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Unboxing the Spacecraft Software Black Box: Automated Binary Hunting

Brandon Bailey

Aerospace Corporation lead Brandon Bailey introduces automated binary inspection pipelines to hunt for zero-days in black-box spacecraft firmware.

Summary

The Challenge of Black-Box Spacecraft Firmware

As the commercialization of space accelerates, spacecraft integrators frequently acquire embedded binaries and proprietary flight software without access to source code.

Building Automated Binary Inspection Pipelines

Brandon Bailey details designing automated static and dynamic analysis workflows leveraging Ghidra and custom rule sets tailored to space RTOS binaries.

Hunting for Flaws Across Space Software Architectures

Bailey demonstrates identifying memory corruption bugs, unauthenticated command handlers, and hardcoded encryption keys in compiled flight images.

Accelerating Mission Assurance and Software Verification

The presentation provides spacecraft developers with a scalable, repeatable methodology for pre-flight software security validation.

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