Shimware: Toward Practical Security Retrofitting for Monolithic Firmware Images
Eric Gustafson, Paul Grosen, Nilo Redini, Saagar Jha, Andrea Continella, Ruoyu Wang, Kevin Fu, Sara Rampazzi, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna · 2023
In today’s era of the Internet of Things, we are surrounded by security- and safety-critical, network-connected devices. In parallel with the rise in attacks on such devices, we have also seen an increase in devices that are abandoned, reached the end of their support periods, or will not otherwise receive future security updates. While this issue exists for a wide array of devices, those that use monolithic firmware, where the code and data are opaquely intermixed, have traditionally been difficult to examine and protect.