S12X Patch Diffing with QBinDiff

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 5 Aug 2026] S12X Patch Diffing with QBinDiff Ben Gardiner (NMFTA Inc) This paper presents a reverse engineering analysis of a firmware update for a commercial vehicle Brake ECU. We analyze the updater executable to extract firmware and perform differential binary analysis of the S12X architecture firmware images. Our research identifies specific changes in the recall that address undocumented vulnerabilities in legacy protocol processing. We demonstrate that the patched functionality contained critical flaws. The findings confirm the safety recall remediation was also a security patch. Comments: Preprint of paper to be presented at VehicleSec 2026. This version includes appendices beyond the page limits of the conference Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2608.05350 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.05350v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.05350 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ben Gardiner [view email] [v1] Wed, 5 Aug 2026 19:17:37 UTC (32,067 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)