Facilitating Non-Intrusive In-Vivo Firmware Testing with Stateless Instrumentation
Jiameng Shi
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024 · Day 1 · Firmware
Dynamic testing techniques, ubiquitous in general software development, face formidable challenges when applied to firmware on deeply embedded devices like microcontrollers (MCUs). These devices operate in unique runtime environments characterized by severely restricted resources, making it impractical to directly deploy resource-intensive analysis tools such as sanitizers or advanced debuggers. Firmware developers often resort to rudimentary debugging methods like halt-and-examine, a stark contrast to the sophisticated tooling available for PC-based software. This talk introduces **IPEA** (in-vivo probe, ex-vivo analysis), a novel framework designed to bridge this gap by intelligently partitioning the workload of firmware testing.