Alexandru Ariciu is a Penetration Tester and Vulnerability Researcher for Applied Risk, with more than 5 years experience in the field of Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing. His core skills are offensive scenarios such as Penetration Testing, Reverse Engineering and Hardware Hacking. Source code analysis, software negative testing and Post-Exploitation techniques are also his strengths. He has developed a number of security tools that are used within the security community as part of open source projects. Passionate on how things work and how they can be made to function in unintended ways, he has a keen eye for details and is committed to deliver the best quality deliverables in each project he is taking part.

BlackBox Debugging of Embedded Systems.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are increasingly vital for critical infrastructures (CIs) and societies. Whether a sensor, controllers or transmitters all the systems are running embedded systems and therefore could be vulnerable to cyber security threats.
Protecting these systems requires deep understanding of the various attack vectors and interfaces. This is become even harder in absence of a full debugging environment.
This research will demonstrate new methods / techniques that we have developed to debug embedded systems and potentially modify/infect code through various interfaces (whatever is available on the target) without bricking the system and render it unusable.

In this presentation, we will demonstrate this process end to end and perform a live demo on a target ICS/SCADA device including:
– Using hardware interfaces to interact with device
– Bypassing the firmware validation
– Infecting the device with not useful code(and bricking it by mistake)
– Implementing the debugger (Background, Broad overview, Specific Implementation)
– Live debugging using the technique on the target device