detect bugs using firmware with intentionally injected bugs.
References
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Abraham A Clements, Eric Gustafson, Tobias Scharnowski, Paul Grosen, David Fritz, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna, Saurabh Bagchi, and Mathias Payer. 2020. HALucinator: Firmware Re-hosting Through Abstraction Layer Emulation. In In Proceedings of the 29th USENIX Security Symposium. 1201–1218. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/clements
[2]
Eric Gustafson, Marius Muench, Chad Spensky, Nilo Redini, Aravind Machiry, Yanick Fratantonio, Davide Balzarotti, Aurélien Francillon, Yung Ryn Choe, Christophe Kruegel, and Giovanni Vigna. 2019. Toward the Analysis of Embedded Firmware through Automated Re-hosting. In In Proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2019). 135–150. https://www.usenix.org/conference/raid2019/presentation/gustafson
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Microchip Technology Inc.[n. d.]. MCP2517FD External CAN FD Controller with SPI Interface. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/mcp2517fd
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Sandia National Laboratories. [n. d.]. HALucinator. https://github.com/sandialabs/halucinator
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STMicroelectronics. [n. d.]. STM32F4 Series. https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32f4-series.html
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Christopher Wright, William A. Moeglein, Saurabh Bagchi, Milind Kulkarni, and Abraham A. Clements. 2022. Challenges in Firmware Re-Hosting, Emulation, and Analysis. Comput. Surveys 54, 1 (1 2022), 1–36.
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Wei Zhou, Lan Zhang, Le Guan, Peng Liu, and Yuqing Zhang. 2022. What Your Firmware Tells You Is Not How You Should Emulate It: A Specification-Guided Approach for Firmware Emulation. In In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (Los Angeles, CA, USA). 3269–3283.
Index Terms
- Finding bugs in embedded external device drivers using emulation
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Published In
September 2024
289 pages
ISBN:9798400717086
DOI:10.1145/3698062
Copyright © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
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Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
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Published: 08 December 2024
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WSSE 2024
WSSE 2024: 2024 The 6th World Symposium on Software Engineering (WSSE)
September 13 - 15, 2024
Kyoto, Japan
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