WPI- Computer Science Department, PhD Proposal Defense, Tongwei Rei " Reverse Engineering and Securing Embedded Systems"

Tongwei Ren

PhD Candidate, 

WPI – Computer Science Department

Tuesday, November 7th, 2023

Time: 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. 

Zoom Link: https://wpi.zoom.us/j/96464980929

Committee members: Prof. Robert Walls, WPI - Computer Science (Advisor)

     Prof. Craig Shue, WPI - Computer Science

     Prof. Xiaoyan Sun, WPI - Computer Science

     Prof. Lorenzo De Carli, University of Calgary (External Member)

Abstract:

Embedded devices are specialized computing systems often have resource limitations in terms of memory, processing power, and storage. While these systems offer efficiency and specificity, and play critical roles from ensuring vehicles safety to smart industries, they are often developed using unsafe languages like C. Combined with the fact that they are often closed-source and lack of updates, these systems are vulnerable to attacks.

 In this proposal, we seek to enhance the security, efficiency, and resilience of embedded systems by solving four major challenges.

First, we developed a system named PRAT to reduce the software bloating caused by reusing third-party code. Second, we present a protocol diversification system to address shared bugs caused by software homogeneity. Third, we focus on function matching in reverse engineering closed-source firmware, a necessary step to identify bugs, and propose to evaluate and improve code matching techniques to help reverse engineers analyze vulnerable binary code. Finally, we propose a memory safety enforcement mechanism against non-control data attacks, that balance the trade-offs between memory safety and efficiency.