Abstract
Smart TV devices are gaining increasingly more popularity. Due to their nature, Smart TVs can access a lot of sensitive data. This is one of the reasons why the Smart TV has become a popular target of hacking recently. Manufacturers try to make such attacks more difficult, and one of the methods they use is the removal of symbols from the firmware. In principle, this would prevent or significantly hinder the preparation of malwares or homebrew that could run on different firmware versions. This article is focused on developing algorithms for automatic symbol resolution. We proposed two automatic symbol resolution methods designed for Smart TVs. Presented methods were tested on the firmwares of the most popular Smart TV manufacturers’, Samsung and LG, devices. Furthermore, an original framework is presented, which automatically locates the desired function in the binaries based on characteristic strings used in or near searched function. The developed framework is commonly used by homebrew developers (e.g., SamyGO) and releases developers from hardcoding function’s addresses for different firmwares.
Highlights
We are living in the Internet of Things era, where every day we find new applications for IoT devices [1,2] and take advantages of remote [3] and distributed systems [4]
Using the framework presented in the article, a developer has to find a unique string reference, which is in the function they needed, or near it, and localizes it in the used firmware
The automatic symbol resolution methods on embedded platforms by the example of Smart TV devices were presented. Those methods were tested on two operating systems installed on the TVs of two major Smart TVs manufacturers: LG and Samsung (Figure 1)
Summary
We are living in the Internet of Things era, where every day we find new applications for IoT devices [1,2] and take advantages of remote [3] and distributed systems [4]. The background information about the firmware security mechanisms used by Smart TV software vendors and operating systems of the selected devices is provided. Firmware signing is one of the ways of protecting Smart TV devices before installing corrupted firmwares This feature is implemented by the software vendor, who signs the firmware image with a private key, kept in secret. In case of detection compromised firmware integrity, the device will reject its upgrade or installation. This can be omitted by turning off the feature that checks firmware signing or uploading a rootkit when the firmware is already run by the system [59]
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