# P2IM: Scalable and Hardware-independent Firmware Testing via Automatic Peripheral Interface Modeling (extended version)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06472 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06472/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [REBENCH: A Procedural, Fair-by-Construction Benchmark for LLMs on Stripped-Binary Types and Names (Extended Version)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27319/) (2026)
- [LLMs as Firmware Experts: A Runtime-Grown Tree-of-Agents Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18438/) (2025)
- [APIOT: Autonomous Vulnerability Management Across Bare-Metal Industrial OT Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02346/) (2026)
- [FirmPilot: Evidence-Guided Multi-Agent Environment Recovery for IoT Firmware Rehosting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14903/) (2026)
- [Feyospace-v1: How the Cyber Mercury Seven Trained Frontier Cyber Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08418/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dynamic testing or fuzzing of embedded firmware is severely limited by hardware-dependence and poor scalability, partly contributing to the widespread vulnerable IoT devices. We propose a software framework that continuously executes a given firmware binary while channeling inputs from an off-the-shelf fuzzer, enabling hardware-independent and scalable firmware testing. Our framework, using a novel technique called P2IM, abstracts diverse peripherals and handles firmware I/O on the fly based on automatically generated models. P2IM is oblivious to peripheral designs and generic to firmware implementations, and therefore, applicable to a wide range of embedded devices. We evaluated our framework using 70 sample firmware and 10 firmware from real devices, including a drone, a robot, and a PLC. It successfully executed 79% of the sample firmware without any manual assistance. We also performed a limited fuzzing test on the real firmware, which unveiled 7 unique unknown bugs.