Slashdot Mirror
Hardware TPM Hacked
BiggerIsBetter writes "Christopher Tarnovsky has pulled off the 'near impossible' TPM hardware hack. We all knew it was only a matter of time; this is why you shouldn't entrust your data to proprietary solutions. From the article: 'The technique can also be used to tap text messages and email belonging to the user of a lost or stolen phone. Tarnovsky said he can't be sure, however, whether his attack would work on TPM chips made by companies other than Infineon. Infineon said it knew this type of attack was possible when it was testing its chips. But the company said independent tests determined that the hack would require such a high skill level that there was a limited chance of it affecting many users. ... The Trusted Computing Group, which sets standards on TPM chips, called the attack "exceedingly difficult to replicate in a real-world environment."'"
'near impossible'
Shouldn't that be 'near inevitable'?
Infineon said it knew this type of attack was possible when it was testing its chips.
Did they mention this in their marketing and when selling the TPM FUD to governments and companies?
"exceedingly difficult to replicate in a real-world environment."
Meaning only powerful criminal organizations, companies and governments can probably gather the
required resources and people with the expertise to pull it off? Out of 6.8 billion people, how
many have the resources to do this? 1000? 10,000? What about in 5 years?
At what point will they admit its flawed? Probably when TPM2 is fully patented and ready.
To encrypt something, you must have a 20-character password minimum to get 128-bit key strength. Nobody likes typing 20 characters, so TPM was invented. TPM stores your key on a separate chip. This chip only coughs up the key if you enter a short password to authenticate yourself to the chip.
The chip uses rate-limiting boot-delays to prevent brute-forcing of the password.
So they only way to get the key is to break the chip apart and look at the hardware somehow. The chips are usually encased in epoxy to make this hard to do. It's never been done before. Now it has... but it's still hard work.
TPM chips come on all business laptops these days, though few businesses make use of them. And they're still better than telling your users to memorize 20 char passwords (which they would just write down).
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
FTA "Using off-the-shelf chemicals, Tarnovsky soaked chips in acid to dissolve their hard outer shells. Then he applied rust remover to help take off layers of mesh wiring, to expose the chips' cores. From there, he had to find the right communication channels to tap into using a very small needle."
If the attacker has this much physical access to your system/data then you've lost LONG before the TPM chip failed.
Not sure what you mean. But yes, this does require a high skill level - we don't know how many TMP chips this guy trashed before getting it to work on one, or what his success rate would be on the next one. If he gets a laptop full of Chinese secrets and is asked to crack the TPM chip, he might well fry it on the first attempt, and you don't get second attempts on this kind of thing. It's not the kind of exploit that can be scripted and downloaded by any kiddie.
Yes, but remember that TPM is about keeping you our of your own computer, so those who would like to do so are worried about this.
Since using technique involves reverse engineering the chip, this is a clear violation of the DMCA. So just find your local attorney and prosecute.
Problem solved. Nothing to see here move along. Thanks for playing. :)
While decapping chips is done all the time in failure analysis labs, it isn't easy, and it's even harder if you're trying not to damage the chip (or yourself) in the process.
Decapping usually involves concentrated nitric and/or sulfuric acids. Temperature control is important. You want to carefully dissolve the plastic without destroying the lead frame and/or the bonding wires going from the lead frame to the die. You also want to complete this process without losing any fingers or your eyesight -- highly concentrated acids. Rinse carefully with deionized water and test to make sure the chip is still functional.
Now you can feed the chip to your electron beam probe, FIB mill, or just take pretty pictures.
Not the kind of thing you're going to do in your kitchen!
I've been reading about this hack for days, but something seems fishy. Some of the earlier reports had him hacking the SLE 66 CL processor chip which is embedded in the TPM, not the TPM itself. This article also describes him as having to work with many copies of the chip to discover its secrets, but it has the chips being inexpensive ones from China. Problem is that Infineon is a German company and I don't think you can get Infineon TPMs cheaply from China. Putting this together, it's not clear to me that he has truly hacked an Infineon TPM. He may have hacked a similar chip and he assumes that the same attack would work on TPM.
However, there is a way for him to easily prove that he has done what he said. Every Infineon TPM comes with an RSA secret key embedded in it, called the Endorsement Key or EK. This key is designed to be kept secret and never revealed off-chip, not to the computer owner or anyone. And Infineon TPMs also come with an X.509 certificate on the public part of the EK (PUBEK), issued by Infineon. If Tarnovsky has really hacked an Infineon TPM and is able to extract keys, he should be able to extract and publish the private part of the EK (PRIVEK), along with the certificate by Infineon on that key. The mere publication of these two pieces of data (PRIVEK and Infineon-signed X.509 cert on PUBEK) will prove that his claim is true.
Actually, most likely the keys stored inside the chip's non-volatile memory are probably encrypted, just to prevent that sort of attack.
I worked with similar technology in a previous job. When Tarnovsky said "This chip is mean, man - it's like a ticking time bomb if you don't do something right,"
My guess is he wasn’t kidding. These sorts of chips have all sorts of counter measures to make this sort of attack difficult. The algorithms built into the circuits on the chip are designed to make eavesdropping hard. You can send different commands to the chip, and ask it to decode different amounts of data, but it will intentionally insert randomness into the time and number of operations to do the work to prevent you from gleaning information about what is going on inside the chip. I’m sure there are circuits that do nothing other than generate spurious electrical impulses so that trying to sense what the chip is doing remotely won’t work. The only way to even attempt an attack like this is to do what Tarnovsky did, and strip off the packaging. Assuming you didn’t just destroy it, even then you aren’t home free. I’m sure there are other safe guards built into the chips. Oh, did the voltage drop just now across that one circuit? That’s probably an attack – the chip just deleted the keys you were trying to recover and is now useless. Did that operation take too long because someone hooked up their own custom circuit in an attempt to decode what was going on? Yeah, that’s out too bye bye secret keys Interrupt the power to the key storage area for a nanosecond while you try to connect your probe? I’m sorry, you’re done. Did you just read out the data out of the protected storage out of sequence? Well, not only is that data encrypted (and therefore useless), the chip detected it, and intentionally burned out a small inaccessible fuse buried inside the chip and bricked itself. You’re done. Did you just inject an internal command with your probe that wasn't expected? Yep, you just blew another fuse. Go home.
You have to connect your probes in exactly the right place, in exactly the right way, and not disturb the electrical properties of the circuit you tapped into to prevent the chip from knowing that you are there and triggering a counter-measure.
I don’t know which counter measures the TPM modules from Infineon implement, but if they are current with the sort of technology out there, this hack was really really super damn hard.
Sure, with enough time, money, skill, patience, and physical access to the machine, anything can eventually be broken. The idea of the TPM was to make it expensive enough to hack that the average thief won’t bother. If you are relying on a TPM only to protect secrets on a mobile device (which can be stolen and then hacked by a well funded company or government) you either deserve what you got, or you’ve made way too many well funded and motivated enemies.
[...] remember that TPM is about keeping you our of your own computer[...]
Um, no. TPMs are designed for three things: 1) establish a hardware root of trust for boot (i.e., make sure that you're actually booting your OS and not a rootkit first), 2) provide lightweight, secure and fast cryptographic operations (so you don't have to do something stupid like store a cryptographic key in plaintext on your HD), and 3) allow remote attestation of a computer's software stack (i.e., verifying the integrity of the OS and other pieces of software...very useful for distributed systems).
Yes, there are applications of TPMs for DRM, but that is a side effect and not a primary factor. Furthermore, in the case of general purpose computers (which does not include gaming platforms like the Xbox), the TPM best practices make it very clear that the TPM should only be activated with the user's explicit knowledge and consent. I.e., it is the owner of the hardware who decides if the TPM will be used, not the software vendors. Of course, hardware vendors are not obliged to follow the best practices, but that's not the fault of TCG.
Why don't you have him just sign something with that public key signature rather than divulging the private key to the world?
Perhaps a signed copy of the Gutenberg Press release of Aesop's fables???
The Eagle and the Arrow
An Eagle was soaring through the air when suddenly it heard
the whizz of an Arrow, and felt itself wounded to death. Slowly
it fluttered down to the earth, with its life-blood pouring out of
it. Looking down upon the Arrow with which it had been pierced,
it found that the shaft of the Arrow had been feathered with one
of its own plumes. "Alas!" it cried, as it died,
"We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction."
I have been researching on this hack for hours upon hours, and something just doesn't add up. Earlier reports were of him cracking the SLE 66 CL which is embedded in the TPM but is NOT the TPM itself. The chips he has been using are cheap ones from China. The issue at hand is that Infineon is a German company, just a little different from your run-of-the-mill Chinese company. When you sum these things up, you can't really surmise that he has in fact cracked the Infineon TPM. So what if he has hacked a similar chip? You can't just go around saying that you have cracked a top-of-the-line Infineon. Every chip is NOT created equally.
On the flip side, there is an easy way for him to prove me wrong. Every Infineon TPM comes with an Endorsement Key, basically an RSA secret key. The purpose of this key is that it should be kept secret and never realized off the chip, not to software, not to any other board component. Infineon TPMs come with X.509 certificates issued by Infineon. If Tarnovsky has truly hacked this one out, he should be able to extract and publish the private part of the Endorsement Key along with Infineon's certificate on that key. All that he has to do is show that he has these TWO pieces of data.
But is he up for it?