Skip to content
Sujan Ghimire
Research
Ongoing research

Embedded Firmware Security and Fuzzing

Research on bare-metal firmware security through emulation, rehosting, fuzzing, and vulnerability analysis.

  • Research
  • Embedded and IoT Systems

Problem

Bare-metal firmware is tightly coupled to its hardware, which makes dynamic testing difficult and leaves many embedded devices insufficiently evaluated for security.

Technical approach

  1. 01Study techniques for executing firmware outside its original hardware through emulation and rehosting.
  2. 02Apply fuzzing and vulnerability analysis to evaluate firmware security.
  3. 03Explore using LLMs to extract hardware knowledge from microcontroller reference manuals.

  1. 01

    Firmware image

    Bare-metal binary

  2. 02

    Rehosting

    Emulated execution environment

  3. 03

    Fuzzing

    Input generation & monitoring

  4. 04

    Analysis

    Vulnerability triage

Figure. Conceptual overview of the Embedded Firmware Security and Fuzzing workflow. Illustrative only; not a description of results.

My contributions

  • Co-author of the IEEE Access survey of bare-metal firmware fuzzing techniques (2025).
  • Co-author of LLM4MCU-Onto on LLM-based ontology generation from microcontroller reference manuals (IEEE ICCD 2025).

Associated publications