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

Introducing the Android OS and its architecture

Android is a Linux kernel-based OS. The company Android Inc. was founded in 2003 and acquired by Google in 2005. The main company focus is writing an OS for mobile devices, but they extended Android to other types of devices. At the time of writing this chapter, the Android OS goes up to version 13, and its code is always open sourced through the project: Android Open Source Project (AOSP). It is possible to easily navigate through the source code on the web page: https://cs.android.com/.

The Android architecture

Because Android is a Linux kernel-based project, once compiled, most of its components will run on top of the bare-metal microprocessor, while other components will run within the runtime of the OS (for example, the Android Runtime (ART) framework or the major part of the applications). At the beginning of the Android project, a long-term stable (LTS) version of the Linux kernel code was forked. Then, periodically, specific...