Path of Least Resistance: Cellular Baseband to Application Processor Escalation on Mediatek Devices

Intro Today’s mobile systems are composed of multiple separate, but highly interconnected processing units, each running their own code. Previous research has proven that these components, especially the wireless baseband processors, are susceptible to remote or vicinity attacks. Such exploits have been demonstrated in practice against all major baseband SoC vendors during the last few years. Compromising the baseband (modem or MD as referred to in MTK source code) is a powerful attack as it provides access to all data passing through the modem while being virtually undetectable by current protection mechanisms.

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Emulation and Exploration of BCM WiFi Frame Parsing using LuaQEMU

Introducing LuaQEMU When dealing with complex code in firmware, it is often desirable to have some kind of dynamic runtime introspection as well as the ability to modify behavior on the fly. For example when reverse engineering embedded solutions such as cellular basebands or custom operating system code, the analysts understanding of a target is often fueled by assisting binary analysis with the ability to look at protocol stacks, operating system tasks, and memory at runtime.

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Were 900k Deutsche Telekom routers compromised by Mirai?

In the last 36 hours, news of a “cyber attack” against Deutsche Telekom DSL routers has been making headlines in German media. Customers have been asked to restart their devices to receive firmware updates, but little information on the actual cause has been made available, which has led to rumours and speculation. The dominant theory proposed thus far was that a strain of the Mirai botnet family was responsible for the outage .

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Reverse Engineering and Exploiting Samsung's Shannon Baseband

Last month we gave a presentation at REcon about Samsung baseband security. The slides are available here. In the talk, we discuss steps for understanding the proprietary firmware format, reverse engineering the RTOS, figuring out the security architecture, analyzing the attack surface to find vulnerabilities, and, finally, writing an exploit to achieve remote code execution. During our journey, we found several tricks that often prove useful during the reverse engineering of embedded devices nicely applicable to our usecase.

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