The ARM IoT Exploit Laboratory

Class Abstract

The world of ARM IoT devices is growing rapidly. Routers, IP cameras, Network video recorders, VoIP systems and several other “smart” appliances are now running on ARM SoCs. While the hardware is the latest and greatest, the software running on it is a different story.

The ARM IoT Exploit Laboratory is a brand new class. This class takes a closer look at the hardware and the firmware running on it. Students shall learn how to analyse, emulate and exploit the firmware on a variety of ARM IoT devices. The class starts with extracting the firmware directly from the devices, moves on to creating an emulated test environment for fuzzing and debugging, and writing end to end exploits for the devices. The class shall feature an array of hardware targets of varying complexity. Students shall have ample time for hands on exercises to sharpen their exploitation skills.

UPDATED CONTENT

Hardware level firmware extraction from IoT devices
EMUX: A new firmware emulation framework for accurate emulation of IoT devices, including nvram.
New hardware targets: Network video recorders, multiple IP cameras, multiple routers, and perhaps more.

Key Learning Objectives

A quick introduction to ARM architecture and assembly.
An introduction to ARM IoT devices.
Under the hood - circuit boards, pins, interfaces and flash chips.
Firmware Extraction via UART.
Firmware Extraction directly from flash memory.
Introducing the EMUX Firmware Emulation Framework.
How to emulate an IoT device in EMUX.
Exploiting vulnerabilities in the IoT device.
Bypassing exploit mitigation technologies - DEP and ASLR.
Practical ARM ROP chains.
Customised ARM shellcode.
Overcoming limitations - payload size, bad characters, encodings.
A deeper look into firmware emulation - emulating nvram, patching factory defaults.
Working around missing emulated hardware - tracing binaries, patching libraries.
Exercises, exercises and more exercises
The Lab environment is a mixture of physical ARM hardware and EMUX Docker images.

Who Should Attend

Past x86/ARM Exploit Laboratory students
Pentesters working on ARM embedded environments. (SoCs, IoT, etc)
Red Team members, who want to pen-test custom binaries and exploit custom built applications.
Bug Hunters, who want to write exploits for all the crashes they find.
Members of military or government cyberwarfare units.
Members of reverse engineering research teams.
People frustrated at IoT devices to the point they want to break 'em!

Part 1 - Exploitation

A quick introduction to ARM architecture and assembly language.
EXERCISE - Learn ARM assembly by compiling and reverse engineering binaries.
EXERCISE - Using GDB for debugging ARM ELF binaries.
An introduction to ARM IoT devices.
Introducting the EMUX Firmware Emulation Framework.
Debugging the emulated IoT device.
Memory Corruption
Exploiting Stack Overflow conditions in ARM binaries.
Writing customised ARM shellcode.
EXERCISE - end to end stack overflow exploit.
Bypassing exploit mitigation technologies - DEP and ASLR.
Practical ARM ROP chains.
Attacking the actual hardware.
Overcoming cache coherency issues.
Overcoming limitations in the exploit payloads - size, bad characters and encodings.
EXERCISES - three hardware targets to emulate and exploit.
BONUS CHALLENGES - for those hungry for more.

Part 2 - Firmware Extraction & Emulation

Under the hood - a tour of the circuit boards, pins, interfaces and flash chips.
Obtaining the firmware via UART, bootloader or an EEPROM programmer.
Unpacking the firmware and static analysis.
How to emulate an IP camera in EMUX.
Matching the device - choosing the right CPU to emulate.
Matching the device - compiling a custom kernel.
EXERCISE - emulate a home router in EMUX.
Filling in the blanks - dealing with missing hardware in the emulator.
Working with nvram
Complexities in emulation - hotpatching and hooking functions.
EXERCISE - emulate a compilcated IoT device.

Pre-requisites

A conceptual understanding of how functions work in C programming
Knowledge of how a stack works, basic stack operations
Familiarity with GDB
Not be allergic to command line tools.
If none of the above apply, then enough patience to go through the pre-class tutorials.
SKILL LEVEL: INTERMEDIATE

Pre-class Tutorials

The following tutorials have been specially prepared to get students up to speed on essential concepts before coming to class.

Operating Systems - A Primer https://www.slideshare.net/saumilshah/operating-systems-a-primer
How Functions Work https://www.slideshare.net/saumilshah/how-functions-work-7776073
Introduction to Debuggers https://www.slideshare.net/saumilshah/introduction-to-debuggers

Hardware Requirements

A working laptop (no Netbooks, no Tablets, no iPads)
Intel Core i3 (equivalent or superior) required
8GB RAM required, at a minimum
Wireless network card
40 GB free Hard disk space

Software Requirements

Linux / Windows / Mac OS X desktop operating systems
Docker installed and working
Command line git client installed and working
Administrator / root access MANDATORY

Students will be provided with

Students will be provided with all the lab images used in the class. Students will also be provided with the fully loaded version of EMUX which is not available publicly.

The ARM IoT Exploit Laboratory uses a “Live Notes” system that provides a running transcript of the instructor's system to all the students. Our lab environment, plus about 800MB of curated reading material, will be made available to all attendees to take with them and continue learning after the training ends.