Hi everyone. I’m Alex James (theracermaster on IRC) and I’m working on developing modules for Ghidra to assist with firmware reverse engineering as a part of GSoC 2019. Martin Roth and Raul Rangel are my mentors for this project; I would like to thank them for their support thus far.

Ghidra is an open-source software reverse engineering suite developed by the NSA, offering similar functionality to existing tools such as IDA Pro. My GSoC project aims to augment its functionality for firmware RE. This project will consist of three parts: a loader for PCI option ROMs, a loader for firmware images, and various scripts to assist with UEFI binary reverse engineering (importing common types, GUIDs, etc).

The source code for this project is available here.

Week 1

During my first week, I started implementing the filesystem loader for PCI option ROMs. This allows option ROMs (and their enclosed images) to be loaded into Ghidra for analysis. So far, option ROMs containing uncompressed UEFI binaries can be successfully loaded as PE32+ executables in Ghidra. The loader also calculates the entry point address for legacy x86 option ROMs.

Plans for this week

So far this week, I’ve worked on writing a simple JNI wrapper for the reference C implementation of the EFI decompressor from EDK2, and have used this to add support for compressed EFI images to the option ROM FS loader. Additionally, I plan on making further improvements to the option ROM loader for legacy option ROMs; while the entry point address is properly calculated, they still have to be manually imported as a raw binary.