If you can get a gdb stub onto an embedded system, you can do a lot of cool stuff, up to and including running its firmware in an emulator and forwarding I/O ac

If you can get a gdb stub onto an embedded system, you can do a lot of cool stuff, up to and including running its firmware in an emulator and forwarding I/O accesses to the real hardware (!), which gives you basically unlimited visibility into the code. You can see Jonas Zaddach et al.'s Avatar paper (PDF: http://www.s3.eurecom.fr/docs/ndss14_zaddach.pdf http://www.s3.eurecom.fr/docs/ndss14_zaddach.pdf , code: http://www.s3.eurecom.fr/tools/avatar/ http://www.s3.eurecom.fr/tools/avatar/ ) for more details.