Research Blog

Introduction In late 2023 and early 2024, the NCC Group Hardware and Embedded Systems practice undertook an engagement to reverse engineer baseband firmware on several smartphones. This included MediaTek 5G baseband firmware based on the nanoMIPS architecture. While we were aware of some nanoMIPS modules for Ghidra having been developed in private, there was no […]

A story on finding a zero day attacking the NETGEAR WAN interface after a last minute patch for Pwn2Own 2022, involving a command injection, predicting random numbers, boot timing and voltage supply variations.

A detailed analysis on multiple vulnerabilities which were identified on the NETGEAR Nighthawk WiFi 6 Router (RAX AX2400) and may exist on other NETGEAR router models.

Alex Plaskett and McCaulay Hudson presented this talk at HITB AMS on the 20th April 2023. The talk showcased NCC Exploit Development Group (EDG) in Pwn2Own 2022 Toronto targeting all consumer routers (Netgear, TP-Link and Synology) from both a LAN and WAN perspective.  The talk also described how we compromised a small business device (Ubiquiti) […]

Summary Vulnerability Details Overview Execution Flow /bin/pucfu /usr/lib/libfwcheck.so get_check_fw fw_check_api curl_post /lib/libpu_util.so SetFileValue pegaPopen Check Firmware HTTPS Normal Request Response Exploitation Command Injection Response Root Shell Final Notes Patch Pwn2Own Note Summary This blog post describes a command injection vulnerability found and exploited in November 2022 by NCC Group in the Netgear RAX30 router’s WAN […]

Summary Target Binary tdpServer Architecture Mitigations Forks Understanding The Vulnerability Reaching The Vulnerable Function Broadcast Fork Flow Server Fork Flow JSON Array Stack Overflow Triggering The Bug Broadcast Fork Response Server Fork Request Vulnerability Constraints Storing Arbitrary Content In Memory cJSON Summarized cJSON Struct cJSON Data cJSON Heap Memory Single cJSON cJSON structure and key/value […]

This blog post details the steps taken to replicate a udhcpc process crash on BusyBox 1.24.2 using NVD – CVE-2016-2147 (nist.gov), and to produce a working denial of service exploit. We will be using the symbolic execution engine called KLEE to help identify parameters that can cause the specific crash we are interested in. This […]

(The version of Ghidra used in this article is 10.1.2. For the Go string recovery tool release, skip ahead to Ghostrings Release.) Introduction A well-known issue with reverse engineering Go programs is that the lack of null terminators in Go strings makes recovering string definitions from compiled binaries difficult. Within a compiled Go program, many […]

Introduction Ghostrings is a collection of Ghidra scripts for recovering string definitions in Go binaries with P-Code analysis. A well-known issue with reverse engineering Go programs is that the lack of null terminators in Go strings makes recovering string definitions from compiled binaries difficult. Within a compiled Go program, many of the constant string values […]

This blog post describes an unchecked return value vulnerability found and exploited in September 2021 by Alex Plaskett, Cedric Halbronn and Aaron Adams working at the Exploit Development Group (EDG) of NCC Group. We successfully exploited it at Pwn2Own 2021 competition in November 2021 when targeting the Western Digital PR4100.