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

iOS basics

To describe a bit of how iOS is organized, the following figure details four fundamental blocks. We can assume that Cocoa Touch and Media Layer execute mostly in user space, while Core Services and Core Os execute as privileged code. The communication messages between these two separated (unprivileged/privileged) memory zones are managed by intricate mechanisms, such as XPC and MIG.

Figure 10.1 – A diagram of the iOS operating system structure

Figure 10.1 – A diagram of the iOS operating system structure

The operating system components are detailed in the following list:

  • Hardware: iOS runs on Apple’s mobile hardware devices.
  • Mach-O: The Mach Object (Mach-O) file format is used by iOS and macOS to represent executable code and other object code formats, such as libraries, frameworks, and bundles. Every operating system needs to have an executable format and an Application Binary Interface (ABI) to compile, load and execute binaries. The equivalent in Linux is ELF, while PE is the...