Presented at
REcon 2022,
June 3, 2022, 1:30 p.m.
(30 minutes).
While busy hacking the planet, have you ever encountered an unfamiliar architecture and simply had no idea where to start? You pried the firmware from a reluctant (and almost not smoldering) flash chip, loaded the thing in IDA, but what's next?
We got into this pickle while working on reversing the firmware of a medical device. The mystery architecture turned out to be M32C, and thankfully, IDA Pro added support for it a few months prior.
This talk is not exactly about reversing yet another embedded device. Instead, this is more about the journey and lessons learned so that it could be abstracted away for the next project. Rather than focusing on the specifics of the firmware itself, we will see how it interacts with the micro-controller and the steps taken to approach an unfamiliar embedded architecture.
During this presentation, you can expect digging into low-level micro-controller notions such as interrupt handlers, special purpose registers, how to find flash handling code, and way too much M32C assembly.
If you've ever dabbled in hardware hacking and want to have a look at something that is not Linux-based, this talk will give you some pointers in how to get the ball* rolling.
(*not talking about the ones we dropped at the reballing station)
Presenters:
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Philippe Laulheret
Philippe Laulheret is a Senior Security Researcher on the Trellix vulnerability research team with Trellix’s Threat Labs. With a focus on Reverse Engineering and Vulnerability Research, Philippe uses his background in Embedded Security and Software Engineering to poke at complex systems and get them behave in interesting ways. In his spare time, Philippe enjoys playing CTFs, immersing himself in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, and exploring the realm of Creative Coding.
Philippe holds a MSc in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and a MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Supélec (France).
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