📶 Analyzing Cellular Basebands with FirmWire 🔎 (camp2023)

Last year, we released FirmWire to the public, an open-source baseband analysis platform. But what even is a baseband and why do we want to analyze it? Hint: It’s a critical part of your phone and a first point of entry for attacks. This talk will answer your questions and provide a hands-on introduction to our framework. This talk will discuss cellular basebands and FirmWire, our open-source platform for baseband firmware. The platform allows researchers to emulate, dynamically debug, introspect, and interact with complex baseband firmware, providing insights about its inner workings in real-time. FirmWire’s integrated ModKit creates and injects custom tasks into the emulated baseband. We leverage the ModKit for full-system fuzzing via AFL++ by creating custom fuzzing tasks interacting with the host, using special hypercalls. With this setup, we uncovered several pre-authentication vulnerabilities in the LTE and GSM stacks of Samsung’s Shannon and MediaTek’s MTK baseband implementations, affecting billions of devices. FirmWire is the outcome of a more than two-year-long international research collaboration between the University of Florida, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, TU Berlin, and Ruhr-University Bochum. about this event: https://pretalx.c3voc.de/camp2023/talk/TQXEN7/