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Philipp Mao

Publications and source records attributed to Philipp Mao.

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"Operator, can you hear me?" A Faithful Line into the UNISOC Baseband

Baseband processors are reachable over the radio at all times. Their most security-relevant logic runs deep inside protocol state machines: the control-plane handlers that gate registration, authentication, and session setup. Analyzing that logic systematically requires introspecting the firmware as it runs, which makes re-hosting the baseband necessary. Existing re-hosting work approximates the execution environment and under-approximates the SoC complexity of the baseband processor together with its surrounding components, bringing this state practically out of reach. We instead model each surrounding component, co-processors, SIM, application processor, from what a real device does, and step them in lockstep with the baseband on one shared clock. That makes faithfulness checkable at component interfaces, rather than assumed. We call this method Unislop and demonstrate it on the UNISOC UDX710, a platform in an estimated 10-15% of cellular modems and in automotive systems, not systematically analyzed before. Starting from a Quectel RM500U-CNV module, we gain code execution, defeat its firmware-integrity check, instrument the baseband, and recover its peripheral environment from the running device. The resulting re-host reaches the same control-plane states as the real device, establishes a full PDU session, and carries real IP traffic on both ingress and egress. The recovered components are shared across UNISOC's baseband lineup, so with additional reverse-engineering effort the same design extends to further targets.

cs.CR

T\"AMU: Emulating Trusted Applications at the (GlobalPlatform)-API Layer

Mobile devices rely on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to execute security-critical code and protect sensitive assets. This security-critical code is modularized in components known as Trusted Applications (TAs). Vulnerabilities in TAs can compromise the TEE and, thus, the entire system. However, the closed-source nature and fragmentation of mobile TEEs severely hinder dynamic analysis of TAs, limiting testing efforts to mostly static analyses. This paper presents T\"AMU, a rehosting platform enabling dynamic analysis of TAs, specifically fuzzing and debugging, by interposing their execution at the API layer. To scale to many TAs across different TEEs, T\"AMU leverages the standardization of TEE APIs, driven by the GlobalPlatform specifications. For the remaining TEE-specific APIs not shared across different TEEs, T\"AMU introduces the notion of greedy high-level emulation, a technique that allows prioritizing manual rehosting efforts based on the potential coverage gain during fuzzing. We implement T\"AMU and use it to emulate 67 TAs across four TEEs. Our fuzzing campaigns yielded 17 zero-day vulnerabilities across 11 TAs. These results indicate a deficit of dynamic analysis capabilities across the TEE ecosystem, where not even vendors with source code unlocked these capabilities for themselves. T\"AMU promises to close this gap by bringing effective and practical dynamic analysis to the mobile TEE domain.

cs.CR