Broken, Abandoned, and Forgotten Code, Part 6

Note: It is assumed that the reader is debugging the processes described in this and the next several posts using emulation and IDA Pro. Those topics are outside the scope of this series and are covered in detail here and here.

In the previous post, we switched gears and started looking at the web server for the Netgear  R6200. That's because the HTTP daemon's code for upgrading the firmware is less broken and easier to analyze. We also analyzed a stock firmware image downloaded from Netgear to see how it is composed. Craig Heffner's binwalk identified three parts, a TRX header at offset 58, followed by a compressed Linux kernel, followed by a squashfs filesystem. All of those parts are well understood, which only leaves the first 58 bytes to analyze.

With the goal of recreating the header using a stock TRX header, Linux kernel, and filesystem, I described how we can use Bowcaster to create fake header data to aid in debugging. When we left off, I had started discussing httpd's abCheckBoardID() function at 0x0041C3D8, which partially parses the firmware header. We identified a magic signature that should be at the firmware image's offset 0, as well as some sort of size field that should be at offset 4. We also discovered this header should be big endian encoded even though the target system is little endian.

In this part, we'll clarify the purpose of the size field as well as identify a checksum field. Identification of the checksum algorithm is tricky if you don't have an eye for that sort of thing (I do not). I'll show how to deal with that. By the end of this part, we will have identified four fields, accounting for 30 bytes of the 58-byte firmware header.

Updated Exploit Code

I last updated the exploit code for part 5, which added several Python modules to aid in reverse engineering and reconstructing a firmware image. In this part I've added a module to regenerate checksums found in the header (see below). Additionally, the MysteryHeader class populates a couple of new fields that we will cover this post. If you've previously cloned the repository, now would be a good time to do a pull. You can clone the git repo from:
https://github.com/zcutlip/broken_abandoned

Header Size

We know the field at offset 4 is a size field of some sort because it's used as the size for a memcpy() operation[1]. Let's take a look at a stock firmware image to see what value is in that field. It might correlate to something obvious.

Above, we see the stock value is 0x0000003A, or 58 in decimal. Since 58 is also the amount of unidentified data before the TRX header, it's a safe bet this field is the overall size of this unidentified header. It's also a safe bet that this header is variable in size. The TRX header, whose size is fixed, does not have a size field for the header alone, only for the header plus data.

Checksumming the firmware header.

Checksum Fun

From abCheckBoardID() there are several calls to the calculate_checksum() function. This is an imported symbol and is not in the httpd binary itself. Strings analysis of libraries on the R6200's filesystem reveals that this function is in the shared library libacos_shared.so. We can disassemble this binary and analyze the function.

Disassembly of calculate_checksum().

There's no need to completely reverse engineer this function. Sure, it would be convenient to know what checksum algorithm this is[2] and if there was a built-in python module to use. All we really need, however, is code that calculates the same values this function does. It's easier in this case to just reimplement the algorithm. I duplicated this function one-for-one, where each line of MIPS disassembly became a line of Python. It's a small function, so it didn't take long to do. That module is included in this week's update to the git repo.

Python code fragment that looks suspiciously like IDA Pro disassembly.

A checksum is calculated across the first 58 bytes of the header. Then at 0x0041C5BC the checksum gets compared to 0x41623241, a value extracted from the firmware data. Using Bowcaster's find_offset(), it is revealed that offset 36 of the firmware header should contain the checksum of the header itself. We'll need to calculate that value for the header and insert it at this location. In abCheckBoardID() the checksum field is zeroed out before the value is calculated. We should do the same before calculating our own. The updated code in the git repository performs this operation.

Board ID String

With the header checksum in place, we can move forward to the next few basic blocks. A few checks are performed to verify the "board_id" string of the firmware. There are a couple of hard-coded board_id strings that are referenced. If neither of those match, NVRAM is queried to find out the running device's board_id. It's possible to verify the proper board ID is "U12H192T00_NETGEAR" by extracting the NVRAM parameters from a live device[3]. Even if we didn't have that information, we could still analyze a stock firmware, where we find the same string embedded in the header.

As before, by looking at the pattern string that is compared, we can identify the offset into the header where the board_id should be placed.

$ ./buildfw.py find=b3Ab4Ab5Ab6Ab7Ab8A kernel.lzma squashfs.bin
 [@] Building firmware from input files: ['kernel.lzma', 'squashfs.bin']
 [@] TRX crc32: 0x0ee839c0
 [@] Creating ambit header.
 [+] Building header without checksum.
 [+] Calculating header checksum.
 [@] Calculated header checksum: 0x840d0ddd
 [+] Building header with checksum.
 [@] Finding offset of b3Ab4Ab5Ab6Ab7Ab8A
 [+] Offset: 40

The string b3Ab4Ab5Ab6Ab7Ab8A is located at offset 40.

It is worth noting that we suspected the header was variable length given the presence of a size field. The board_id is a string and is the last field in the header; it is likely responsible for the header's variable length.

At any rate, this is easy to add as a string section using Bowcaster. This is the last check in abCheckBoardID().

The Mystery Header So Far

Here's a diagram of what we know about the header so far.

That's four fields identified, for a total of 30 bytes. 28 bytes remain. Although the abCheckBoardID() function only inspected these four fields, it did populate several integers in the global header_buf structure. It remains to be seen how these fields get used.

Based on this information we can enhance the Python code to add the necessary fields. Updated code in part_6 of the git repo looks similar to:

from bowcaster.development import OverflowBuffer
from bowcaster.development import SectionCreator

class MysteryHeader(object):
    MAGIC="*#$^"
    MAGIC_OFF=0
    
    HEADER_SIZE=58
    HEADER_SIZE_OFF=4
    
    HEADER_CHECKSUM_OFF=36
    
    BOARD_ID="U12H192T00_NETGEAR"
    BOARD_ID_OFF=40
    
    def __init__(self,endianness,image_data,size=HEADER_SIZE,board_id=BOARD_ID,logger=None):
        self.endianness=endianness
        self.size=size
        self.board_id=board_id
        
        
        chksum=0;
        logger.LOG_INFO("Building header without checksum.")
        header=self.__build_header(checksum=chksum,logger=logger)
        logger.LOG_INFO("Calculating header checksum.")
        chksum=self.__checksum(header)
        logger.LOG_INFO("Building header with checksum.")
        header=self.__build_header(checksum=chksum,logger=logger)
        self.header=header
        
    def __build_header(self,checksum=0,logger=None):
        
        SC=SectionCreator(self.endianness,logger=logger)
        SC.string_section(self.MAGIC_OFF,self.MAGIC,
                            description="Magic bytes for header.")
        SC.gadget_section(self.HEADER_SIZE_OFF,self.size,"Size field representing length of header.")
        
        SC.gadget_section(self.HEADER_CHECKSUM_OFF,checksum)
        SC.string_section(self.BOARD_ID_OFF,self.board_id,
                            description="Board ID string.")
        buf=OverflowBuffer(self.endianness,self.size,
                            overflow_sections=SC.section_list,
                            logger=logger)

    def __checksum(self,header):
        data=str(header)
        size=len(data)
        chksum=LibAcosChecksum(data,size)
        return chksum.checksum

In the next post I'll discuss other functions that parse portions of the header. I'll show how to identify what fields get used where. By the end of the next installment we'll be able to generate a header sufficient to get our firmware image written to flash.

-------------------------------
[1] Wah wah...Buffer overflow.
[2] I'm pretty sure it's Fletcher32. I believe this because I asked Dion Blazakis, and he thinks it is, and that dude is smart. Also I found a Fletcher32 implementation on Google Code by Ange Albertini that gives the same result as mine. And that guy is also smart.

[3] The NVRAM configuration can be extracted from /dev/mtd14. This, plus libnvram-faker is covered independently of this series, in Patching, Emulating, and Debugging a Netgear Embedded Web Server

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Broken, Abandoned, and Forgotten Code, Part 5

In previous installments I shared proof-of-concept code that would exercise the Netgear R6200's hidden (and badly broken) SetFirmware SOAP action. It satisfied the various wonky conditions necessary to get into the sa_parseRcvCmd() function. Then I showed where in that function a firmware would be decoded from the SOAP request and written to flash. I showed how to identify a code path that leads to firmware writing. In part four, I showed how an undersized malloc() means a stock firmware crashes upnpd. Although we'll work around that bug later, for this and the next several installments we'll be working out how the firmware image gets parsed so we can create our own.

Updated Exploit Code

I last updated the exploit code for part 3, in which I showed how to form the complete SOAP request. In this part, I've added several Python modules to aid in reverse engineering and reconstructing a firmware image. If you've previously cloned the repository, now would be a good time to do a pull. You can clone the git repo from:

https://github.com/zcutlip/broken_abandoned

Analyzing httpd

We know that the code path in upnpd that accepts a firmware and writes it to flash memory is severely broken. When given a legitimate firmware obtained from Netgear, it crashes. In order to reverse engineer the firmware format, it may be easier to analyze a program that is known to work properly when upgrading: the web interface.

In the next several posts I'll describe analysis of the embedded HTTP daemon to understand how it processes a firmware image file. I'll also describe how to use the Bowcaster exploit development framework to aid in dynamic analysis and to develop an understanding of the firmware header composition. The goal is to generate a firmware image out of an existing filesystem and kernel. Bonus points if we can either create a firmware image that is identical to the original or if we can explain what the differences are and why those differences don't get in the way.

You can debug the web server by copying GDB to the physical R6200 router, or you can debug the embedded httpd in emulation. The first option requires less up-front effort, but the second option is more convenient once you have it working. Running upnpd and httpd in emulation requires faking some hardware and some binary patching. Before proceeding, you may want to read my previous posts on debugging with QEMU and IDA Pro and on patching, emulating and debugging using IDA Pro (which specifically addresses httpd). If you're playing along at home, I strongly recommend getting the web server and the UPnP daemon up and running in QEMU and debugging them with IDA Pro. During the next several posts, there will be a few aspects I don't explain in depth. These these things will be relatively straightforward if you have your working environment set up like mine.

Firmware Composition

Before we actually upload a firmware to the web interface, let's first see how a firmware image file is composed, and identify any sections that are already understood and don't need reverse engineering.

A good starting point is Craig Heffner's binwalk.

zach@devaron:~/code/wifi-reversing/netgear/r6200 (0) $ binwalk R6200-V1.0.0.28_1.0.24.chk

DECIMAL    HEX        DESCRIPTION
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
58         0x3A       TRX firmware header, little endian, header size: 28 bytes, image size: 8851456 bytes, CRC32: 0xEE839C0 flags: 0x0, version: 1
86         0x56       LZMA compressed data, properties: 0x5D, dictionary size: 65536 bytes, uncompressed size: 3920006 bytes
1328446    0x14453E   Squashfs filesystem, little endian, non-standard signature,  version 3.0, size: 7517734 bytes,  853 inodes, blocksize: 65536 bytes, created: Wed Sep 19 19:27:19 2012

Binwalk identifies three sections: A TRX header at offset 58, an LZMA section at offset 86, and a Squashfs filesystem at offset 1328446. The TRX header is well understood. It's a firmware header format that dates back to at least the venerable Linksys WRT54g.

Here's a diagram (courtesy of the OpenWRT wiki) of the TRX header's format:

0                   1                   2                   3   
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+
 |                     magic number ('HDR0')                     |
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+
 |                  length (header size + data)                  |
 +---------------+---------------+-------------------------------+
 |                       32-bit CRC value                        |
 +---------------+---------------+-------------------------------+
 |           TRX flags           |          TRX version          |
 +-------------------------------+-------------------------------+
 |                      Partition offset[0]                      |
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+
 |                      Partition offset[1]                      |
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+
 |                      Partition offset[2]                      |
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+

There's no need for analysis here. In the part_5 directory in the git repo, I've provided a module that generates a TRX header.

We also don't need to analyze the Squashfs filesystem. At least not yet. Although there are many variations of Squashfs, there are also a lot of tools that will generate Squashfs images. We'll investigate more closely later, but for now, this is a known quantity.

When there is only one LZMA section, and it's near the beginning of an image--after the TRX header and before the filesystem--that is often the compressed Linux kernel. That's easy to verify. Extract out that section and decompress it to see if it's a Linux kernel.

zach@devaron:~/code/wifi-reversing/netgear/r6200 (130) $ binwalk R6200-V1.0.0.28_1.0.24.chk
DECIMAL    HEX        DESCRIPTION
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
58         0x3A       TRX firmware header, little endian, header size: 28 bytes, image size: 8851456 bytes, CRC32: 0xEE839C0 flags: 0x0, version: 1
86         0x56       LZMA compressed data, properties: 0x5D, dictionary size: 65536 bytes, uncompressed size: 3920006 bytes
1328446    0x14453E   Squashfs filesystem, little endian, non-standard signature,  version 3.0, size: 7517734 bytes,  853 inodes, blocksize: 65536 bytes, created: Wed Sep 19 19:27:19 2012

zach@devaron:~/code/wifi-reversing/netgear/r6200 (0) $ dd if=R6200-V1.0.0.28_1.0.24.chk skip=86 count=`expr 1328446 - 86` bs=1 of=kernel.7z
1328360+0 records in
1328360+0 records out
1328360 bytes (1.3 MB) copied, 0.953731 s, 1.4 MB/s
zach@devaron:~/code/wifi-reversing/netgear/r6200 (0) $ p7zip -d kernel.7z

7-Zip (A) [64] 9.20  Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov  2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,4 CPUs)

Processing archive: kernel.7z

Extracting  kernel

Everything is Ok

Size:       3920006
Compressed: 1328360
zach@devaron:~/code/wifi-reversing/netgear/r6200 (0) $ strings kernel | grep Linux
Linux version 2.6.22 (peter@localhost.localdomain) (gcc version 4.2.3) #213 PREEMPT Thu Sep 20 10:22:07 CST 2012

So we have the TRX header, compressed Linux kernel, and the squashfs filesystem. The TRX header starts at offset 58, leaving only 58 bytes of unidentified data. Not bad! What are the chances that this 58-byte header is just a haiku about a man from Nantucket?

It's possible this header is documented somewhere, but if so, I'm not aware of it. Even if it is, it's worth going to the trouble of reversing it. Doing so is instructional. It also exposes interesting bugs in the HTTP and UPnP daemons.

Part 5's example code takes advantage of a project I created, called Bowcaster. Bowcaster has a class called OverflowBuffer that generates a pattern string for debugging buffer overflows. It also gives you the ability to replace sections of that string with things like ROP gadgets, fixed strings, and other data types. The pattern string Bowcaster generates for you looks like:

Aa0Aa1Aa2Aa3Aa4Aa5Aa6Aa7Aa8Aa9Ab0Ab1Ab2Ab3Ab4Ab5Ab6Ab7Ab8A


In the pattern string, no sequence of three or more characters is ever repeated. OverflowBuffer provides a find_offset() method. This makes it easy to identify at what offset a given value seen in a register or in memory during a debugging session is found.

Even though we're not debugging a buffer overflow, the OverflowBuffer class is still useful. As we identify each field and what value it should contain, it's easy to plug in those values at the right offsets as if they are ROP gadgets.

The following code fragment, taken from part 5's exploit code, uses Bowcaster to generate a stand-in for the header:

from bowcaster.development import OverflowBuffer
from bowcaster.development import SectionCreator

class MysteryHeader(object):
    def __init__(self,endianness,size):
        SC=SectionCreator(endianness,logger=logger)
        self.header=OverflowBuffer(endianness,size,
                            overflow_sections=SC.section_list,
                            logger=logger)

The stand-in header is shown below:

Above we see Bowcaster's pattern string in memory just prior to the TRX header.

The first parsing of this header takes place in the function abCheckBoardID(), called by http_d(). In this function the first header field that is inspected is a strcmp() between the string "*#$^" and the firmware data starting at offset 0.

This appears to be a magic number or signature. Adding it to our Python header class:

from bowcaster.development import OverflowBuffer
from bowcaster.development import SectionCreator

class MysteryHeader(object):
    MAGIC="*#$^\x00"
    MAGIC_OFF=0
    def __init__(self,endianness,size):
        SC=SectionCreator(endianness,logger=logger)
        #add the magic signature "*#$^"
        SC.string_section(self.MAGIC_OFF,self.MAGIC,
                            description="Magic bytes for header.")
                            
        self.header=OverflowBuffer(endianness,size,
                            overflow_sections=SC.section_list,
                            logger=logger)

If the firmware doesn't have this signature, no other parsing takes place. Also, note that the signature string must be null terminated since the comparison is performed using a strcmp().

The next few things worth pointing out involve what appears to be a size field right after the signature string. Here's a look at a hex dump of our generated firmware header:

Below we see a memcpy() at address 0x0041C550 that uses the size field highlighted in the above hex dump:

There are a few things worth calling out here. First is the byte order. This is a little endian system, so we would expect to see 0x61413100 in register $s0. The byte order in the register matching the byte order on disk means this data is interpreted as big endian. A couple of basic blocks prior to the location of the memcpy() are where the byte-swapping occurs to convert this big endian value to little endian. This is the first sign that the 58-byte leading header should be big endian even though the rest of the file, and indeed the target hardware itself, is little endian.

Another thing; the null terminator of the "*#$^" string overlaps with the high byte of the size field. It is serendipitous that the size field is big endian encoded and its value is small enough to have a leading zero (the stock firmware's size field contains 0x0000003a). This appears to be an innocuous bug. Instead of a strcmp() to check the signature string, a memcmp() or an integer comparison should have been used.

But wait, there's more! If you haven't guessed already, this is a buffer overflow. It would be a really nice one, too, except that it requires authentication. I won't discuss it in detail here, because we'll see an identical one when we circle back to upnpd. But if you're playing along at home, feel free check it out. Exploitation is straightforward.

The last thing worth noting is the OverflowBuffer class's find_offset() method. The value found in register $s0 is a combination of a null terminator plus three characters of the pattern sequence: "\x001Aa". We can use find_offset() to figure out where in the header this value came from:

zach@devaron:~/code/broken_abandoned/part_5 (0) $ ./buildfw.py find=0x00314161 kernel.lzma squashfs.bin
 [@] Building firmware from input files: ['kernel.lzma', 'squashfs.bin']
 [@] TRX crc32: 0x0ee839c0
 [@] Creating ambit header.
 [@] Finding offset of 0x00314161
 [+] Offset: 4

It's easy to encode the size value into the header using Bowcaster:

#observed size in real-world examples.
#this may be variable
HEADER_SIZE=58
HEADER_SIZE_OFF=4

SC.gadget_section(self.HEADER_SIZE_OFF,self.size,"Size field representing length of ambit header.")

In the next part, I'll continue discussing the abCheckBoardID() function. I'll also discuss a checksum function whose algorithm is difficult to identify and how we deal with that. Then I'll discuss what other functions also are responsible for inspecting and parsing the firmware header.

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Broken, Abandoned, and Forgotten Code, Part 4

In the last post, I described how upnpd's sa_parseRcvCmd() function finds the body of a SOAP request and how it parses that SOAP request. This is a large and complicated function that processes many types of SOAP requests. I demonstrated how to work out the desired path of execution to decode and write firmware. At the end I made an educated guess as to how the SOAP request should be formed, and how the firmware should be represented in the request body.

In this post, we'll start with some prototype code that will exercise the portions of upnpd we have analyzed so far. It satisfies the conditions that I described in parts 1, 2, and 3. Including:

• The necessary timing games described in parts 1 and 2
• The minimum Content-Length described in Part 1
• The HTTP headers I described in Part 2
• The SOAP request body I described in part 3

PoC Exploit Code

In the previous installment, I updated the git repository with working exploit code that satisfies the above conditions. There is no update to the code for Part 4; the previous part's code is sufficient for now. You can clone the repo from:
https://github.com/zcutlip/broken_abandoned

Emulation and Debugging

Strictly speaking, you don't need to debug upnpd for this installment, although it may help a little. In the next several installations of this series, however, it is assumed that readers who are following along will be emulating and debugging the target processes. If you are following along, it's worth checking out my post on remote debugging with QEMU and IDA Pro. In that article, I walk you through running upnpd in emulation and attaching IDA Pro for debugging.

The exploit code from Part 3 allows you to specify an optional file as a command line argument to encode into the request. If you don't provide an input file, then the entire firmware data will consist of a string "A"s. This is a good starting point as a long string of "A"s is easy to identify in a debugger's memory trace.

Debugger memory trace showing the SOAP request just before base64 decoding.

Crash! Hopes and Dreams Wrecked

When I got to this point in my analysis, naturally the first thing I did was encode a legitimate firmware file into the request, in hopes the firmware would be successfully written. Surprise. This was not successful. The upnpd deamon crashed processing the request. It was at this point in the summer of 2013 that I chucked my laptop into the river and seriously considered a career change.

Don't chuck your laptop into the river. Instead, let's figure out why the program crashes when given a legitimate firmware. I encoded a legitimate firmware file (obtained from Netgear's support website) into the SOAP request. When I sent that request to the UPnP daemon, the daemon crashed in sa_base64_decode(). My initial assumption was that this was a non-standard, possibly buggy, base64 decoder. I spent some time reversing the base64 decoding function. There was no obvious problem with it. Laptops were chucked.

It turns out, the problem isn't with the base64 decoder, but something more obvious. The problem is with the buffer that the firmware gets decoded into.

Allocate a 4MB buffer for decoding

In the above screenshot, we see memory being allocated. The resulting buffer is used to hold the base64 decoded firmware. Note the instruction right after the jump to malloc() (On MIPS, the instruction right after a jump gets executed at the same time as the jump):

lui    $a0, 0x40

For those less familiar with MIPS assembly, the lui instruction means "load upper immediate." This will load 0x40 into the upper half of the $a0 register. That means $a0 will contain 0x400000, or 4194304 in decimal. By convention, the $a0 register contains the first argument to a function, in this case malloc(), resulting in a 4MB[1] buffer to decode the firmware into. The size of a typical firmware image for this device is over 8MB:

zach@devaron:~/code/wifi-reversing/netgear/r6200 (0) $ ls -l R6200-V1.0.0.28_1.0.24.chk
-rw-r--r-- 1 zach zach 8851514 Jan 27  2014 R6200-V1.0.0.28_1.0.24.chk

In fact it's closer to 9MB. This is what crashes the program. It's unclear why the decoding isn't done in place or why the distance between the opening and closing <NewFirmware> tags, which is calculated right before this operation, isn't used to allocate the buffer.

In any case, this is the surest sign yet that the SetFirmware SOAP action isn't completely implemented, and likely never actually worked in production firmware. If we're going to exercise this functionality without crashing the program, it will be necessary to generate a replacement firmware image than is dramatically smaller[2] than the stock firmware. While possible, this is a non-trivial effort and will come with severe limitations. I'll discuss shrinking the firmware in a later post.

Before spending time on making a smaller firmware, we have a few other things to work through. We need to work out (1) what sort of validation, if any, is done on the decoded firmware, and (2) how to satisfy that validation. Further, there may be additional bugs in upnpd preventing a firmware from being written to flash memory. If so, there will be no point in figuring out how to shrink the firmware.

We'll start reverse engineering the firmware format in the next post.

-----------------------------
[1] Technically this should be 4MiB, but in order to write that you have to say "mebibytes," which is dumb. If you hear anyone saying "mebibyte" in public, you should punch them in the face. So I'm kicking it old-school with "MB."

[2] This is the first of two potential buffer overflows that I am aware of in the firmware processing code. Some may see an opportunity here to exploit a heap-based buffer overflow. The approach I went with was to shrink the firmware to avoid crashing upnpd.

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Broken, Abandoned, and Forgotten Code, Part 3

In the previous posts, I talked about the hidden "SetFirmware" SOAP action in the Netgear R6200's UPnP daemon, and the weird timing games we have play to deal with UPnP daemon's broken networking code. I also discussed the haphazard parsing of the HTTP headers across multiple functions. I made a guess at what headers might get our SetFirmware SOAP request passed to the sa_parseRcvCmd() function where hopefully an encapsulated firmware image will be decoded.

In this post I'll discuss how the sa_parseRcvCmd() function actually parses, or attempts to parse, the SOAP request body.

Updated Exploit Code

Previously, I published a git repository containing proof-of-concept code that demonstrates what I discussed in part 2. The repository has been updated for part 3, so if you've cloned it, now is good time to do a pull. The new code will generate the complete SetFirmware SOAP request to flash an updated firmware to the router. You can get the repo here:

https://github.com/zcutlip/broken_abandoned

Parsing the SOAP Request Body

The sa_parseRcvCmd() function is large and difficult to describe. Attempting to reverse engineer the entire function would be tiresome.

Graph view of the sa_parseRcvCmd function

The above figure is a bird's eye view of this function. To give some perspective, the following figure is the first basic block, which includes the function prologue that sets up a long list of local variables in addition to the first bit of parsing of the SOAP request body.

Check out all those local variables.

Rather than try to understand the entire function, an easier approach is to decide where in the function we want execution to reach and work backwards from there. This way offers a better chance of finding out if the desired code is reachable, and if it is, what paths will lead there.

If we spend some time browsing the disassembly, we start to see what appears to be a group of blocks responsible for decoding the firmware from the SOAP request body and writing it to flash memory.

Looking even closer, we can identify the actual block where the firmware is written to flash.

It's easy to guess that this block writes to flash memory based on the blocks that lead up to it (an earlier block opens /dev/mtd1 for writing) as well as the error string that will be printed if the write fails. This block at 0x0042466C is our goal and the path that leads to it is how we must get there.

Working backwards, we come to a block at 0x00423C38 that appears, based on symbols and error strings, to base64 decode the firmware image.

From this we can guess that the firmware image should be base64 encoded into the SOAP request body. We might also guess that the sa_CheckBoardID() function in the above figure performs some sort of parsing of the decoded firmware. Once we've worked out the code path that gets to this block, we'll start working forwards again and spend some time investigating this function.

Working backwards even further, we find a cluster of blocks with many outbound paths. One of these paths (the block at 0x004238C8) leads to the base64 decoding section. This part of the function is particularly tortured, so here's the summary. This cluster appears to be a part of a large loop. On each pass through the loop, a variable is checked against a number of constants. Each comparison, if a match, results in a branch to a different path of execution. The constant that leads to the base64 decoding operation is 0xFF3A. While not actionable at the moment, this is worth noting.

Looking for several constants. 0xFF3A leads to firmware decoding.

From there we can go backwards a little further and reach the function prologue, discussed earlier. With a general idea of the path that is required to get the firmware decoded and written, we can start working forwards again. We now have a better idea of what code paths to focus on and what ones can be ignored.

It is at the start of sa_parseRcvCmd() where we find the first hints at how the actual body of the SOAP request should be structured. At the very beginning of this function, a substring search for ":Body>" is performed. This would find the canonical <SOAP-ENV:Body> XML tag that surrounds a SOAP message body. It would also find the non-canonical <HOLY-SHIT-THIS-CODE-IS-SHITTY:Body> XML tag. So, you know, whatever.

Naive string search for ":Body>".

Once the body is located, the function loops over a table of strings, called s_keyword. This is the loop described earlier that checks for a series of constants on each iteration. The s_keyword table is an array of structs that are formed approximately like the following:

struct k_struct
{
    uint32_t action;
    char *keyword;
    uint32_t what_the_shit_is_this;
};

For each of these structures, the request body is searched for an opening and closing XML tag constructed from the corresponding keyword. If a tag is found then the keyword's corresponding action code is checked to determine the code path to take.

Perform a strstr() for the first string in the s_keyword table.

Inspecting the s_keyword table reveals the keyword that corresponds to the magic 0xFF3A action code: "NewFirmware".

If a <NewFirmware> tag is found inside the soap body tag, then execution proceeds to allocate memory for the decoded firmware, and then on to writing it to flash memory as discussed above.

In the previous part, I made a guess at what HTTP headers would get the request into the sa_parseRecvCmd function. At this point we now have enough information to speculate as to how the body of the SOAP request should be formed.

POST /soap/server_sa/SetFirmware HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: identity
Content-Length: 102401
Soapaction: "urn:DeviceConfig"
Host: 127.0.0.1
User-Agent: Python-urllib/2.7
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/xml ;charset="utf-8"

<SOAP-ENV:Body>
    <NewFirmware>
        <!-- Base64-encoded firmware image goes here? -->
    </NewFirmware>
</Body>

If this guess is right, the function first looks for the opening Body tag. Then it looks for one of a variety of inner tags, NewFirmware being the one we're interested in. And inside that, hopefully, it will find our base64 encoded firmware image and will decode and write it to flash. Are we almost home free? Stay tuned.

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