Getting started with ARM and MIPS

Now that we know how to emulate firmware and perform basic analysis, you will often find yourself coming across various binaries which will require additional analysis. It is impossible for us to cover all the various architectures possible for an embedded device in a single book, we will focus on two popular architectures - ARM and MIPS.

We will, however, only look at exploitation of MIPS and look a bit into ARM reverse engineering. From an exploitation perspective, ARM and MIPS are quite similar and learning one architecture would give you a head start and basic understanding for the other.

Getting Ready

We will start our binary analysis journey with a very basic analysis of a backdoor found in D-Link firmware. This backdoor was found by Pierre Kim. To identify this backdoor, one would require a basic reverse engineering idea of ARM-based binaries. Even though we won't be going in-depth into registers and the architecture over here (since we are going to...