Christian Niesler (University of Duisburg-Essen), Sebastian Surminski (University of Duisburg-Essen), Lucas Davi (University of Duisburg-Essen)

Memory corruption attacks are a pre-dominant attack vector against IoT devices. Simply updating vulnerable IoT software is not always possible due to unacceptable downtime and a required reboot. These side-effects must be avoided for highly-available embedded systems such as medical devices and, generally speaking, for any embedded system with real-time constraints.
To avoid downtime and reboot of a system, previous research has introduced the concept of hotpatching. However, the existing approaches cannot be applied to resource-constrained IoT devices. Furthermore, possible hardware-related issues have not been addressed, i.e., the inability to directly modify the firmware image due to read-only memory.

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of HERA (Hotpatching of Embedded Real-time Applications) which utilizes hardware-based built-in features of commodity Cortex-M microcontrollers to perform hotpatching of embedded systems. HERA preserves hard real-time constraints while keeping the additional resource usage to a minimum. In a case study, we apply HERA to two vulnerable medical devices. Furthermore, we leverage HERA to patch an existing vulnerability in the FreeRTOS operating system. These applications demonstrate the high practicality and efficiency of our approach.

View More Papers

Detecting Tor Bridge from Sampled Traffic in Backbone Networks

Hua Wu (School of Cyber Science & Engineering and Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration Southeast University, Ministry of Education, Jiangsu Nanjing, Purple Mountain Laboratories for Network and Communication Security (Nanjing, Jiangsu)), Shuyi Guo, Guang Cheng, Xiaoyan Hu (School of Cyber Science & Engineering and Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration…

Read More

Favocado: Fuzzing the Binding Code of JavaScript Engines Using...

Sung Ta Dinh (Arizona State University), Haehyun Cho (Arizona State University), Kyle Martin (North Carolina State University), Adam Oest (PayPal, Inc.), Kyle Zeng (Arizona State University), Alexandros Kapravelos (North Carolina State University), Gail-Joon Ahn (Arizona State University and Samsung Research), Tiffany Bao (Arizona State University), Ruoyu Wang (Arizona State University), Adam Doupe (Arizona State University),…

Read More

Detecting Kernel Memory Leaks in Specialized Modules with Ownership...

Navid Emamdoost (University of Minnesota), Qiushi Wu (University of Minnesota), Kangjie Lu (University of Minnesota), Stephen McCamant (University of Minnesota)

Read More

Obfuscated Access and Search Patterns in Searchable Encryption

Zhiwei Shang (University of Waterloo), Simon Oya (University of Waterloo), Andreas Peter (University of Twente), Florian Kerschbaum (University of Waterloo)

Read More