Carel van Rooyen & Philipp Promeuschel

Talk Title

Expanding exploitation beyond X86 and Arm, into the realm of Xtensa: A comparative short study

Abstract

With over 100 million Xtensa devices distributed by January 2018, it is clear that this is becoming a very popular platform for IoT devices. This talk will assist security researchers in the future analysis of these devices (reverse engineering application code, developing exploits) to better understand the fundamental differences between ARM and Xtensa architectures. We will show the major differences in these two (embedded) architecture, from an exploiters / attackers point of view. The security mechanisms supported by the OSes for these architectures and the difference in the very basic assembly instructions for both platforms will be shown. Searching for gadgets are discussed, in addition to stackless architecture and getting post-boot persistence

Bio

Carel van Rooyen is a computer systems engineer currently employed as a senior information security officer in Zurich. Prior to his roles, as the security analyst and security researcher, he spent more than a decade teaching web application development and network security principles.

Philipp Promeuschel is a security analyst at Compass Security Schweiz AG, interested in mobile and IoT security. Additionally, he is a security course teacher (APT, mobile security, forensics, web application security) and volunteering for public IT Security events such as Cyber Security Austria 2013, Cyber Security Alpen Cup 2014, OWASP AppSec EU 2013, 2015-2017 as well as for the European Cyber Security Challenge 2015.