Slashdot Mirror
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.
...or jumper. How much more would that cost?
FINALLY! *This* is bricking
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...
nah - his tool's called PhlashDance, which made me go all warm and fuzzy at the thought of Jennifer Beals stamping on my fimware in her heels :P
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
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
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.
That's the key: Reliable Enough. We dont need 100% availability, as it requires many redundant units (akin DRBD). I just have another WRT54G if this one burns out.
Business wise: I would go higher end as time==money. Better reliability can be afforded.
It does what I want it to do, and it does it well. And cheap.
> "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'