The Corellium team recently got together to show us how to build a custom device model and load it into the Corellium platform for convenient testing, advanced research, and accelerated development. Watch the full webinar, “Intro to Custom Device Modeling,” today or continue to read below and learn about custom device modeling, its benefits, and how to build them.
What Is Customer Device Modeling?
Device modeling is a technique used in hardware/firmware development and security research to simulate and emulate the behavior of specific devices. It involves creating custom models replicating various devices' characteristics, functionality, and vulnerabilities.
Custom device modeling creates virtual device models that can be loaded into the Corellium platform. Corellium is a virtualized platform that runs on ARM servers, not an emulator or simulator. It allows users to run ARM operating systems directly on ARM chips, similar to what VMware did for x86 virtualization. With custom device modeling, hardware/firmware developers and cybersecurity researchers can build and tailor virtual device models to their specific needs, even for devices with proprietary operating systems or hardware/firmware designs still under development.
Unlocking the Potential of Device Virtualization
Virtualization, the ability to run multiple virtual machines on a single system, forms the foundation for custom device modeling. Hardware-assisted virtualization allows direct execution of guest code without translation, resulting in a significant performance boost.
Custom device modeling requires knowledge of the hardware-software interface of the target device, ARM architecture, reverse engineering tactics, and communication mechanisms used with peripherals. Experience with firmware or kernel development proves to be beneficial since device modeling shares similarities with firmware and driver development.
Deploying Custom Models for Security Testing
Custom models grant access to hardware in a way that is introspective and not feasible in the physical world. The deployment of custom models can be done into Corellium's on-premises servers, Arm Virtual Hardware, or private clouds.
Introducing CHARM: Corellium Hypervisor for ARM
CHARM is Corellium’s custom type-1 hypervisor designed explicitly for modeling devices. It is a robust framework to handle the intricacies of device modeling and provides access to previously inaccessible hardware, functionalities, and debugging capabilities.
Custom models enable scalability, making it possible to examine the same type of device simultaneously, even if only one physical hardware unit is available.
For an in-depth exploration of how developers can use the Corellium CHARM Developer Kit to create their own custom virtual device models, we invite you to check out our webinar.
