Analyzing Cellular Basebands with FirmWire

Explore the critical world of cellular basebands and learn how to analyze them using FirmWire in this 53-minute conference talk. Discover what basebands are, why they're crucial components of mobile phones, and how they can be potential entry points for attacks. Gain hands-on experience with FirmWire, an open-source baseband analysis platform that enables researchers to emulate, debug, introspect, and interact with complex baseband firmware in real-time. Learn about the integrated ModKit for creating and injecting custom tasks, and how it's leveraged for full-system fuzzing using AFL++. Uncover insights into pre-authentication vulnerabilities found in LTE and GSM stacks of Samsung's Shannon and MediaTek's MTK baseband implementations, affecting billions of devices. Delve into the results of this two-year international research collaboration between the University of Florida, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, TU Berlin, and Ruhr-University Bochum, and gain valuable knowledge about mobile device security and baseband analysis techniques.