Analytical Modeling for Identification of the Machine Code Architecture of Cyberphysical Devices in Smart Homes

Sensors (Basel). 2022 Jan 28;22(3):1017. doi: 10.3390/s22031017.

Abstract

Ensuring the security of modern cyberphysical devices is the most important task of the modern world. The reason for this is that such devices can cause not only informational, but also physical damage. One of the approaches to solving the problem is the static analysis of the machine code of the firmware of such devices. The situation becomes more complicated in the case of a Smart Home, since its devices can have different processor architectures (means instruction sets). In the case of cyberphysical devices of the Smart Home, the destruction of machine code due to physical influences is also possible. Therefore, the first step is to correctly identify the processor architecture. In the interests of this, a machine code model is proposed that has a formal notation and takes into account the possibility of code destruction. The article describes the full cycle of research (including experiment) in order to obtain this model. The model is based on byte-frequency machine code signatures. The experiment resulted in obtaining template signatures for the Top-16 processor architectures: Alpha, X32, Amd64, Arm64, Hppa64, I486, I686, Ia64, Mips, Mips64, Ppc, Ppc64, RiscV64, S390, S390x and Sparc64.

Keywords: byte-frequency allocation; code destruction; forensics; processor identification; signature.