A review of Azure Sphere vulnerabilities: Unsigned code execs, kernel bugs, escalation chains and firmware downgrades

From blog.talosintelligence.com

In May 2020, Microsoft kicked off the Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge, a three-month initiative aimed at finding bugs in Azure Sphere. In the first three months, Cisco Talos reported 16 vulnerabilities. Our analysis continued intermittently, and eventually, we discovered and reported a total of 31 published vulnerabilities, two of which were present in the Linux kernel itself.

We already released several blog posts about Azure Sphere (see blog posts 12345). Today, we’re putting a bow on our research by summarizing what we’ve found and how attackers could exploit them, and what that would mean for the user. We also have another blog post coming next week that will detail how we exploited a chain of two vulnerabilities to gain arbitrary kernel code execution.

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