A Firmware Code Gene Extraction Technology for IoT Terminal

With the development of the IoT technology, an unprecedented number of IoT terminals are connected to various networks. Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology is widely used in the IoT terminal firmware, which results in high code reuse rates. Such firmware is always heterogeneous and closed-source. It is so difficult to detect and investigate the security risks at the firmware level that their impacts are faster and broader. In recent years, some firmware security detection technologies based on similarity are gradually becoming a research hotspot. However, in these studies, the basic issue regarding whether these foundations comprise an essential basis for comparison and their utility as similarity measures has not been addressed theoretically. Inspired by biological genes, this paper attempts to supplement a foundation for cross-platform firmware binary code homology and similarity analysis by mining firmware code genes that can essentially identify code and exhibit stability, antivariability and heritability. The firmware code gene extract system(FCGES) is designed and implemented in this paper. FCGES first extracts the features of firmware code, then numericizes and normalizes them, and finally sublimates them to firmware code genes by the hypothesis margin. The experimental results show that the firmware code gene extracted by FCGES has essentiality, stability, antivariability and heritability on different platforms.