Draytek Arsenal: Observability and hardening toolkit for Draytek edge devices.

Advanced attackers are increasingly choosing edge devices as targets. However, these devices are controlled by closed-source software known as firmware, often distributed in a proprietary format. This is an added difficulty for defenders and researchers, who must understand how to extract firmware to assess its security.

This is more than just a hypothetical scenario, as we discovered recently when a client was compromised. With Draytek equipment at the edge of their infrastructure, the natural question was: Could this be the attackers' entry point? Over 500k Draytek devices are exposed to the Internet. Yet, no working tool exists to extract their firmware and assist researchers and defenders working with these devices.

During our assessment, we reverse-engineered Draytek's firmware format, which contains a bootloader, a compressed RTOS kernel, and two filesystems. Through our investigation, we developed tools to extract these components, unveiling the real-time operating system's capability to load code modules dynamically. These modules are loaded from one of the filesystems in the firmware image during boot but can also be loaded while the system is running and stored in a separate filesystem in flash memory. An attacker can exploit this feature to achieve persistence by loading a module that remains active even after a reboot or firmware upgrade, and the end-user does not have a way to detect this type of attack. Consequently, we developed our own module to check the integrity of loaded modules in memory, mitigating this potential threat.

In our pursuit of a more secure internet, we are making this set of tools accessible to the community, enabling observability, hardening, transparency, and vulnerability research on Draytek edge devices

Presentation

This tool was developed as part of a research project that was presented at DEFCON HHV and La Villa Hacker. You can find the slides and PoC videos here.

Note

We initially developed this as an internal tool. It was just a set of scripts, but it showed great potential, prompting us to make it open-source. Since then, we have been working to integrate these scripts into the Python package you will find in this repo and make them compatible with other device models.

Get started

Requirements:

• Python3
• Docker (Optional)

Installation

(Optional) Create and activate python virtual environment:

$ python3 -m virtualenv .venv
$ source .venv/bin.activate

Install draytek_arsenal:

$ cd draytek_arsenal
$ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python3 -m pip install .

Test the installation:

$ python3 -m draytek_arsenal

Install as developer

This installation will be affected by local code changes

$ python3 -m pip install -e .

Mips-tools

Some commands as mips_compile and mips_merge needs a complementary Docker image in order to work.
If it has not been downloaded this error message is shown:

[x] Image 'draytek-arsenal' not found. Please build or download the image.

You could download the image with the following command:

$ docker pull ghcr.io/infobyte/draytek-arsenal:main

Or build it with:

$ docker build -t draytek-arsenal ./mips-tools

Usage

draytek-arsenal is a set of scripts collected in a python package. So, to use it you should select a command:

usage: draytek-arsenal [-h] [command] args..

Some of the commands are:

parse_firmware

Parse and show information of a Draytec firmware.

usage: parse_firmware [-h] firmware

positional arguments:
  firmware    Path to the firmware

options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

extract

Command used to extract and decompress Draytek packages.

usage: extract [-h] [--rtos RTOS] firmware

positional arguments:
  firmware              Path to the firmware

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --rtos RTOS, -r RTOS  Where to extract and decompress the RTOS

dlm_hash

Get the hash of a DLM module.

usage: dlm_hash [-h] [-c] dlm

positional arguments:
  dlm         Path to the dlm

options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  -c          Print as .c code

find_loading_addr

Find the address where the RTOS if loaded with the first jump instruction.

usage: find_loading_addr [-h] rtos

positional arguments:
  rtos        Path to the rtos

options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

find_endianness

Checks if the RTOS is little or big endian.

usage: find_endianness [-h] rtos

positional arguments:
  rtos        Path to the rtos

options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

mips_compile

Compile MIPS relocatable binary (used for DLMs).

usage: mips_compile [-h] output [input ...]

positional arguments:
  output      Output file
  input       Output file

options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

mips_merge

Merge two ELF MIPS relocatable files.

usage: mips_merge [-h] first_input second_input output

positional arguments:
  first_input   First input file
  second_input  Second input file
  output        Output file

options:
  -h, --help    show this help message and exit