• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.867-875
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• 2009

A wireless sensor network inherently comprises a plurality of sensor nodes widely deployed for sensing environmental information. To add new functions or to correct some faulty functions of an existing wireless sensor network, the firmware for each sensor node needs to be updated. Firmware update would be quite troublesome if it requires the gathering, reprogramming, and redeploy of all of already deployed sensor nodes. Over-the-air programming (OTA) facilitates the firmware update process, thereby allowing convenient maintenance of an already-deployed sensor network. This paper proposes and implements a remote firmware update mechanism for a TDMA-based wireless sensor network, in which the firmware for sensor nodes constituting the TDMA-based sensor network can be easily updated and the update process can be conveniently monitored from a remote site. We verify the validity of the proposed firmware update method via experiments and introduce three wireless sensor networks installed in outdoor sites in which the proposed firmware update mechanism has been exploited.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.25-30
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• 2023

We propose a method to update DSP (Digital Signal Processor) firmware using USB (Universal Serial Bus) flash drives. The DSP automatically detects USB drives based on an interrupt when the USB drive is inserted into the USB port. The new firmware binary file is found in the mounted USB drive, and the destination address of DSP flash memory is identified for the firmware update writing by investigating the firmware file header. After the new firmware is written to the DSP flash memory, the DSP is reset and rebooted with the newly updated firmware. By employing TI's TMS320F28379D control card with USB ports, we conduct experiments and verify the normal operation of the implemented method.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.61 no.1
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• pp.155-161
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• 2012

The firmware upgrade, which is remotely performed, is an essential function in smart metering or AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure). In other words, the AMI software and firmware can be switched for maintaining and improvement without replacement of H/W devices in AMI environment. Also, if number and type of devices are increase, the demand of remote update service will be increased. Through the firmware upgrade service remotely, the electric power corporation may be able to benefit various fields. For example, there are to adapt more easily in many environments, real-time service and to cut maintenance costs. In this paper, we proposed to design an international level FUMS(Firmware Upgrade Management System) which includes requirement function, architecture and protocol related with DCU, Smart Meter.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.1-7
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• 2023

In this paper, we propose a base address candidate selection method using the $gp register and page granularity as a way to build a static analysis environment for firmware based on MIPS architecture. As a way to shorten the base address search time, which is a disadvantage of the base address candidate selection method through inductive reasoning in existing studies, this study proposes a method to perform page-level search based on the $gp register in the existing base address candidate selection method as a reference point for search. Then, based on the proposed method, a base address search tool is implemented and a static analysis environment is constructed to prove the validity of the target tool. The results show that the proposed method is faster than the existing candidate selection method through inductive reasoning.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.247-251
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• 2021

We propose a protocol for Ethernet-based industrial real-time communication networks. In the protocol, the master periodically transmits control frames to all slaves, and the ring-type network topology is selected to achieve high-speed transmission speed. The proposed protocol is implemented in the form of both firmware and Linux kernel modules. To improve the transmission speed, the MAC address table is disabled in the firmware implementation, and the NAPI function of the Ethernet driver is removed in the Linux kernel module implementation. A network experiment environment is built with four ARM processor-based embedded systems and network operation experiments are performed for various frame sizes. From the experimental results, it is verified that the proposed protocol normally operates, and the firmware implementation shows better transmission speed than the Linux kernel module implementation.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.1225-1234
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• 2019

The security of the firmware is more important because embedded devices have become popular. Network devices such as routers can be attacked by attackers through web application vulnerabilities in embedded firmware. Therefore, they must be found and removed quickly. The Firmadyne framework proposes a dynamic analysis method to find vulnerabilities after emulating firmware. However, it only performs vulnerability checks according to the analysis methods defined in the tool, thus limiting the scope of vulnerabilities that can be found. In this paper, fuzzing is performed in emulation-based environment through fuzzing, one of the software security test techniques. We also propose a Fabfuzz tool for efficient emulation based fuzzing. Experiments have shown that in addition to the vulnerabilities identified in existing tools, other types of vulnerabilities have been found.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.07c
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• pp.1367-1370
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• 2002

This paper introduces a new web based method to remotely upgrade firmwares of Cable Modems (CM) which are integral part in providing high-speed Internet access through Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) networks. Also, it discusses various practical problems arising in the upgrading process. Traditional upgrade has been performed by modifying the CM configuration fie. This paper shows a new web based CM firmware upgrade method using SNMP and MIB which greatly reduces upgrading time, cost and man-hour than traditional firmware upgrade methods. This method has been shown to be very efficient and practical. This method will make significant impact especially because tens of million cable modems are currently waiting to be upgraded soon to the next version from the current version.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2016.10a
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• pp.317-320
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• 2016

In embedded system, if firmware code is opened by other company, must devise hardware copy prevention. That guard valuable product. Not used security IC, Suggested platform is source code open method that prevent core code and hardware copy. And that open firmware code for other company programmer. Suggest system security platform based on Corex-M3. that consist of IAP(In-application programing) and APP(Applicataion). IAP contain core code and security confirm code. APP is implement by other company developer using core function prototype.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.121-132
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• 2019

As the 4th industrial age enters, the number of IoT devices is exploding. Accordingly, the importance of security is also increasing in proportion to the increasing number of security incidents of IoT devices. However, due to the limited performance of IoT devices, there are limitations to applying existing security solutions. Therefore, a new automatic firmware distribution solution is needed to solve this problem. To solve this problem, we propose a new automatic firmware update system that uses a hybrid blockchain that combines a public blockchain and a private blockchain. The public blockchain allows various firmware providers to distribute firmware using a common system. Private blockchain solves the transaction overload problem of the public blockchain and facilitates the management of IoT devices. It also uses distributed file storage to ensure high availability without failing. Therefore, this system is expected to be very effective for improving the security of IoT devices.

• Journal of Software Assessment and Valuation
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.65-79
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• 2020

As Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), popular components in industrial control systems (ICS), are incorporated with the technologies such as micro-controllers, real-time operating systems, and communication capabilities. As the latest PLCs have been connected to the Internet, they are becoming a main target of cyber threats. This paper proposes two sanitizers that improve the security of uC/OS-II based firmware for a PLC. That is, we devise BU sanitizer for detecting out-of-bounds accesses to buffers and UaF sanitizer for fixing use-after-free bugs in the firmware. They can sanitize the binary firmware image generated in a desktop PC before downloading it to the PLC. The BU sanitizer can also detect the violation of control flow integrity using both call graph and symbols of functions in the firmware image. We have implemented the proposed two sanitizers as a prototype system on a PLC running uC/OS-II and demonstrated the effectiveness of them by performing experiments as well as comparing them with the existing sanitizers. These findings can be used to detect and mitigate unintended vulnerabilities during the firmware development phase.