Abstracting The Hardware: Bridging Renode and Ghidra for Embedded Vulnerability Research with Open Source

Physical hardware is the biggest bottleneck in embedded vulnerability research. No exposed JTAG, long boot sequences, risk of bricking your board and the challenge of actually getting your hands on a target device make researching the security of those platforms a painfully slow process. But what if you could leave the physical board behind entirely? What if you could go from unknown firmware binary to a complete attack reproduction case without leaving your computer? In this presentation we'll talk about how to use Renode, Antmicro's open source simulation framework, together with the Ghidra Software Reverse Engineering (SRE) tool developed by the National Security Agency (NSA). We'll demonstrate how using these tools enables advanced research techniques, allowing you to trace execution and manipulate memory based on an example firmware built on top of Zephyr RTOS.