Book Image

Fuzzing Against the Machine

By : Antonio Nappa, Eduardo Blázquez
Book Image

Fuzzing Against the Machine

By: Antonio Nappa, Eduardo Blázquez

Overview of this book

Emulation and fuzzing are among the many techniques that can be used to improve cybersecurity; however, utilizing these efficiently can be tricky. Fuzzing Against the Machine is your hands-on guide to understanding how these powerful tools and techniques work. Using a variety of real-world use cases and practical examples, this book helps you grasp the fundamental concepts of fuzzing and emulation along with advanced vulnerability research, providing you with the tools and skills needed to find security flaws in your software. The book begins by introducing you to two open source fuzzer engines: QEMU, which allows you to run software for whatever architecture you can think of, and American fuzzy lop (AFL) and its improved version AFL++. You’ll learn to combine these powerful tools to create your own emulation and fuzzing environment and then use it to discover vulnerabilities in various systems, such as iOS, Android, and Samsung's Mobile Baseband software, Shannon. After reading the introductions and setting up your environment, you’ll be able to dive into whichever chapter you want, although the topics gradually become more advanced as the book progresses. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the skills, knowledge, and practice required to find flaws in any firmware by emulating and fuzzing it with QEMU and several fuzzing engines.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Foundations
5
Part 2: Emulation and Fuzzing
9
Part 3: Advanced Concepts
15
Chapter 12: Conclusion and Final Remarks

Emulating the ARM architecture to run an OpenWrt system

Here we will emulate the ARM architecture using QEMU to run OpenWrt. We will use an already-compiled version from the OpenWrt website (https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.3/targets/armvirt/32/) instead of compiling it ourselves, but if you prefer to compile it, you can refer to the instructions in Chapter 8. We will use the same version as in the previous chapter to keep this example simple:

# download the kernel image
wget -q https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.3/targets/armvirt/32/openwrt-21.02.3-armvirt-32-zImage -O zImage
# download a compiled rootfs with a file system for openWRT
wget -q https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.3/targets/armvirt/32/openwrt-21.02.3-armvirt-32-rootfs-squashfs.img.gz -O rootfs-squashfs.img.gz
# now extract the rootfs
gunzip rootfs-squashfs.img.gz

Now that we have a working kernel and a filesystem for OpenWRT on ARM, the first thing we will do is check everything was...