Expanding Exploitation Beyond X86 and ARM

Explore the world of Xtensa architecture and its growing importance in IoT devices through this 56-minute conference talk from Nullcon Goa 2018. Delve into a comparative study by Carel van Rooyen and Philipp Promeuschel that examines the fundamental differences between ARM and Xtensa architectures from an exploiter's perspective. Learn about security mechanisms supported by operating systems for these architectures, basic assembly instructions, and the challenges of searching for gadgets. Gain insights into stackless architecture and methods for achieving post-boot persistence. This talk equips security researchers with essential knowledge for analyzing and reverse engineering Xtensa-based devices, which have surpassed 100 million distributions as of January 2018.