RVDebloater: Mode-based Adaptive Firmware Debloating for Robotic Vehicles
Mohsen Salehi, Karthik Pattabiraman

TL;DR
RVDebloater is an adaptive, mode-based firmware debloating technique for robotic vehicles that reduces attack surfaces by dynamically removing unneeded code at runtime, with minimal performance impact.
Contribution
It introduces a novel adaptive debloating method that identifies and restricts unneeded firmware functions per mode using static and dynamic analysis, supporting diverse embedded devices.
Findings
Average of 85% of functions are unnecessary across modes.
No mission failures after debloating, indicating high accuracy.
45% reduction in firmware call graph size.
Abstract
As the number of embedded devices grows and their functional requirements increase, embedded firmware is becoming increasingly larger, thereby expanding its attack surface. Despite the increase in firmware size, many embedded devices, such as robotic vehicles (RVs), operate in distinct modes, each requiring only a small subset of the firmware code at runtime. We refer to such devices as mode-based embedded devices. Debloating is an approach to reduce attack surfaces by removing or restricting unneeded code, but existing techniques suffer from significant limitations, such as coarse granularity and irreversible code removal, limiting their applicability. To address these limitations, we propose RVDebloater, a novel adaptive debloating technique for mode-based embedded devices that automatically identifies unneeded firmware code for each mode using either static or dynamic analysis, and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy
