Alejandro Mera and Changming Liu, Northeastern University; Ruimin Sun, Florida International University; Engin Kirda and Long Lu, Northeastern University

Modern microcontrollers (MCU)s are ubiquitous on critical embedded applications in the IoT era. Therefore, securing MCU firmware is fundamental. To analyze MCU firmware security, existing works mostly adopt re-hosting based techniques. These techniques transplant firmware to an engineered platform and require tailored hardware or emulation of different parts of the MCU. As a result, security practitioners have observed low-fidelity, false positives, and reduced compatibility with real and complex hardware. This paper presents SHiFT, a framework that leverages the industry semihosting philosophy to provide a brandnew method that analyzes firmware natively in MCUs. This novel method provides high fidelity, reduces false positives, and grants compatibility with complex peripherals, asynchronous events, real-time operations, and direct memory access (DMA). We verified compatibility of SHiFT with thirteen popular embedded architectures, and fully evaluated prototypes for ARMv7-M, ARMv8-M and Xtensa architectures. Our evaluation shows that SHiFT can detect a wide range of firmware faults with instrumentation running natively in the MCU. In terms of performance, SHiFT is up to two orders of magnitude faster (i.e., ×100) than software-based emulation, and even comparable to fuzz testing native applications in a workstation. Thanks to SHiFT's unique characteristics, we discovered five previously unknown vulnerabilities, including a zero-day on the popular FreeRTOS kernel, with no false positives. Our prototypes and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/RiS3-Lab/SHiFT.