Shoulder for ARM: Generating Software from the ARM Architecture Reference Manual

No ratings

Presented at BSidesDenver 2018 by

Jared Wright

Reference manuals for the ARM architecture are complex and exceedingly long (over 6000 pages for ARMv8-A!). While these manuals are certainly detailed and complete, the process of reading and understanding them is both time consuming and prone to error. However, what would happen if you could write a program to read and understand these manuals for you? In 2017, ARM released the ARMv8-A Architectural Reference Manual in a machine parsable format that was designed specifically to be read and understood by a computer program. This presentation will provide an introduction to ARM's machine parsable specification, discuss a few use cases related to information security, and will introduce a new open source project called Shoulder for ARM which generates software APIs from these documents.