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Extract Firmware using UART

At this point you should have:

Not all UART interfaces are the same. Infact manufacturers could output actually anything over it. So there is no guarante you can abuse UART to dump firmware or get a shell on the device. But there are common methods, which we want to discuss further:

{% tabs %} {% tab title="Failsafe mode" %} Some manufacturers build a failsafe mode in their devices, which is designed as a recovery option, if the device is not operating correctly. An example for this is OpenWRT, which will print something like this in the bootlog:

Press the [f] key and hit [enter] to enter failsafe mode
Press the [1], [2], [3] or [4] key and hit [enter] to select the debug level

Pressing F will give us a root shell:

OpenWrt command command shell

Depending on your device you may have to mount the correct filesystem first:

  • Run ls /dev or blkid to locate storage devices and partitions (e.g., /dev/sda1, /dev/mmcblk0p2).
  • Use these commands to first create a mount point and then mound the filesystem:
    • mkdir /mnt/filesystem
    • mount /dev/<root_partition> /mnt/filesystem
  • Now you may access the filesystem under /mnt/filesystem

From here we can check if the root-filesystem is already been mounted and we can look for:

  • /etc/shadow hashes
  • ssh private keys
  • other credentials {% endtab %}

{% tab title="U-Boot" %} If U-Boot is used, chances are that the "stop autoboot" function may not be disabled. Here we have to press any key within a certain timespan (for example 5 sec) and we will be provided with a U-Boot shell

Typing help will give us a list of all available commands

To dump the firmware, we can then use one of these options:

  1. Using TFTP:
    1. On your attacker host:
      1. Set up a TFTP server sudo apt install tftpd-hpa (files will be stored in/srv/tftp)
      2. Create a firmware.bin file, as in TFTP that can't be done by the client: 
        1. cd /srv/tftp
sudo touch firmware.bin
sudo chmod 666 firmware.bin
    2. In U-Boot:
      1. Setup IP-Adresses: 
        1. setenv ipaddr <IP of target> (e.g.: 10.0.0.2)
setenv serverip <IP of attacker host> (e.g.: 10.0.0.1)
      2. check if IP Adress are saved: printenv
    3. Initialize the flash with sf probe 0.
    4. Copy the flash contents to RAM (adjust offset and size):
      1. sf read <addr in RAM> <offset in flash> <size>
      2. sf read 0x82000000 0x0 0x1000000. (=16MB in this case)
    5. Transfer the data with TFTP:
      1. tftp <addr> <filename> <size>
      2. tftp 0x82000000 firmware.bin 0x1000000.
  2. We can also dump it in the console: (CAN BE SLOW!)
    1. Read data:
      1. md.b <offset to read from> <number of bytes to read>
      2. example: md.b 0x82000000 0x1000000
    2. Save data to file using CTRL-A L in minicom for example (has to be trimmed)
  3. If we want to dump from an MMC: 
    1. #list available MMCs
mmc list
# select an MMC to dump (we have to select one else next commands fail)
mmc dev 0
#get info of mmc
mmc info
# get partition to see which partition we wanna dump (e.g. rootfs)
mmc part
# search in partition
ext4ls mmc <device>:<partition> <path>
ext4ls mmc 1:8 /home/root
# read file from MMC to RAM
ext4load mmc <device>:<partition> <memory_address in ram> <file_path>
ext4load mmc 1:8 0xC6200000 /etc/shadow
# show the file from memory
md.b <memory_address in ram> <size>
md.b 0xC6200000 0x43C

      Tool that does these steps automatically: https://github.com/nmatt0/firmwaretools {% endtab %}

{% tab title="Root-shell" %} If you drop directly into a root shell or if you can figure out the root-password (e.g. default creds), you can simply dd the partition to a usb stick or transfer it another way.

Example:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress

Replace:

  • /dev/sda with your root filesystem device
  • /dev/sdb with your USB stick device

Ensure you verify the correct device paths to avoid overwriting important data. You can use lsblk or fdisk -l to check your devices. {% endtab %} {% endtabs %}

Analyze firmware

  • Using binwalk firmware.bin we can try to analyze the firmware and extract sensitive information
  • check the "Analyze Firmware" chapter

Resources

https://www.cyberark.com/resources/threat-research-blog/accessing-and-dumping-firmware-through-uart
https://slava-moskvin.medium.com/extracting-firmware-every-method-explained-e94aa094d0dd