No Hardware, No Problem: Emulation and Exploitation
Vulnerability Hunting for Sport If you've been following our blog, you might notice some favoritism when it comes to embedded targets... We've been exploring the NETGEAR R7000 for several blog posts . This pattern stems from a number of product characteristics, one of which is that the device is easy to emulate in QEMU, which provides an alternative to testing the actual device and is much more researcher-friendly. While it's not strictly required, nor is it the only factor that we consider, it does make for a more enjoyable vulnerability research experience! In this blog post, we'll walk through emulating the R7000's UPnP daemon in QEMU to aid in the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities. Towards that end, this blog will demonstrate an exploit for a post-authenticated stack overflow vulnerability, and how to easily unpack the encrypted firmware updates for the R7000's Circle update daemon. Unpacking the R7000 Firmware The first step in emulating the