SANS SEC661: ARM Exploit Development

The Internet of Things (IoT) has taken over. Everywhere we look we see more systems coming online, from routers to refrigerators. But as these systems become more and more integrated into our home and business networks, how does their security posture keep up with their increasing popularity? The Advanced Reduced instruction set computing Machines architecture (ARM) introduced a new family of computer processors that provide a robust platform that is ideal for running a wide variety of small, specialized systems.

Unfortunately, the rapid expansion of new devices coming to market, along with accelerated development lifecycles, mean that security is often an afterthought. The security posture of many IoT devices is further restricted due to hardware limitations and the need to maintain low production costs.

Now more than ever, there is a demand for highly skilled security professionals who understand IoT vulnerabilities and ARM exploitation. However, the complexity of exploit development and the difficulty of acquiring and analyzing the software that runs on IoT systems can create intimidating barriers to those wanting to enter this field.

SEC661: ARM Exploit Development is designed to break down those barriers. It has been built from the ground up to give students a solid foundation in exploit development on the ARM platform. The course starts by going over the fundamentals of the architecture and some basic ARM assembly. Initial emphasis is placed on key data structures and how they work together so that students gain a better understanding of why certain vulnerabilities occur.

Students are provided with the tools they need to set up and work in an ARM environment. From there, we go through several hands-on labs that explore memory corruption vulnerabilities and show how to craft custom input in order to gain control of execution. We will also cover common exploit mitigations and techniques for bypassing them. Finally, students will demonstrate their understanding of the core concepts taught in this highly technical course by crafting their own exploits against two emulated ARM routers.

You will learn:

• Techniques for running ARM in an emulated environment
• The fundamentals of ARM assembly
• How to write ARM exploits to leverage stack-based buffer overflows
• Exploit mitigations and common workarounds
• How to work with ARM shellcode
• Return Oriented Programming (ROP)
• How to exploit IoT devices in ARM
• 64-bit ARM exploit development