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

QEMU full-system mode

QEMU can also run in full-system emulation mode, where it basically emulates a specific machine, including the CPU, platform chipset, device buses (for example, PCI), and specific devices connected to those buses. Full emulation is supported for many target architectures, including ARM 32-bit and 64-bit, MIPS, RISC-V, x86, and x86_64.

In system emulation mode, the machine to emulate can be set via the -M or --machine command-line options. This value establishes the base hardware to emulate, that is, the board model for embedded hardware, or the platform chipset for architectures such as x86. Note that some of the original devices associated with a specific machine might not be supported (for example, some emulated boards might be missing the Ethernet controller or the SPI / GPIO interface). An up-to-date list of supported devices for the given machine can be found in QEMU’s documentation. Or, if we want to see those supported by our qemu-system-* binaries...