pcode_graph is a Python library, published by Quarkslab, suitable to build semantic graphs from binary code. We present how to use it to detect function similarities in binaries.

Hardware key attestation lets an Android app prove to its backend that a key lives in secure hardware on a locked, verified device. It is also the wall that stops a security analyst working on a rooted phone. This article opens the mechanism from the analyst's chair, from the certificate chain and the attestation extension down to the root of trust, then shows a simple bypass that never touches the secure hardware. We relay the attestation to a clean device and splice a genuine chain back into the target app with a Frida hook. A companion repository ships the validation backend, the demo apps and the instrumentation, so the whole setup can be run and inspected rather than taken on faith.

At the request of the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF), Quarkslab performed a security audit of Cortex, evaluating the security of its multi-tenant design and the mechanisms protecting tenant isolation.

Xiaomi's MJA1 is a proprietary secure chip used in their recent cameras to protect sensitive data and device communications. With no public documentation available, we conducted a black-box security analysis covering hardware identification, I2C sniffing, flash dumping, and firmware reverse engineering. This post walks through how we mapped the chip's command protocol, brute-forced undocumented commands, and assessed its security properties.

The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) commissioned Quarkslab to extend the BOLT-based static binary analyser in LLVM to support additional compiler flags for security hardening. This work resulted in the first iteration of a scanner for validating the implementation of -ftrivial-auto-var-init.

During a Red Team exercise we were able to chain multiple LLM and web-based vulnerabilities to achieve admin account takeover from a low-privileged account. Trusting the LLM turned out to be the first falling domino of a long chain of events that lead to complete compromise. In this article we describe how it went down.

This article describes the main software protection techniques used in Android applications, organized around a taxonomy covering environment checks, obfuscation, and program loading abuse. It presents the results of a large-scale analysis of nearly 2.5 million Android apps, studying how widely these protections are adopted across different markets, app categories, and malware samples.

The Scala team has partnered with the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) to conduct its first security audit. This initiative aims to identify potential vulnerabilities through static and dynamic analysis and provide greater confidence in Scala. The security audit conducted by Quarkslab is particularly focused on Scala 3.

An Optical Line Terminal (OLT) is the central device in a Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) network that connects and manages all customer connections, making it a critical control point in an ISP's infrastructure for delivering high speed Internet. This article uncovers how unauthenticated access to OLTs can lead to a full network takeover starting by exploiting exposed vulnerable devices, showing how to pivot into the cloud-based fleet manager using other vulnerabilities, and then compromising an ISP's entire infrastructure.

This article presents the structure of the Independent Guest Virtual Machine (IGVM) file format, a binary file designed to define and securely launch the initial state of a virtual machine. It bundles all necessary components such as the BIOS/OVMF, kernel, and initial ramdisk, into a single file. We'll focus on a concrete example to understand the main structure of the file format.