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

FlowLens: Enabling Efficient Flow Classification for ML-based Network Security...

Diogo Barradas (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa), Nuno Santos (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa), Luis Rodrigues (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa), Salvatore Signorello (LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa), Fernando M. V. Ramos (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa), André Madeira (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de…

Read More

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

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

Read More

Towards Understanding and Detecting Cyberbullying in Real-world Images

Nishant Vishwamitra (University at Buffalo), Hongxin Hu (University at Buffalo), Feng Luo (Clemson University), Long Cheng (Clemson University)

Read More

From Library Portability to Para-rehosting: Natively Executing Microcontroller Software...

Wenqiang Li (State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Department of Computer Science, the University of Georgia, USA; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the University of Kansas, USA), Le Guan (Department of Computer Science, the University…

Read More