DEF CON 33 - Emulating Embedded Linux Devices at Scale w LightTouch Firmware Rehosting - S Polke
Source: YouTube · DEFCONConference · published Oct 10, 2025 · 38:29
This presentation demonstrates a "light touch firmware rehosting" approach to emulate embedded Linux devices at scale with high return on investment 0:00-0:07.
Key Takeaways:
• Traditional embedded Linux emulation uses user-space LD preloading to compensate for hardware differences, which has limitations with complex systems 0:44-1:23
• The rehosting approach focuses on kernel-level modifications rather than user-space hacks, creating a more holistic emulation environment 3:02-3:19
• By targeting systems-on-chip (SoCs) rather than specific devices, one emulation environment can support multiple vendor devices using the same SoC 4:16-5:13
• The process involves building compatible kernels, creating fake hardware interfaces (NVRAM, GPIO), and modifying QEMU machines to match device expectations 20:52-30:17
• The approach successfully achieved ~95% functionality across multiple vendor devices (ASUS, Netgear, D-Link) using the same Broadcom BCM4709 SoC 33:50-34:01
The technique offers significant scalability benefits as the initial investment in creating an emulation environment for one SoC enables rapid emulation of many different devices from various vendors 37:57-38:07.
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First 800 characters of the transcript
Okay. Hello. Uh welcome to this talk uh emulating embedded Linux devices at scale with light touch firmware rehosting. Uh today I'm going to give this um a kind of higher level uh approach like overview of uh what we've been doing in the um advanced research team at Crowdstrike which is kind of giving us this um quite low investment high return ratio uh when we've been uh emulating embedded Linux systems. So by the end you should uh be able to kind of take the principles that I'm talking about here and apply them in other emulation stuff. So it's it's a little bit of a patchwork approach and a bit proof of concept but um hopefully a little bit helpful at least. Um at the moment most uh embedded Linux um emulation works in user space. Um, so a lot of the emulation approaches take a stock AR…