Compared to x86, ARM shellcode has made little progress. The x86 hardware is largely homogenous. ARM, however, has several versions and variants across devices today. There are several constraints and subtleties involved in writing production quality ARM shellcode which works on modern ARM hardware, not just on QEMU emulators.
In this talk, we shall explore issues such as overcoming cache coherency, reliable polymorphic shellcode, ARM egghunting and last but not the least, polyglot ARM shellcode. A bonus side effect of this talk will be creating headaches for those who like to defend agaisnt attacks using age old signature based techniques. There will be demonstrations of my shellcode on ARM IoT devices featuring different types of ARM architecture.
