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

Modifying QEMU for Basic Instrumentation

In this chapter, we will see how to adapt QEMU and use Avatar2 and PANDA (an ad-hoc version of QEMU that interfaces nicely with Avatar2) to add a new architecture (https://i.blackhat.com/USA-20/Wednesday/us-20-Hernandez-Emulating-Samsungs-Baseband-For-Security-Testing.pdf). Also part of this work was explored by Marina Caro and Ádrian Hacar Sobrino in their BSc final projects. We will describe a basic process to add a new central processing unit (CPU) to QEMU and start to see some universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter (UART) output. We will add a CPU and check some UART output of an unknown (a baseband firmware) because such CPU and peripherals are the basics to develop an emulator for a real-time baseband firmware based on ARM Cortex-R (R stands for real-time). Then we will explore the work cited previously, which has methodologically made an effort to fuzz specifically baseband firmware. Nonetheless, the surface for basebands is...