A custom journey

This book has been designed to be in three self-contained parts – Foundations, Description of Emulation and Fuzzing, and Advanced Concepts – all of which include examples with famous open source firmware. The first part provides a deep and thoughtful understanding of emulation and fuzzing. These two techniques are extremely common and widespread in security research. Nonetheless, there are no reference books that talk about these matters in detail and help people start their journey toward understanding one of the most ancient and fascinating concepts in computer science, which is emulation. Fuzzing too is a very old technique, but it has become so sophisticated and advanced that evolutionary algorithms have been implemented to select the best inputs to trigger weird machine states and hunt for some vulnerabilities.

The second part has the hard task of gluing very ancient concepts together with everyday reality. 80 years in computer science are probably comparable to millions of years in biology if you think about circuit miniaturization as a reference point. For that reason, in the second part of this book, we will deep-dive into practical examples where we will use the main tools from this book to get in touch with the world of vulnerability analysis of IoT devices with fuzzing techniques. While this is just an introduction, you will grasp the main concepts, and you will be able to practice these concepts with the proposed exercises.

Finally, in the third part of this book, we will guide you through real examples of fuzzing IoT devices. Here, you will learn how to configure the tools to work with emulated hardware, such as the iPhone 11, and how to use emulation with the corresponding configuration to fuzz this machine to look for vulnerabilities. Once we find possible attack vectors (possible vulnerabilities found by the fuzzer), we will learn how to exploit them using the tools professionals use to search for and exploit those vulnerabilities (for example, disassemblers, and debuggers).