Getting Down with Bringup
10-12, 15:00–15:50 (US/Pacific), The Point

Discussing the interesting things in pre-boot stages of systems, especially SoCs. Cool stuff and tools, places to "hook", and why adding a resistor in the right place can drop the system to "debug" mode.


Systems these days depend on the lowest stages of start up to provide a base for security further up the chain. As the security community and hackers have gotten better tools and better at sniffing out bugs, security has been forced to move down the chain. But how far? Is the boot loader enough? At what point can you really call it "SecureBoot"? Do you need a TPM?

We are going down the rabbit hole to find out where the bits get flipped, whats signed, whats not, and what IS signing anyway? Let's take a look at chip ROMs, BIOS, UEFI, e-fuses, pre-boot partitions (like TrustZone and aBoot), where TPMs get involved, and when boot loaders go wrong.

Lets see if we can get a "secure" boot environment going on cheap, easy to debug hardware, and juts how secure we can make it. After all, doesn't every hacker need a place where they can try out their boot loader and firmware exploits?

Gene Erik is a hacker with many variety interests spanning the gamut of hacking topic, including wireless networking, software defined radio, embedded device hacking, phone phreaking, application security, social engineering, and much more. Gene Erik is a hacker with many variety interests spanning the gamut of hacking topic, including wireless networking, software defined radio, embedded device hacking, phone phreaking, application security, social engineering, and much more. Gene's major passion is taking those hacking concepts, distilling them down, and weaponizing them through automation and tool creation. In the real world, Gene has had experience at companies big and small doing stuff all over the IT professional space: software development; technical support; desktop support; dev(sec)ops (system administration and hardening, orchestration, vulnerability management, cloud achitecture and migration, and the software development that goes with it); network engineering; data center and storage architecture; PBX design and management; AppSec; and much more. Gene is a long time toorcon attendee with a passion for breaking (and fixing) things.

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