Analysis of Qualcomm Secure Boot Chains

Qualcomm is the market-dominant hardware vendor for non-Apple smartphones. Considering the [SoCs] they produce are predominant, it has become increasingly interesting to reverse-engineer and take over their boot chain in order to get a hold onto the highest-privileged components while they are executing. Ultimately, the objective is to be able to experiment with closed-source and/or undocumented components such as hardware registers or Trusted Execution Environment Software.

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Reverse-engineering Broadcom wireless chipsets

Broadcom is one of the major vendors of wireless devices worldwide. Since these chips are so widespread they constitute a high value target to attackers and any vulnerability found in them should be considered to pose high risk. In this blog post I provide an account of my internship at Quarkslab which included obtaining, reversing and fuzzing the firmware, and finding a few new vulnerabilities.

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Defeating NotPetya from your iLO

NotPetya [0] is a variant of the Petya ransomware [1] that appeared in June 2017 in Ukraine. These malwares have the particularity to rewrite the MBR of computers that are still using an old fashioned BIOS-based booting system. This MBR encrypts the Master File Table (MFT) of the underlying NTFS partition systems.

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Overview of Intel SGX - Part 2, SGX Externals

This blog post provides the reader with an overview of the Intel SGX technology, as a follow-up to SGX Internals. In this second part, we quickly explain how an application interacts with its enclave. We also detail what pieces of software are included within the SDK and PSW. Finally, we summarize the known attacks and concerns with this technology, as well as conclude on the subject.

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Overview of Intel SGX - Part 1, SGX Internals

This blog-post provides the reader with an overview of the Intel SGX technology. In this first part, we explore the additions made to Intel platforms to support SGX, focusing on the processor and memory. We then explain the management and life cycle of an enclave. Finally, we detail two features of enclaves: secret sealing and attestation.

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Introduction to Trusted Execution Environment: ARM's TrustZone

Increasing popularity of connected devices in recent years has led devices manufacturers to deal with security issues in a more serious way than before. In order to address these issues appropriately, a specification has emerged to define a way to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of data running in the entity implementing this specification.

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