Virtualization and Validation of Emulated STM-32 Blue Pill Using the QEMU Open-Source Framework
Conference
Gutierrez, D, Ocampo, W, Perez-Pons, A et al. (2023). Virtualization and Validation of Emulated STM-32 Blue Pill Using the QEMU Open-Source Framework
. 10.1109/ISDFS58141.2023.10131693
Gutierrez, D, Ocampo, W, Perez-Pons, A et al. (2023). Virtualization and Validation of Emulated STM-32 Blue Pill Using the QEMU Open-Source Framework
. 10.1109/ISDFS58141.2023.10131693
Hardware emulation is a technique often employed during system testing and evaluation. It provides the ability to closely replicate the functionality of a physical system, granting both evaluation efficiency and financial benefits over standard hardware testing. However, the extent to which emulation can accurately recreate the behavior of a physical microcontroller remains a topic of great debate for the public and private sector alike. This paper seeks to investigate and quantify the accuracy of an emulated microcontroller to its physical counterpart. The performance of the STM-32 Blue Pill (STM32f103C8T6), a commonly deployed general-purpose microcontroller, is contrasted in both the physical and emulated form factors. The Dhrystone 2.1 benchmark is employed to obtain computational and instruction-completion performance data to assess emulation capacity. This research aims to provide insight into the benefits of emulation to aid in the fields of cybersecurity, for the emulation of environments, and digital forensics, for the facile replication of the various attacks, to gain further insight on how best to mitigate these threats.
