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Gray-box fuzzing is widely used for testing embedded systems (ESes). State-of-the-art (SOTA) gray-box fuzzers test ES firmware in fully emulated environments without real peripherals. They emulate missing peripherals to achieve decent code…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Wei-Lun Huang , Kang G. Shin

Hardware flaws are permanent and potent: hardware cannot be patched once fabricated, and any flaws may undermine any software executing on top. Consequently, verification time dominates implementation time. The gold standard in hardware…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2021-02-05 Timothy Trippel , Kang G. Shin , Alex Chernyakhovsky , Garret Kelly , Dominic Rizzo , Matthew Hicks

The increasing complexity of embedded software has made comprehensive manual testing impractical, motivating the use of automated techniques such as fuzzing. Coverage-guided fuzzers like AFL++ have shown strong results for conventional…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Chiara Ghinami , Igor Pontes Tresolavy , Luis Seibt , Nils Bosbach , Rainer Leupers

Coverage-guided fuzzing has been widely applied to address zero-day vulnerabilities in general-purpose software and operating systems. This approach relies on instrumenting the target code at compile time. However, applying it to industrial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Carmine Cesarano , Roberto Natella

Software testing is becoming a critical part of the development cycle of embedded devices, enabling vulnerability detection. A well-studied approach of software testing is fuzz-testing (fuzzing), during which mutated input is sent to an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-08-15 Philip Sperl , Konstantin Böttinger

Monolithic Firmware is widespread. Unsurprisingly, fuzz testing firmware is an active research field with new advances addressing the unique challenges in the domain. However, understanding and evaluating improvements by deriving metrics…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Mathew Duong , Michael Chesser , Guy Farrelly , Surya Nepal , Damith C. Ranasinghe

The USB protocol has become ubiquitous, supporting devices from high-powered computing devices to small embedded devices and control systems. USB's greatest feature, its openness and expandability, is also its weakness, and attacks such as…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-08-19 Grant Hernandez , Farhaan Fowze , Dave Tian , Tuba Yavuz , Kevin R. B. Butler

Fuzzing is a commonly used technique designed to test software by automatically crafting program inputs. Currently, the most successful fuzzing algorithms emphasize simple, low-overhead strategies with the ability to efficiently monitor…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-07-20 William Drozd , Michael D. Wagner

Ability to test firmware on embedded devices is critical to discovering vulnerabilities prior to their adversarial exploitation. State-of-the-art automated testing methods rehost firmware in emulators and attempt to facilitate inputs from a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Guy Farrelly , Paul Quirk , Salil S. Kanhere , Seyit Camtepe , Damith C. Ranasinghe

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has introduced significant security challenges, primarily due to the opacity of firmware components and the complexity of supply chain dependencies. IoT firmware frequently relies on…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Abdurrahman Tolay

In recent years, there has been a notable surge in attention towards hardware security, driven by the increasing complexity and integration of processors, SoCs, and third-party IPs aimed at delivering advanced solutions. However, this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-20 Raghul Saravanan , Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao

Fuzzing is a powerful technique for finding bugs in software libraries, but scaling it remains difficult. Automated harness generation commits to fixed API sequences at synthesis time, limiting the behaviors each harness can test.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Harrison Green , Fraser Brown , Claire Le Goues

Modern computing systems heavily rely on hardware as the root of trust. However, their increasing complexity has given rise to security-critical vulnerabilities that cross-layer at-tacks can exploit. Traditional hardware vulnerability…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Mohamadreza Rostami , Marco Chilese , Shaza Zeitouni , Rahul Kande , Jeyavijayan Rajendran , Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

Emulating firmware of microcontrollers is challenging due to the lack of peripheral models. Existing work finds out how to respond to peripheral read operations by analyzing the target firmware. This is problematic because the firmware…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Wei Zhou , Lan Zhang , Le Guan , Peng Liu , Yuqing Zhang

Microcontroller units (MCUs) are widely used in embedded devices due to their low power consumption and cost-effectiveness. MCU firmware controls these devices and is vital to the security of embedded systems. However, performing dynamic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Chongqing Lei , Zhen Ling , Xiangyu Xu , Shaofeng Li , Guangchi Liu , Kai Dong , Junzhou Luo

The increasing complexity of modern processor and IP designs presents significant challenges in identifying and mitigating hardware flaws early in the IC design cycle. Traditional hardware fuzzing techniques, inspired by software testing,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Raghul Saravanan , Sreenitha Kasarapu , Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao

In future nuclear arms control treaties, it will be necessary to authenticate the hardware and software components of verification measurement systems, i.e., to ensure these systems are functioning as intended and have not been tampered…

Instrumentation and Detectors · Physics 2026-04-14 Jayson R Vavrek , Luozhong Zhou , Joshua Boverhof , Elisa R Heymann , Barton P Miller , Sean Peisert

As the complexity of logic designs increase, new avenues for testing digital hardware becomes necessary. Fuzz Testing (fuzzing) has recently received attention as a potential candidate for input vector generation on hardware designs. Using…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruochen Dai , Michael Lee , Patrick Hoey , Weimin Fu , Tuba Yavuz , Xiaolong Guo , Shuo Wang , Dean Sullivan , Orlando Arias

In recent IoT (Internet of Things) and Web 2.0 technologies, a critical problem arises with respect to storing and processing the large amount of collected data. In this paper we develop and evaluate distributed infrastructures for storing…

Databases · Computer Science 2014-04-04 S. Sioutas , E. Sakkopoulos , A. Panaretos , D. Tsoumakos , P. Gerolymatos , G. Tzimas , Y. Manolopoulos

Orientation and Motion Sensing are widely implemented on various consumer products, such as mobile phones, tablets and cameras as they enable immediate interaction with virtual information. The prototyping phase of any orientation and…

Emerging Technologies · Computer Science 2013-03-21 Fabio Varesano