📶 Analyzing Cellular Basebands with FirmWire 🔎

Event start: 8 months, 4 weeks ago // Event Information

📶 Analyzing Cellular Basebands with FirmWire 🔎
Typ
Village Event
Time
Aug. 17, 2023, 10:30 a.m. - Aug. 17, 2023, 11:15 a.m.
Speakers
nsr, domenukk
Language
en
Room
Milliways
Host
Milliways
Last year, we released FirmWire to the public, an open-source baseband analysis platform. But what even is a baseband and why do we want to analyze it? Hint: It’s a critical part of your phone and a first point of entry for attacks. This talk will answer your questions and provide a hands-on introduction to our framework.

This talk will discuss cellular basebands and FirmWire, our open-source platform for baseband firmware. The platform allows researchers to emulate, dynamically debug, introspect, and interact with complex baseband firmware, providing insights about its inner workings in real-time.

FirmWire’s integrated ModKit creates and injects custom tasks into the emulated baseband. We leverage the ModKit for full-system fuzzing via AFL++ by creating custom fuzzing tasks interacting with the host, using special hypercalls. With this setup, we uncovered several pre-authentication vulnerabilities in the LTE and GSM stacks of Samsung’s Shannon and MediaTek’s MTK baseband implementations, affecting billions of devices.

FirmWire is the outcome of a more than two-year-long international research collaboration between the University of Florida, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, TU Berlin, and Ruhr-University Bochum.

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