The Shadow File

BayThreat 2013 Presentation - Additional Resources

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For my presentation at BayThreat, entitled “BT Wireless Routers: Adventures in Reversing and Exploiting”, rather than have one or two or three slides packed with hard to read URLs, I included a single slide with a link to this post.  Here you’ll find links to additional resources that I may have referenced in my talk.

White paper: Reverse Engineering and Exploiting the BT HomeHub 3.0b (pdf)
Slides: BT Wireless Routers: Adventures in Reversing and Exploiting

BT HomeHub 3.0b specifications

Here’s a walkthrough I wrote on getting Debian MIPS Linux up and running in QEMU system emulation.  I use QEMU & Debian Linux to run and analyze binaries that I find in firmware.
QEMU/Debian MIPS Linux walkthrough

Often binaries found in firmware won’t play nicely in emulation because they make a lot of assumptions about the underlying hardware which QEMU can’t satisfy.  The most common case of this is an application querying NVRAM for configuration parameters.  Here’s a library I wrote to intercept those queries and provide answers from an INI-style configuration file.
NVRAM “faker” library for use in emulation

Bowcaster is an exploit development API that I wrote to ease development of buffer overflow exploits.  It grew out of all the tools and techniques Craig Heffner and I developed for exploiting embedded devices.  It primarily targets MIPS Linux, since there support for that architecture was almost non-existent.  I plan to add support for other architectures as I have time.
Bowcaster

Here’s my Github repository for proof-of-concept exploit code.  In it, you’ll find the exploit code for the BT HomeHub 3.0b that I demoed at BayThreat, among a few others.
Proof-of-Concept exploit code

In the presentation I mentioned how exploiting buffer overflows on MIPS Linux is a bit different that other, more familiar architectures.  I wasn’t able to go into details; that could make an entire presentation in itself.  However, I mentioned my Black Hat USA 2012 presentation, where I did describe some of the mechanics of exploiting MIPS Linux buffer overflows.  Here’s the video of that presentation, entitled “From SQL Injection to MIPS Overflows: Rooting SOHO Routers”.

SQL Injection to MIPS Overflows - Zachary Cutlip - Black Hat USA 2012 from Zach on Vimeo.

I hope these resources are useful.  If you came to this article because you saw my BayThreat talk and demo, I hope you enjoyed it!  Be sure to get in touch and share your thoughts!  Twitter or my email are best.

Twitter: @zcutlip
Email: uid000 at gmail

Cheers!
Zach