MITRE Embedded Cybersecurity Competition
Hardened vulnerable embedded firmware for the MITRE eCTF — closing buffer-overflow and unauthorized-flash-access holes with stack canaries and MPU protections.
CPythonEmbedded
Overview
The MITRE Embedded Capture-the-Flag (eCTF) drops you into a deliberately vulnerable embedded system and asks you to secure it against a live attack scenario. Our work focused on the firmware.
What I did
- Rewrote vulnerable firmware routines in C, removing the memory-safety bugs that made exploitation possible in the first place.
- Enabled stack canaries and MPU memory protections, closing buffer-overflow and unauthorized-flash-access vulnerabilities in the competition scenario.
What I learned
On constrained hardware, security is a budget: every protection costs cycles and flash. The exercise was as much about which defenses to spend on for a given threat model as it was about implementing them.