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.

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.