lukas seidel

lukas seidel

@pr0me.bsky.social

Firmware Security • Embedded Systems • AI x Infosec • Researcher @binarly • PhD Candidate @TUBerlin • Capturing Flags with ENOFLAG

420 followers209 following54 posts

recently, the google scholar feed I used to explore new work in my fields of interest was removed. so I built my own paper discovery website: a minimalistic design with high information density and full control over search terms.

design inspired by the great usgraphics website and font is of course the one and only Berkeley Mono. to search for and fetch recent papers I use AI2's semantic scholar and ExaAILabs` APIs.

okay deepwiki is pretty sweet. just replace 'github' with 'deepwiki' in a repo's url and it will generate an architecture overview, explanations for components, flow diagrams etc. I tried it on large code bases like afl++ and libafl and it's actually impressive

new CCS workshop on decompilation, reversing, root cause analysis, debugging, etc. 👀

ACM SURE Workshop@sureworkshop.bsky.social

We are excited to announce that the 1st Workshop on Software Understanding and Reverse Engineering (SURE) will be co-located at ACM CCS 2025 in Taiwan! We invite the community to submit their awesome research sure-workshop.org/. So, what is SURE? More in the 🧵

the guy who reversed the denuvo drm @momo5502.bsky.social works on a high-perf windows emulator for security research. I noticed that it supports icicle as a backend, a fuzzing-specific emulator. awesome to see academic work being continuously developed and making it into the real world

icicle's main selling points are its support for a diverse set of architectures by emulating p-code and architecture-agnostic fuzzing instrumentation. I guess multi-arch support is not really needed for this project but its fuzzing focus might come in handy.

the recording of my talk "Rethinking Emulation for Fu(zzi)n(g) and Profit: Near-Native Rehosting for Embedded ARM Firmware" is online! I had an absolute blast speaking and being at @re-verse.io, so many great talks and hallway discussions

RE//verse@re-verse.io

We were slow with the last video update so we figured we'd do a two for one! Lukas talks about rehosting firmware for fuzzing (youtu.be/o_ckTnTQlfs) and Robin shows off a fantastic new tool for exploring code relationships beyond single binaries (www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsDn...)

some convenient features coming to binja, incl. auto-classification of embedded devices based on peripheral accesses making firmware hacking maybe a little less painful cc @stacksmashing.bsky.social

Binary Ninja@binary.ninja

We've been teasing it for a while, but the full features of Firmware Ninja are officially available on dev and will be in the 5.0 release later this month! Doing reverse engineering of embedded firmware? Check out how FWN can make your life better:

3.7 is both in api and in cursor just utterly disappointing. when it does what it's supposed to, it's great, but man is it trying hard to misinterpret my intentions.

beautiful and incredibly interesting talk on reverse engineering the OG xbox by @ret2systems.bsky.social's Markus, incl. building a custom interposer to upgrade the CPU a deep dive into hardware hacking, an ode to hw engineering and a call for software-focused researchers to try new things

RE//verse@re-verse.io

Our first video from RE//verse 2025 is live! Part journey of personal discovery, part technical deep-dive, this presentation from Markus Gaasedelen was the highest rated in the feedback survey and is a must-see talk:

libAFL is a beast. it has so many settings to tweak, different modes to select and the code can be quite scary at first. but writing a target-specific custom fuzzer is super powerful! to get started, Trail of Bits just published a nice primer: appsec.guide/docs/fuzzing...

appsec.guideLibAFLLibAFL # The LibAFL fuzzer implements features from AFL-based fuzzers like AFL++. Similarly to AFL++, LibAFL provides better fuzzing performance and more advanced features over libFuzzer. However, wit...

my google scholar's 'recommended articles' feed has been empty for weeks. where is, it I miss it :/ anyone any recommendation for an alternative? some tunable feed of recent papers?

I had a blast speaking and being at the RE//verse conference! so many cool people and great discussions on firmware, fuzzing, ai and binary analysis if you want to find out more about firmware rehosting or are an enjoyer of ascii diagrams, check out the slides to my talk below :)

today was blessed. had a super fun day at Kennedy Space Center. and then I got to witness my first rocket launch in person, a falcon 9 bringing Intuitive Machine's lunar lander into orbit. my space-nerd heart is so happy.

excellent blog post on garbage collectors: "Memory Hell" it addresses many of humanity's great questions: - do we actually know how to do garbage collection? - pointers, indices or handlers? - and what are typesafe use-after-frees?

AapoAlas@aapoalas.trynova.dev

Your slides ended up inspiring me to write a veritable treatise of a blog post on how implementing garbage collection in a memory / type safe engine can, is, and ought to be done. It's a bit of a ramble, maybe, but also a direct response to your excellent questions <3 trynova.dev/blog/memory-...

lukas seidel reposted

2024 was a significant year for decompilation, constituting a possible resurgence in the field. Major talks, the thirty-year anniversary of research, movements in AI, and an all-time high for top publications in decompilation. Join me for a retrospective: mahaloz.re/dec-progr...

mahaloz.reDecompiling 2024: A Year of Resurgance in Decompilation ResearchThe year 2024 was a resurgant year for decompilation. Academic publications from that year made up nearly 30% of all top publications ever made in decompilat...

"IoT Firmware Emulation and Its Security Application in Fuzzing" is a great read to get started with rehosting firmware it provides a taxonomy of nearly all the available approaches and discusses the most important concepts, such as peripheral modeling and fidelity trade-offs

lukas seidel reposted

Hooked on computer security, adversarial learning, or even both? 🤩 The BIFOLD Graduate School has 10 open PhD positions! Join us in vibrant Berlin to work with top-notch researchers on machine learning, data management, and, of course, security! 🔗 mlsec.org/jobs.html#jobs

lukas seidel reposted

RULECOMPILE - Undocumented Ghidra decompiler rule language. A blog post about how frustration with poor decompilation led me to dive deep into Ghidra's decompiler to discover (and reverse-engineer) - an obscure, undocumented DSL msm.lt/re/ghidra/ru... #reverseengineering #ghidra

happy new year 🎉 to continue the tradition, here is some of my favorite firmware & embedded security research of 2024: Defeating the new Raspberry Pi's RP2350 Security Features [1] Reversing and Hacking Firmware of an in-orbit Satellite to Re-establish Lost Communication [2]

View full thread

happy new year 🎉 to continue the tradition, here is some of my favorite firmware & embedded security research of 2024: Defeating the new Raspberry Pi's RP2350 Security Features [1] Reversing and Hacking Firmware of an in-orbit Satellite to Re-establish Lost Communication [2]

JTAG Hacking with a Raspberry Pi [3] Hands-on Firmware Extraction, Exploration, and Emulation of an EV Charger [4] PKfail: Untrusted Secure Boot Platform Keys in Production [5]

SIMURAI: Emulator for SIM card Exploration and Experimentation, e.g., Enabling Deep Fuzzing of Baseband Firmware [6] Deploying Rust in Existing Firmware Codebases [7]

recovering a satellite by creatively using existing telecommands and overwriting vtables to persistently add new commands without needing to touch (and risk breaking) the running OBC firmware. also, because that firmware didn't have an update mechanism incredible talk! media.ccc.de/v/38c3-hacki...

media.ccc.deHacking yourself a satellite - recovering BEESAT-1In 2013, the satellite BEESAT-1 started returning invalid telemetry, rendering it effectively unusable. Because it is projected to remain...

one week left to submit to the SpaceSec NDSS workshop! some highlights from the first two years: A Case Study on Fuzzing Satellite Firmware [1] Merge/Space: A Security Testbed for Satellite Systems [2] Death By A Thousand COTS: Disrupting Satellite Comms using Low Earth Orbit Constellations [3]

happy to be part of a company that values open-access research and education in the security space (go binarly :D )! and OST is just an awesome project

OpenSecurityTraining2@opensectraining.bsky.social

Gold Sponsors: ost2.fyi/Sponsor_3mdeb ost2.fyi/Sponsor_Bina... ost2.fyi/Sponsor_Crow... bsky.app/profile/dark... @nccgroupinfosec.bsky.social 👇

lukas seidel reposted

Scientists, academics, researchers: We’re excited to share that @altmetric.com is now tracking mentions of your research on Bluesky! 🧪

Altmetric@altmetric.com

There are already many articles for which there is more attention on Bluesky than on other comparable micro-blogging sites, meaning the academic community and the general public have clearly adopted Bluesky as one of its core places to disseminate and discuss new research. A Place of Joy.

this is very true. especially in fuzzing, a thorough evaluation (statistically sound and reproducible) is super important for any claims you want to make. I can highly recommend @mu00d8.bsky.social et al.'s work "Prudent Evaluation Practices for Fuzzing" if you want to avoid mistakes

halvarflake.bsky.social@halvarflake.bsky.social

The biggest mistake CS did historically is moving too close to the pure math department and forgetting that as an engineering discipline teaching everyone sound empirical science is important.