Florian Hofhammer (EPFL), Marcel Busch (EPFL), Qinying Wang (EPFL and Zhejiang University), Manuel Egele (Boston University), Mathias Payer (EPFL)

Dynamic analysis of microcontroller-based embedded firmware remains challenging. The general lack of source code availability for Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) firmware prevents powerful source-based instrumentation and prohibits compiling the firmware into an executable directly runnable by an analyst. Analyzing firmware binaries requires either acquisition and configuration of custom hardware, or configuration of extensive software stacks built around emulators. In both cases, dynamic analysis is limited in functionality by complex debugging and instrumentation interfaces and in performance by low execution speeds on Microcontroller Units (MCUs) and Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) translation overheads in emulators.

SURGEON provides a performant, flexible, and accurate rehosting approach for dynamic analysis of embedded firmware. We introduce transplantation to transform binary, embedded firmware into a Linux user space process executing natively on compatible high-performance systems through static binary rewriting. In addition to the achieved performance improvements, SURGEON scales horizontally through process instantiation and provides the flexibility to apply existing dynamic analysis tooling for user space processes without requiring adaptations to firmware-specific use cases. SURGEON’s key use cases include debugging binary firmware with off-the-shelf tooling for user space processes and fuzz testing.

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Trim My View: An LLM-Based Code Query System for...

Sima Arasteh (University of Southern California), Pegah Jandaghi, Nicolaas Weideman (University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute), Dennis Perepech, Mukund Raghothaman (University of Southern California), Christophe Hauser (Dartmouth College), Luis Garcia (University of Utah Kahlert School of Computing)

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Understanding MPU Usage in Microcontroller-based Systems in the Wild

Wei Zhou, Zhouqi Jiang (School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Le Guan (School of Computing, University of Georgia)

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DeGPT: Optimizing Decompiler Output with LLM

Peiwei Hu (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China), Ruigang Liang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China), Kai Chen (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)

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Binary Mutation Analysis of Tests Using Reassembleable Disassembly

Navid Emamdoost (University of Minnesota), Vaibhav Sharma (University of Minnesota), Taejoon Byun (University of Minnesota), Stephen McCamant (University of Minnesota)

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