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

Approaching IoT devices with emulation

A few years ago, emulation was mostly used for didactic purposes and for video games – that is, Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME). Recently, companies such as Lastline Inc. (acquired in 2019 by VMware) and research groups such as BitBlaze from CMU and UC Berkeley have resorted to full system emulation for analysis, instrumentation, and vulnerability research. The emergence of IoT and embedded devices has stimulated the development of tools such as Avatar, Avatar2, and PANDA, which we will see in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7. These frontends for QEMU have added sensational functionality. Thanks to their Python code base, it is very easy to start a new project and control breakpoints, memory values, and all sorts of things through Avatar2, while PANDA allows us to take snapshots and replay the CPU state over and over again, saving us a lot of time.

Another very important reason to use emulation as a tool for cybersecurity and...