So how do you debug bios and triage a vulnerability for exploitability with no stack trace or error log? How do BIOS developers do it? Do not worry! We will explain how anyone can have debug capabilities on modern Intel platforms and show you how this massively simplifies exploit dev. Developing an exploit for a BIOS vulnerability is a different experience than other types of exploit dev. Your available code base to draw from is unlike what you would expect when running at the operating system level and you have no gdb you can use.
In this talk we will summarize BIOS exploitation techniques and dive deeper into the specifics of an exploit we developed to provide reliable arbitrary code execution for an"over-the-internet" bios update vulnerability we found and responsibly disclosed. We will explain the relevant parts of UEFI and talk more about the exploit mitigations that exist there. We will also explain how to explore System Management Mode (SMM) in an Intel based platform, utilizing Intel hardware debug capabilities on an Intel 8th gen platform to obtain SMRAM content, analyze its contents, and search for vulnerable code.