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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Quarks In The Shell - Episode IV

This year has been very fruitful for Quarkslab with lots of research, new challenges, newcomers, open source success. It is now a tradition to look back at what we have done during a small conference named “Quarks in the Shell” or just "QITS", where we share the year experience with our customers, partners and friends. QITS meeting is one of the output channels for our research work that is also reflected in internal tools, our open-source projects (e.g. Triton, LIEF and QBDI), and our products (IRMA Enterprise and Epona).

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Android Bluetooth Vulnerabilities in the March 2018 Security Bulletin

The March 2018 Android Security Bulletin includes fixes for 10 vulnerabilities in its Bluetooth stack, some of which were also independently discovered by Quarkslab, but were fixed while we were in the process of reporting them to Google (spoiler alert: we have reported a few more new Bluetooth vulnerabilities to the Android team — we'll disclose the details after they get fixed). This blogpost shows technical details for a couple of these fixed bugs, which can be triggered remotely and without any user interaction, as well as proof-of-concept code for them.

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Vulnerabilities in High Assurance Boot of NXP i.MX microprocessors

This blog post provides details about two vulnerabilities found by Quarkslab's researchers Guillaume Delugré and Kévin Szkudłapski in the secure boot feature of the i.MX family of application processors [1] built by NXP Semiconductors.

The bugs allow an attacker to subvert the secure boot process to bypass code signature verification and load and execute arbitrary code on i.MX application processors that have the High Assurance Boot feature enabled. These bugs affect 12 i.MX processor families.

The vulnerabilities were discovered and reported to the vendor in September 2016 and the technical details included in this blogpost were disclosed in a joint Quarkslab-NXP presentation at the Qualcomm Mobile Security Summit 2017 [2] in May 19th, 2017. National computer emergency response teams (CERTs) from 4 countries were informed about the issues in March, 2017.

NXP has issued an Engineering Bulletin and two Errata documents (EB00854, ERR010872 and ERR0108873 respectively) [3] providing a brief description of both vulnerabilities, the list of affected processor models along with resolution plans and possible mitigations.

In the rest of the blogpost we describe the relevant features in i.MX processors and the vulnerabilities affecting them.

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