Researching the Unisoc Baseband

Explore the first-ever security research on the Unisoc baseband in this 28-minute conference talk from Recon 2022. Dive into the process of reverse-engineering and fuzzing the NAS protocol implementation to uncover vulnerabilities that can disrupt radio communication in Unisoc-based devices. Learn about the history of Unisoc (formerly Spreadtrum), its market position as the fourth-largest smartphone chip manufacturer globally, and its popularity in Africa and Asia. Discover why this widely-used baseband has remained largely unstudied until now. Follow along as the speaker, Slava Makkaveev, a Security Researcher at Check Point Research, shares insights on researching the LTE protocol stack implementation and finding vulnerabilities that can block communications in Unisoc-powered smartphones.