Bare Metal Reverse Engineering
SolaSec
DEF CON 33 · Day 1 · Main Stage
This talk, "Bare Metal Reverse Engineering" by SolaSec, dives deep into the intricate world of analyzing firmware that runs directly on hardware without a conventional operating system. SolaSec, co-founder of Solosack and an experienced embedded software developer, guides the audience through the challenges and methodologies of reverse engineering raw, stripped binaries often found in **bare metal** and **Real-Time Operating System (RTOS)** environments, specifically focusing on **ARM 32-bit microcontrollers**. The presentation emphasizes that understanding firmware development is crucial for effective firmware reverse engineering.
AI review
Competent, well-structured introduction to bare metal firmware RE on ARM with a practical Ghidra-centric toolchain. The content is solid and the speaker clearly knows the domain, but this is fundamentally a tutorial aimed at practitioners who haven't worked in this space before — not novel research, not new attack surfaces, not anything that will make a vendor lose sleep.