Reverse Engineering Samsung S6 SBOOT - Part I

Various Samsung Exynos based smartphones use a proprietary bootloader named SBOOT. It is the case for the Samsung Galaxy S7, Galaxy S6 and Galaxy A3, and probably many more smartphones listed on Samsung Exynos Showcase [1]. I had the opportunity to reverse engineer pieces of this bootloader while assessing various TEE implementations. This article is the first from a series about SBOOT. It recalls some ARMv8 concepts, discusses the methodology I followed and the right and wrong assumptions I made while analyzing this undocumented proprietary blob used on the Samsung Galaxy S6.

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