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Malicious Hardware Hacking May Be the Next Frontier
An anonymous reader writes "It's a given that hackers will target software, and that's enough for many people to worry about. But now there's the possibility that hackers would hide malicious code in the hardware itself. A hardware hack could be an annoyance, by stopping a mobile phone from functioning. Or it could be more dangerous, if it damages the way a critical system operates. Villasenor says there are several types of attacks. Broadly they would fall into two categories: one is when a block stops a chip from functioning, while the other involves shipping data out."
Then again, July not.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I think somebody accidentally the headline.
"A hardware hack could do [bad thing] or even [really bad thing]!" What about, "A hardware hack could free users from restriction systems?" or perhaps "A hardware hack could allow a mechanic to work on a transmission that was locked down by the manufacturer?"
Palm trees and 8
Someone accidentally the whole thing.
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People have been hacking hardware for a really long time, longer than they have been hacking software. My security engineering textbook lists a number of hardware hacks that were used for espionage, particularly side channel attacks and other signals intelligence. Creating hardware trojan horses is an old trick; you might even say it dates back as far as the Trojan war.
Palm trees and 8
Yeah, THAT sounds practical. The article author watches/reads too much science fiction.
I think it is possible that could hide malicious code in the. It could even potentially words from sentences. In Soviet Russia you.
It may finally answer who was phone though. Hackers was phone.
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Disclaimer: I've been involved in some research in verification of ASICs to uncover trojan hardware. Frankly, I think the threat of hardware hacks tends to be overblown.
The problem with planting Trojan circuits in hardware is that they're traceable. Given a compromised chip, you can locate the manufacturer and the fab it came from, and work backwards to the people who had access to the layout. It would be a financial and P.R. disaster for any third party vendor that allowed such a thing to happen. Who would ever trust them again with a design? These companies want to make money, and allowing government or criminal organizations to compromise the manufacturing process is too big a risk.
On top of that, using a hardware hack is equivalent to firing a shotgun into a swarm of gnats. How can you know that a hacked chip is going to make it into a box that just might happen to be used by a competitor you care about? It's an insane risk with a ridiculously small hope of payoff.
The way to compromise systems is the way that has worked extremely well so far - via software. You can target the attack, you can cover your tracks, and you have plausible deniability if you're caught. If you bribe someone inside the organization, you can place the software you want right on the machines you care about. And as long as organizations keep using Windows, you'll never run out of attack vectors.