Gestalt Firmware Analysis

Vector 35 seeks to address the considerable challenge of understanding and analyzing an integrated embedded software system. Given the diverse nature of components and their interfaces involved in such systems, a comprehensive system-level understanding requires tedious manual reverse engineering of each component and sub-component. Presently, software reverse engineering tools lack the capacity to provide an integrated understanding of an embedded system's diverse components and execute analyses across them.   Our proposed solution is the Gestalt Firmware Analysis (GFA), a unique solution encompassing multiple technical objectives to solve this challenge. The primary objective is to develop a framework that generates a complete software system representation from individual binary views. This comprehensive system view will enhance the understanding of how embedded components interact and function within a system.   Subsequent objectives include enhancing propagation of analysis information across binary boundaries into the rest of the system, identifying interfaces between components, and recovering data structures for data sent and received over these interfaces. In addition, we plan to refine existing analyses to extract useful information such as identifying key algorithms.   A fundamental prerequisite for this proposal is enhancing the existing Binary Ninja platform to represent an entire system instead of single executables. This would enable handling of various system artifacts and provide a base for a more integrated analysis.   Our approach also addresses open research questions, such as the impact of a unified view and analysis framework on reducing the manual effort required for reverse engineering embedded applications.   Recognizing the vital role of interface boundaries in system vulnerabilities and performance bottlenecks, we aim to identify and annotate interfaces and understand data transmitted through these interfaces.   Finally, to enable wide application, we aim to ensure all these frameworks and analyses are embedded into a solid user experience. This includes effectively communicating analysis results and making the data readily available to users for efficient decision-making. In particular, we aim to cater to both manual and automated workflows, considering the variety and complexity of systems in existence.