Uwe Muller, Eicke Hauck, Timm Welz, Jiska Classen, Matthias Hollick (Secure Mobile Networking Lab, TU Darmstadt)

Even though PowerPC mostly disappeared from the consumer device market, its architectural properties continue being popular for highly specialized systems. This particularly includes embedded systems with real-time requirements that are deeply integrated into critical infrastructures as well as aeronautics, transportation, control systems in power plants, etc. One example is Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA), a digital radio system used in the public safety domain and deployed in more than 120 countries worldwide: base stations of at least one of the main vendors are based on PowerPC. Despite the criticality of the aforementioned systems, many follow a security by obscurity approach and there are no openly available analysis tools. While analyzing a TETRA base station, we design and develop a set of analysis tools centered around a PowerPC binary patcher. We further create various dynamic tooling on top, including a fast memory dumper, function tracer, flexible patching capabilities at runtime, and a fuzzer. We describe the genesis of these tools and detail the binary patcher, which is general in nature and not limited to our base station under test.

View More Papers

No Source Code? No Problem! Twenty Years of Research...

Jack W. Davidson, Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia

Read More

Hashomer – Privacy-Preserving Bluetooth Based Contact Tracing Scheme for...

Benny Pinkas (Bar-Ilan University); Eyal Ronen (Tel Aviv University)

Read More

C^2SR: Cybercrime Scene Reconstruction for Post-mortem Forensic Analysis

Yonghwi Kwon (University of Virginia), Weihang Wang (University at Buffalo, SUNY), Jinho Jung (Georgia Institute of Technology), Kyu Hyung Lee (University of Georgia), Roberto Perdisci (Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Georgia)

Read More

Data Poisoning Attacks to Deep Learning Based Recommender Systems

Hai Huang (Tsinghua University), Jiaming Mu (Tsinghua University), Neil Zhenqiang Gong (Duke University), Qi Li (Tsinghua University), Bin Liu (West Virginia University), Mingwei Xu (Tsinghua University)

Read More