DARPA’s Grand Cyber Challenge foretold an ominous future stricken with machines exploiting our code and automatically compromising our systems. Today, we have the chance to steel ourselves by creating new hope through stronger tools and techniques to find our bugs before our big-brother nation-states can take advantage. The firmware holding our phones, our routers, and our cars is our weakest link and it demands new methods of finding exploitable vulnerabilities. This talk will present Firmware Slap, the culmination of concolic analysis and semi-supervised firmware function learning. Each binary or library in a given firmware provides slices of information to accelerate and enable fault-resistant concolic analysis. These techniques provide a method of knowing where our vulnerabilities are and how we can trigger them.
Christopher Roberts is a security researcher at REDLattice Inc. He has extensive vulnerability research experience in embedded systems and program analysis frameworks. He competes and speaks in George Mason’s competitive cyber club. He’s known for building several tools which automatically solve and produce flags from pwnable and reversing CTF problems. (Zeratool) (PinCTF) Github: https://github.com/ChrisTheCoolHut