2 COMPLEMENTARY MODES APPROACHES
Code audit
A methodical, exhaustive analysis of the source code of a piece of software, an OS or a firmware. Our engineer has access to the sources and adopts an attacker’s mindset: how can this code be diverted from its expected behavior?
This is not a quality review. It is a human investigation, conducted without a safety net, across the entire internal attack surface.
Reverse engineering
Analysis of a piece of software, a firmware or a hardware component with no access to the source code. The researcher starts from the compiled binary, the extracted firmware or the physical silicon, and reconstructs the system’s internal logic to find its flaws.
This is the exact posture of a sophisticated attacker. If our researchers can do it, a determined adversary can too.
AN INVESTIGATION, NOT AN AUDIT.
Most security audits stop at the surface — they look for what the tools already know how to look for. QLab begins where others stop.
Our engineers dive into your hardware and software products with the same techniques as the world’s best attackers: reverse engineering, binary analysis, advanced fuzzing, zero-day vulnerability research. Every engagement is a bespoke investigation — no safety net, no generic tooling. And every vulnerability identified comes with a concrete remediation path, tailored to your product architecture.
CODE AUDIT (DEFENSIVE MODE) 4 DEPTH LEVEL
Code audit is a methodical analysis of source code aimed at identifying every exploitable vulnerability before it reaches production. Our researchers operate at four levels of depth — from application code down to the bootloader — whereas the vast majority of market players stop at the application layer.
Application code
Web, mobile and desktop applications & APIs.
Analysis of the application layers to identify logic vulnerabilities, memory-management errors, and any deviation from expected behavior. This level alone is often insufficient: a correctly coded application may rely on a vulnerable system component.
SQL/NoSQL/LDAP injections
authentication & authorization flaws
cryptographic issues
race conditions
buffer overflows
broken business logic
Methods: manual review, data-flow (taint) analysis, security-policy verification, targeted input fuzzing.
Kernel & OS
System kernel, drivers & user/kernel-space interface.
Analysis of critical system components: drivers, kernel modules, interfaces between user space and kernel space (syscalls, ioctls). A kernel flaw compromises the entire software stack above it — no application-level security mechanism can compensate for a vulnerability at this level.
Privilege escalation
kernel use-after-free
overflows in kernel structures
memory leaks exposing data
poorly validated syscall interfaces
Methods: kernel-code analysis, ioctl-interface audit, review of memory-management mechanisms, verification of cross-space access controls.
Embedded firmware
Code running directly on the hardware, with no intervening OS.
Analysis of embedded firmware — code that drives the hardware directly (microcontrollers, SoCs, IoT devices, medical, industrial or automotive systems). A firmware vulnerability is often invisible from the upper layers, and persists even after a complete reinstallation of the system.
Hard-coded cryptographic keys
intentional or accidental backdoors
insecure update mechanisms
debug interfaces left active
secrets exposed in the binaries
Methods: firmware extraction and decompilation, embedded-filesystem analysis, audit of active services, review of internal authentication mechanisms.
Boot-loader
The first code executed at power-on — the most critical level.
Analysis of the bootloader — the first software executed at power-up, which initializes the hardware and loads the OS. This is the most dangerous level: a compromise here is undetectable by the OS, survives any reformatting, and can let an attacker establish a permanent, invisible presence — what is known as a low-level implant or firmware rootkit.
Insecure boot chain
bypassable Secure Boot
undetectable persistent implants
absence of integrity verification
debug modes left enabled
Methods: audit of the boot chain of trust, verification of Secure Boot mechanisms, analysis of cryptographic signatures, review of privileged hardware-access modes.
REVERSE ENGINEERING (OFFENSIVE MODE) – 4 TARGETS
Reverse engineering is the analysis of a piece of software, firmware or hardware component without access to the source code. The researcher deductively reconstructs the system’s internal logic to find its flaws — exactly as a sophisticated attacker would. If our researchers can do it, a determined adversary can too.
Binaries & Libs
Application binaries & compiled libraries
Decompilation and disassembly of compiled code to reconstruct application logic without source code. Identification of sensitive functions (authentication, cryptography, license management, network communications), internal data structures, and exploitable execution paths.
IDA Pro
Ghidra
in-house QLab tools
Objectives: secret extraction, license-mechanism bypass, identification of undocumented attack paths.
OS & Drivers
System components distributed in binary form only
Analysis of proprietary drivers, signed kernel modules and hypervisors distributed without source code. Identification of undocumented interfaces, bypassable security mechanisms, and exploitation primitives — arbitrary read or write in kernel memory, privilege escalation from user space.
Kernel disassembly
ioctl-interface analysis
partial emulation
Objectives: identification of hidden interfaces, extraction of kernel exploitation primitives, mapping of system-compromise paths.
Firmware & Boot
Extraction and analysis of firmware from the physical device
Firmware extraction from the device (via JTAG, UART, SPI flash, or attack of the boot chain), then analysis of its content: embedded filesystem, active services, authentication mechanisms. This step regularly reveals secrets inadvertently left in production code — default credentials, private keys, debug certificates.
JTAG / UART
SPI flash dump
Binwalk
Pyrrha (in-house tool)
Objectives: extraction of production secrets, identification of backdoors, complete mapping of the embedded filesystem.
Hardware SoC / Chip
Analysis of physical components down to the silicon level
- Analysis of SoCs, microcontrollers and proprietary chips at the hardware level.
- The deepest and rarest level: only a handful of teams worldwide master this entire analysis chain. Four families of techniques are deployed depending on the objectives.
- Buses & interfaces: analysis of inter-component communication protocols (I2C, SPI, UART, JTAG), real-time capture and decoding of exchanges.
- Side channels: power-consumption measurement (DPA) and electromagnetic analysis (DEMA) to infer cryptographic operations and extract secret keys.
- Fault injection: deliberate disturbance of the power supply or clock (glitching) to trigger exploitable abnormal behavior — bypassing critical security controls.
- Silicon imaging: in the most advanced cases, chip decapsulation and electron-microscope imaging to analyze the topology of integrated circuits.
Objectives: extraction of hardware keys, bypass of hardware Secure Boot, analysis of proprietary chips with no documentation.
WHAT YOU GET OUT OF IT
See before you’re seen
You don’t receive a list of flaws; you receive exhaustive knowledge of the real attack surface of your products, before someone else discovers it for you.
Fix at the root, not at the surface
Every vulnerability is documented, qualified by real criticality, and paired with a remediation roadmap tailored to your architecture. Not a compliance report. An action plan.
Ship what has been battle-tested
The confidence that your products have been analyzed by researchers whose findings are regularly published as internationally recognized CVEs.
WHAT DIFFERENCIATES QLAB
THE DEPTH OTHERS DON’T REACH
Most market players offer standard application-code audits. Few go down to the kernel level. Very few master embedded firmware. A handful worldwide can carry out a complete hardware analysis down to the silicon level. QLab operates at all of these levels, with the same research engineers — not rotating generalists, but specialists whose work is published as CVEs, conference talks (Black Hat, SSTIC, REcon) and open-source tools adopted by the global community.