Research on Firmware Simulation of Windows Embedded Compact System

Firmware simulation of embedded devices is an important technology to support security testing of embedded devices. However, most of the current firmware emulation targets are bare-metal or Linux-based firmware. The number of embedded devices based on Windows Embedded Compact (Windows CE) as the operating system occupies a certain market size, and there are certain security risks. Firmware extraction and system state simulation of embedded devices based on Windows CE are difficult. In order to solve the problem that embedded devices based on Windows CE system need firmware simulation methods and better support the security testing of embedded devices using Windows CE system, We propose a firmware simulation method for Windows CE systems. Combining the development board framework supported by QEMU and the specific application of embedded devices to be simulated, we make a simulation image that can run in QEMU. We verify our method on two commercial PLCs, and the experimental results show that our method can simulate the system state of PLC firmware.