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  4. EL3XIR: fuzzing COTS secure monitors
 
conference paper

EL3XIR: fuzzing COTS secure monitors

Lindenmeier, Christian
•
Payer, Mathias  
•
Busch, Marcel  
Balzarotti, Davide
•
Xu, Wenyuan
2024
SEC '24: Proceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium
SEC '24: 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium

ARM TrustZone forms the security backbone of mobile devices. TrustZone-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) facilitate security-sensitive tasks like user authentication, disk encryption, and digital rights management (DRM). As such, bugs in the TEE software stack may compromise the entire system's integrity. EL3XIR introduces a framework to effectively rehost and fuzz the secure monitor firmware layer of proprietary TrustZone-based TEEs. While other approaches have focused on naively rehosting or fuzzing Trusted Applications (EL0) or the TEE OS (EL1), EL3XIR targets the highly-privileged but unexplored secure monitor (EL3) and its unique challenges. Secure monitors expose complex functionality dependent on multiple peripherals through diverse secure monitor calls. In our evaluation, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art fuzzing approaches are insufficient to effectively fuzz COTS secure monitors. While naive fuzzing appears to achieve reasonable coverage it fails to overcome coverage walls due to missing peripheral emulation and is limited in the capability to trigger bugs due to the large input space and low quality of inputs. We followed responsible disclosure procedures and reported a total of 34 bugs, out of which 17 were classified as security critical. Affected vendors confirmed 14 of these bugs, and as a result, EL3XIR was assigned six CVEs.

  • Details
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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.5555/3698900.3699202
Author(s)
Lindenmeier, Christian
Payer, Mathias  

EPFL

Busch, Marcel  

EPFL

Editors
Balzarotti, Davide
•
Xu, Wenyuan
Date Issued

2024

Publisher

USENIX Association

Publisher place

Berkeley, CA, United States

Published in
SEC '24: Proceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium
DOI of the book
10.5555/3698900
ISBN of the book

978-1-939133-44-1

Article Number

302

Start page

5395

End page

5412

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
HEXHIVE  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
SEC '24: 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium

SEC '24

Philadelphia, PA, USA

2024-08-14

FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

European Research Council

European Union

Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (

850868

Swiss National Science Foundation

Software Security through Multi-dimensional, Input-guided Sanitization

186974

https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/186974
Available on Infoscience
April 4, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/248685
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