Towards automated exploit generation for embedded systems

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Manual vulnerability discovery and exploit development on an executable are very challenging tasks for developers. Therefore, the automation of those tasks is becoming interesting in the field of software security. In this paper, we implement an approach of automated exploit generation for firmware of embedded systems by extending an existing dynamic analysis framework called Avatar. Embedded systems occupy a significant portion of the market but lack typical security features found on general purpose computers, making them prone to critical vulnerabilities. We discuss several techniques to automatically discover vulnerabilities and generate exploits for embedded systems, and evaluate our proposed approach by generating exploits for two vulnerable firmware written for a popular ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInformation Security Applications - 17th International Workshop, WISA 2016, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsDooho Choi, Sylvain Guilley
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages161-173
Number of pages13
ISBN (Print)9783319565484
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017
Event17th International Workshop on Information Security Applications, WISA 2016 - Jeju Island, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 25 Aug 201625 Aug 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10144 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference17th International Workshop on Information Security Applications, WISA 2016
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
City Jeju Island
Period25/08/1625/08/16

Keywords

  • Embedded system
  • Exploit generation
  • Software vulnerability

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Towards automated exploit generation for embedded systems'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this