Lightning Talk Beginner MIT First Talk

Reversing MIPS: From CTF Binaries to Router

Rejected

Session Description

Proposal Description:

Most people who get into security start with CTF reversing — x86 binaries, Ghidra, GDB. At some point the question comes up: does any of this apply to real hardware? This talk answers that. We go from familiar CTF reversing concepts to analyzing MIPS binaries extracted from actual router firmware, using nothing but open source tools. The demo runs live on DVRF, walking through extraction with Binwalk, emulation with QEMU, and analysis in Ghidra — showing how the same reversing mindset carries over, and what actually changes when the target is embedded hardware.

Key Takeaways

Key Takeaways:

How CTF reversing skills directly transfer to firmware analysis
What makes MIPS different from x86 and why it matters for embedded systems
How to extract and navigate a firmware filesystem using Binwalk
Running MIPS binaries locally with QEMU without real hardware
Getting started with firmware reversing using only open source tools

References

https://github.com/praetorian-inc/DVRF

Session Categories

Knowledge Commons (Open Hardware, Open Science, Open Data etc.)

Talk License: MIT

Which track are you applying for?

Security

Speakers

Smrithi D Warrier Student, Bi0s member | Amrita vishwa vidyapeeth

I'm Smrithi D Warrier, a second year Cyber Security student at Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri and a member of bi0s. My domain is firmware analysis and binary reversing — I work with Ghidra, GDB, and pwntools, and I'm currently exploring how CTF reversing bridges into embedded systems security.