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New 'Phlashing' Attack Sabotages Hardware
yahoi writes "A new type of denial-of-service attack, called permanent denial-of-service (PDOS), damages a system so badly that it requires replacement or reinstallation of hardware. A researcher has discovered how to abuse firmware update mechanisms with what he calls 'phlashing' — a type of remote PDOS attack."
I'm sick of this naming phad.
Seriously, I work to update the equipment at work, but at home, I just really don't care a whole lot about a $30 router.
I can't tell you the last time upgraded the bios on a motherboard. I think it was an older P3 Dell PowerEdge because I was installing Linux on it.
Crap! I just kissed my karma good-bye.
...or jumper. How much more would that cost?
FINALLY! *This* is bricking
interesting research, but we should browbeat the research for calling it phlashing
In Italy a big ISP gave ADSL modems with default password and active administrator wan access...
Is it possible to exploit firmware from the outside, unless the person has enabled remote management and is using the default password?
Those two rarely go hand in hand.
However, I think we'll see a lot of trojans with firmware payloads. How many people use the WRT54G? And how many access points are unsecured with the name "linksys"? Those people probably didn't change their admin password.
Simple solution: Hardware button. You have to press it to flash the router, and you have a minute after you press it to upload the firmware. Should be an easy thing to do and provide a great amount of protection.
Phlashing? And he calls his demo code PhlashDance? Good way to make this seem completely silly. "Damn it, we've been phlashdanced!" That'll really get management to up your security budget, if they ever stop laughing.
It figures that when "bricking" might be remotely appropriate, they pick something worse.
It could have been remote bricking, BOIP(brick over IP), brick-and-run, packet bricking, warbricking.
Even brick-o-gram(landshark).
Sigh...
As a targeted attack against a commercial venture any support team worth their salt will do patching as part of routine maintenance - don't we guys'n'gals? As an attack against mom and pop PCs there are so many hardware variants that any one piece of malware will have a very limited target.
To me this looks like talking up a non existent problem - but I'm open to persuasion otherwise.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I'm pretty sure I remember stories about viruses that could destroy hardware, by doing things like making the drives seek in "funny" ways (past the edge of the disc or something?) or driving wired-together pins to opposite voltages. Those sound *really* permanent, where a bad flash can be fixed by anyone with the proper equipment (JTAG programmer) unless it does that same sort of thing.
The link does not tell us how to attack and render all computers in [insert your favorite evil company here AAPL,MSFT,GOOG]. Just some research guy jaw boning what could be done. So technically there is nothing worthwhile for the slashdot crowd.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Dear Sir, I am the former son of the Nigerian dictator Sonni Abacha. I would like to give you several million dollars. To receive this, please add a static IP to your D-Link router and reboot it.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
He used to be able to turn any working piece of kit into a piece of metal art in about 20 seconds, EVERYTHING was always a BIOS issue and he would NEVER check with anyone before replacing the BIOS.
Lets be clear about how dumb this person was, he had a BIOS that worked on his test servers and would then apply that to all the other servers INDEPENDENT OF HARDWARE OR OS. He would then start the machines (which of course wouldn't start) declare them "broken" and say the issue was with the software.
We did some low level hardware stuff in our software and it did break the boxes sometimes so it took 2 months of painful testing and debugging which found nothing, it only came about because one of the team had a heavy night and decided to "rest" in the server room and saw the moron apply the BIOS to a server that had been running and then scurry out to blame the team again.
Basic rule after then was BIOS set to read-only and locked down with a secure password, to this day my BIOS has a password thanks to the sheer physical shock of realising how dumb some people can be.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
This is why, Flash must die!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I seem to remember a virus back in the 486 days that would cause the hard drive to sweep back and forth between extremes and would keep sweeping until it hit some "resonant frequency" of the drive heads. At that point the heads would start oscillating on the vertical, causing it to strike the platter and physically damage the hard disc.
Anyone else remember this? I had only seen it once and have never been able to find a reference to it.
This would have been in the mid '90s. I have been wracking my brain over finding it since then.
Anyone else who has heard of this, reply and let me know.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
This isn't exactly a new problem...in the early days, you could fry a monitor by setting the video card to absurd refresh rates, and you could destroy hard disks by issuing bogus stepping commands to the heads and slamming them into the stops.
The last time I "phlashed" someone in real-life I received a permanent injunction and restraining order from a very nice judge in court. I guess you can call that a permanent denial of service.
I am not making this up: less than a week ago, I woke up thinking: what to firmware, BIOS, TPM, and IPMI have in common? They'd all be great vectors for bricking a machine.
I'm sorry, but every device out there should have two factory reset switches:
1 to reset user data, akin to a standard BIOS "reset to factory settings"
1 to re-flash the BIOS to the factory-installed version of the BIOS, to de-brick devices.
Furthermore, if there is anything a user can do that is designed to update the machine in a way that's irreversible without a password setting a BIOS or boot password, a hardware switch should be pressed as the information is saved. While this won't prevent social engineering, it will prevent pure software exploits from making the hardware unusable.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
> "Unfortunately, there isn't a magic bullet..."
Yes there is. It's called a write-disable switch.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Wasn't this already done by the CIH (later called Chernobyl) virus, circa 1998? There was even an e-mail variant of it, based on the Loveletter worm.
- wait for a key press
- for decreasing n
- turn on the tape cassete relay
- wait n cycles
- turn off the tape cassete relay
this would cause an increasing pitch whine, followed by a little whiff of smoke from the cassette relay.Something about the people there always saying "there's nothing you can type on the computer that will hurt it..."
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
When I was at the U of Wisconsin back in the 1970s, the central campus Computer Center had a Univac system. An EE prof (or his students ;-) got circuit diagrams and did some analysis. He announced that there was a bug: If a particular (unlikely) sequence of instructions was executed, they would fry a transistor in the CPU. Rather than thanks, he got ridiculed and insulted by the Univac CS people (and a lot of people on campus). So he announced that he'd run a test. He submitted a job that included a chunk of assembly language with the sequence. The machine promptly halted and couldn't be rebooted. The CS engineers looked into it, and found that a transistor had been fried.
...
These days, though, I suppose that he'd probably be charged with something. The smart thing to do if you learn of such bugs is probably to not notify anyone, especially not the vendor or your employer. Instead, you quietly offer the information (for a price of course) to various "interested parties" for whatever use they'd like to make of it.
Another time, some students figured out a bug in Univac's tape drives. They found code that sent commands to spool forward and rewind with timing such that the drive did both - which snapped the tape. They were also not believed, so they demoed it. They submitted a job that asked for a scratch tape, wrote a few KB of data, and snapped the tape. Then it asked for another scratch tape. It didn't take too many tapes before the operators figured out that they should call in the CS people.
I'll bet that others here have a bunch of similar stories. And nonetheless, a future story will be the patenting of using such bugs for "PDOS" attacks. Probably by our favorite whipping boy, Microsoft, who will patent such attacks as a way of enforcing licensing restrictions or DRM.
Maybe the fellow the story is about can get the patent first
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Not a very difficult fix for any tech savvy person with surface mount device reworking equipment - or a soldering iron, a steady hand and a great deal of faith in their ability (or practical experience) to rework SMDs with the wrong kit.
Truly spoken by someone who hasn't tried to buy a programmed flash part for a made in China board. Hint, the replacement board can be purchased but the replacement chip containing IP firmware is a little harder to obtain. Custom parts on the board (flash memory) are not imported in a programmed state. If you can extract the image from the executable without the aid of the boot loader, many of these blank chips and flash upgrade don't come with any way to install the initial code to load the initial firmware.
A new blank BIOS chip doesn't contain enough firmware to boot a floppy, USB memory stick, or CD ROM to flash the BIOS. You need a BIOS image and device programmer. Since neither is supplied and both are needed, your chances of obtaining a BIOS image and installing the firmware are slim to none.
A Blank clock flash memory chip from Mouser does not make a bricked board bootable enough to flash the new BIOS firmware.
If you want to try it, Pick up a blank unit here; Good luck
http://www.epn-online.com/page/new56862/mouser-stocks-silicon-laboratories-c8051f9xx-line-of-mcus.html
The truth shall set you free!