Reverse Engineering and Exploit Development For Embedded Systems

About the course

From critical infrastructure to consumer electronics, embedded systems are all around us and underpin the technological fabric of everyday life. As a result, the security of embedded systems is crucial to us.

Therefore, in this course, we will work toward understanding the fundamentals of developing software/hardware exploits against embedded systems. In this course. We will cover topics such as firmware extraction, modification, and different hardware serial protocols. We also cover topics such as exploit development for ARM-based embedded devices and write exploits for vulnerabilities such as uninitialized stack variables, off-by-one bugs, Use-after-free, and utilize techniques such as ROP, Signal-oriented programming, to attack embedded systems. We also attack micro-controllers and try to extract secrets from them by utilizing reverse-engineering techniques. Finally, we perform fuzz-testing on embedded firmware via re-hosting.

Prerequisites

Do not register directly, before contacting us (abbasi@cispa.de). While we do not have a formal registration requirement, it is absolutely essential that you only apply for this course when you already passed the system security course, or have a very strong background in system security. There is a high probability that you fail the course if you do not have such a background. It is not worth it, do not try.

• You should have experience in systems-oriented programming. In addition, it helps if you have experience in the C programming language to understand some of the topics, Python is helpful as well.
• You should have a basic understanding of operating systems (e.g., memory management, scheduling, etc.).
• You should be familiar with Linux.

Time and Location and structure

The lecture will take place in two weeks from 28 August to 1st September and 4th to 8th September. There will be lectures in the morning followed by practical exercises in the afternoon. The exam will be the week after on 13th September.

Grading

To pass the course, you must score at least 50% on the final oral exam. In the final exam, you can reach 100 points, so you need to achieve at least 50 points in the final exam to pass the course. To be admitted to the exam, you must achieve at least 50% of the points from the exercises.

You will typically have the task of exploiting a vulnerable program to extract a secret flag.

• Strict no cheating policy
  You may discuss the assignments with other students, but you are not allowed to collaborate with others on the solution. Your solution should be original and not an existing solution (e.g., from someone else or from the internet). All submissions will be automatically checked for plagiarism, as we have a strict no-cheating policy. If we find a case of plagiarism, we will assign zero points. If you ever get stuck, you can ask questions in the forum or participate in the exercise lessons. We invite you to help fellow students who have asked questions but avoid giving away the solution. Nobody likes spoilers :)

Oral Exam

At the end of the semester, there will be an oral exam for a duration of 30 minutes. All questions of the exam are in English.

Registration

Register for the course here in the CISPA CMS pending prior communication.