Address Sanitizer for Bare-metal Firmware (Google Online Security Blog)
Posted by Eugene Rodionov and Ivan Lozano, Android Team With steady improvements to Android userspace and kernel security, we have noticed an increasing interest from security researchers directed towards lower level firmware. This area has traditionally received less scrutiny, but is critical to device security. We have previously discussed how we have been prioritizing firmware security, and how to apply mitigations in a firmware environment to mitigate unknown vulnerabilities. In this post we will show how the Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASan) can be used to proactively discover vulnerabilities earlier in the development lifecycle. Despite the narrow application implied by its name, KASan is applicable to a wide-range of firmware targets. Using KASan enabled builds during testing and/or fuzzing can help catch memory corruption vulnerabilities and stability issues before they land…