Baseband exploitation is often considered the cream of the offensive security field. In the last decade, only a handful of such exploits were publicly released. As a result, many researchers view the ability to silently achieve code execution on a victim’s device by emulating a GSM (2G), 3G, LTE (4G), or 5G base station as a difficult objective.
In reality, baseband exploitation is not that challenging! By following a simple list of steps, a baseband platform can be quickly unlocked for research, debugging and exploitation.
In this course, students will learn our systematic approach to baseband security research: from setting up a fake base station using SDR and open-source BTS software, to obtaining and analysing mobile phone firmware and crash dumps, modifying BTS code to trigger bugs and deliver a payload, and finally reverse engineering radio protocols, hunting for vulnerabilities and exploiting them.
By the end of this heavily hands-on course, students will become familiar with two extremely common baseband platforms, Shannon and MediaTek, gain the skills to debug these and other baseband platforms, and learn about previously discovered bugs in basebands, and how they have been exploited.
Each student will be provided with a Software Defined Radio (SDR) board to emulate a base station, and a modern mobile phone to serve as a target.
Pedro Ribeiro is a vulnerability researcher and reverse engineer with over 16 years of experience. Pedro has found and exploited hundreds of vulnerabilities in software, hardware and firmware. He has over 160 CVE ID attributed to his name (most of which related to remote code execution vulnerabilities) and has authored over 60 Metasploit modules which have been released publicly. He also regularly competes in Pwn2Own as part of the Flashback Team, winning the coveted Master of Pwn in 2020.
Besides his public vulnerability research activities, he is the founder and director of a penetration testing and reverse engineering consultancy based in London (Agile Information Security), with a variety of clients worldwide.
More information about Pedro’s publicly disclosed vulnerabilities can be found at https://github.com/pedrib/PoC. Flashback Team’s YouTube channel can be found at https://www.youtube.com/c/FlashbackTeam
Nitay Artenstein is a senior security researcher and the leader of an international research group. He has been a speaker at various security conferences, including Black Hat and Recon, and has conducted training sessions in Linux kernel exploitation and baseband research. He suffers from a severe addiction to IDA Pro (at least until he gets used to Ghidra’s GUI), and generally gets a kick out of digging around where he’s not supposed to.
Day 1: Introduction, initial analysis and debugging
Day 2: Cellular protocols and static analysis
Day 3: Finding bugs in Shannon and MediaTek
Day 4: Exploiting a Shannon n-day
An IDA Pro + ARM32 Decompiler temporary 2 week license for this course can be obtained at an additional cost, please contact us if you require it.