Firmwire full-system 5G baseband emulation
Easier testing of 5G baseband modems with FirmWire
FirmWire is an open source full-system baseband firmware emulation framework for emulating, fuzzing, debugging, and root-cause analysis of smartphone baseband firmware. This project builds upon the framework to support newer, 5G capable, smartphones. Baseband processors are used in all modern smartphones for cellular network connectivity and are a remote attack surface. As such, baseband security is of utmost importance. Baseband firmware is complex, proprietary, and lacks public scrutiny. Emulation and reverse engineering are one of the few public ways to analyze baseband processors. These efforts will provide more transparency in baseband firmware and improve the community’s ability to analyze 5G security through emulation and fuzzing. Additionally, the reverse engineering efforts could aid in developing better open source drivers in the future.
This project was funded through the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101092990.
