FirmWall: Directed Symbolic Execution of Firmware Binaries for Defending Against Unauthorized System Calls
Aruna Jayasena, Prabhat Mishra · IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security · 2025
Modern computing devices rely on root-of-trust (RoT) to ensure confidentiality and integrity of both application code and data while satisfying a wide variety of user requirements. The RoT provides essential cryptographic and security functions as services (implemented as system calls) to the host system, supporting the execution of both trusted and untrusted applications. It also enables a secure boot process for the host operating system and other functionalities to establish a trusted execution environment for user applications. The complexity of RoT implementation often introduces vulnerabilities, such as privilege escalation and code injection risks, which affect the security of user data during execution. In this paper, we propose a RoT firmware verification framework that acts as a firmware firewall (FirmWall) to enhance the overall security of the system. Specifically, we perform directed symbolic execution focused on system calls to verify RoT firmware binaries against security specifications, facilitating targeted patching to mitigate potential vulnerabilities. Our framework demonstrated significantly better coverage compared to state-of-the-art symbolic execution. It also confirmed the presence of multiple vulnerabilities (CVEs) in recent versions of ARM Trusted Firmware-M implementations.