As stated in last week’s blogpost, I have started working on the UEFI helper script (aptly named UEFIHelper). The aim of this script is to assist with reverse engineering UEFI binaries. Similar projects exist for IDA Pro, including ida-efiutils, ida-efitools, and EFISwissKnife.
Background information
UEFI executables are either PE32(+) or TE binaries. The signature of the entry point function depends on the module type; some examples are PEI modules, DXE drivers, and UEFI applications. DXE drivers and standard UEFI applications use the following entry point function:
EFI_STATUS
_ModuleEntryPoint (
IN EFI_HANDLE ImageHandle,
IN EFI_SYSTEM_TABLE *SystemTable
);Other types of modules (such as PEI modules and PEI/DXE core modules) may have different parameters and return types for the entry point function. Nevertheless, we’ll focus on the standard entry point for now. ImageHandle is a firmware-allocated handle for the current EFI application. SystemTable is a pointer to the EFI_SYSTEM_TABLE structure, which in turn has pointers to other EFI tables (such as EFI_BOOT_SERVICES and EFI_RUNTIME_SERVICES). These tables provide data structures and function pointers for standard UEFI functionality, such as getting/setting NVRAM variables, locating/installing UEFI protocols, loading additional UEFI images, rebooting the system, etc.
UEFI’s extensibility is largely implemented through the use of protocols. Protocols are data structures used to enable communication between different UEFI modules, and can be identified by a GUID. A simplified example could be a a UEFI driver for a graphics card. It could support pre-boot graphics output by installing an implementation of the EFI_GRAPHICS_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL, which could then be located and used by other UEFI applications and drivers for graphics output.
UEFIHelper progress
MdePkg in EDK2 includes headers for core UEFI types and protocols. Given a parser configuration file, the C parser in Ghidra can be used to generate data type archives, which are used for storing type definitions in Ghidra. I used the MdePkg headers to generate UEFI data type archives for x86, x86_64, ARMv7, and ARMv8 (AArch64). UEFIHelper will automatically load the correct data type library for the current program’s architecture.
UEFIHelper will search for known GUIDs in the .data segment of the current UEFI program and apply the EFI_GUID type definition. UEFIHelper will also fix the entry point function signature to match the standard entry point for UEFI DXE drivers and applications.
UEFIHelper is a part of the ghidra-firmware-utils extension, and is available on GitHub as usual. I will continue to work on UEFIHelper during the next week.