Exploiting Android S-Boot: Getting Arbitrary Code Exec in the Samsung Bootloader (1/2)
Nitay Artenstein (@nitayart) and Gilad Goldman (@gnull00)

Samsung’s Secure Bootloader (S-Boot) for Android lies at the heart of Samsung’s chain of trust concept. An attacker who compromises S-Boot could potentially load an untrusted kernel and system image, therefore bypassing most of the phone’s security mechanisms. This is a well-known attack vector: It’s often used by the Android rooting and modding community, but our guess is that it’s way more popular with law enforcement and government agencies. All the more interesting, then, that S-Boot on contains several memory corruption bugs, one of which could be used to reach full code execution within the bootloader. We can currently confirm the existence of the vulnerability only on Exynos chipsets. It seems universal to approximately 90% of the Samsung Exynos ROMs running on S5, S6 and S7. The very newest ROMs for S7 (February 2017) appear to include a fix for this bug, but we’ll confirm this in a few days. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so we’ll break up this write-up into two posts. In this post we’ll focus on some S-Boot internals, then explore the bootloader’s attack surface and get basic debugging capabilities. We’ll end the post with the discovery of an especially interesting attack surface. In the next post we’ll disclose the actual vulnerability and how we exploited it to get code execution in S-Boot. We won’t go into much detail on the basics of reversing S-Boot, such as how to load it into IDA or find the base address. Fernand Lone Sang (@_kamino_) is about to publish a great article exactly about that and I’ll put a link for it here when it’s out. If you need any help beyond that, just DM me and I’d be glad to give you a hand if I can.[…]