Uwe Muller, Eicke Hauck, Timm Welz, Jiska Classen, Matthias Hollick (Secure Mobile Networking Lab, TU Darmstadt)

Even though PowerPC mostly disappeared from the consumer device market, its architectural properties continue being popular for highly specialized systems. This particularly includes embedded systems with real-time requirements that are deeply integrated into critical infrastructures as well as aeronautics, transportation, control systems in power plants, etc. One example is Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA), a digital radio system used in the public safety domain and deployed in more than 120 countries worldwide: base stations of at least one of the main vendors are based on PowerPC. Despite the criticality of the aforementioned systems, many follow a security by obscurity approach and there are no openly available analysis tools. While analyzing a TETRA base station, we design and develop a set of analysis tools centered around a PowerPC binary patcher. We further create various dynamic tooling on top, including a fast memory dumper, function tracer, flexible patching capabilities at runtime, and a fuzzer. We describe the genesis of these tools and detail the binary patcher, which is general in nature and not limited to our base station under test.

View More Papers

As Strong As Its Weakest Link: How to Break...

Kai Li (Syracuse University), Jiaqi Chen (Syracuse University), Xianghong Liu (Syracuse University), Yuzhe Tang (Syracuse University), XiaoFeng Wang (Indiana University Bloomington), Xiapu Luo (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Read More

Improving Signal's Sealed Sender

Ian Martiny (University of Colorado Boulder), Gabriel Kaptchuk (Boston University), Adam Aviv (The George Washington University), Dan Roche (U.S. Naval Avademy), Eric Wustrow (University of Colorado Boulder)

Read More

BAR2019 Keynote Talk

Dustin Fraze, Program Manager, DARPA I2O

Read More

CLIK on PLCs! Attacking Control Logic with Decompilation and...

Sushma Kalle (University of New Orleans), Nehal Ameen (University of New Orleans), Hyunguk Yoo (University of New Orleans), Irfan Ahmed (Virginia Commonwealth University)

Read More