Slashdot Mirror
Airgap-Jumping Malware May Use Ultrasonic Networking To Communicate
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Dan Goodwin writes at Ars Technica about a rootkit that seems straight out of a science-fiction thriller. According to security consultant Dragos Ruiu one day his MacBook Air, on which he had just installed a fresh copy of OS X, spontaneously updated the firmware that helps it boot. Stranger still, when Ruiu then tried to boot the machine off a CD ROM, it refused and he also found that the machine could delete data and undo configuration changes with no prompting. Next a computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting and further investigation showed that multiple variants of Windows and Linux were also affected. But the story gets stranger still. Ruiu began observing encrypted data packets being sent to and from an infected laptop that had no obvious network connection with—but was in close proximity to—another badBIOS-infected computer. The packets were transmitted even when the laptop had its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed. Ruiu also disconnected the machine's power cord so it ran only on battery to rule out the possibility it was receiving signals over the electrical connection. Even then, forensic tools showed the packets continued to flow over the airgapped machine. Then, when Ruiu removed internal speaker and microphone connected to the airgapped machine, the packets suddenly stopped. With the speakers and mic intact, Ruiu said, the isolated computer seemed to be using the high-frequency connection to maintain the integrity of the badBIOS infection as he worked to dismantle software components the malware relied on. It's too early to say with confidence that what Ruiu has been observing is a USB-transmitted rootkit that can burrow into a computer's lowest levels and use it as a jumping off point to infect a variety of operating systems with malware that can't be detected. It's even harder to know for sure that infected systems are using high-frequency sounds to communicate with isolated machines. But after almost two weeks of online discussion, no one has been able to rule out these troubling scenarios, either. 'It looks like the state of the art in intrusion stuff is a lot more advanced than we assumed it was,' says Ruiu. 'The take-away from this is a lot of our forensic procedures are weak when faced with challenges like this. A lot of companies have to take a lot more care when they use forensic data if they're faced with sophisticated attackers.'"
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/31/1955239/ars-cross-platform-malware-communicates-with-sound
Is it really SO hard to get rid of dupes that are less than 24 hours old? You seriously call yourself editor if you don't even manage to get those basic things straight?
Bust out an oscilloscope and a logic analyzer and start looking at these signals. It shouldn't be hard to get a waveform capture of the audio running over the speaker and the handshake between a USB device and the host.
A certain alphabet agency that's been in trouble for tapping all kinds of folks lately? Or are they too clueless to put together a monster like this?
1. You'd have to write a boot loader that a) loads your bare-metal-level sound and microphone driver, networking driver, sonic network protocol, and payload.
2. You'd have to write the forementioned a) bare-metal-level sound and mic drivers. Network drivers that might as well be bare-metal, implement a sonic network protocol, and then get them to successfully transmit your payload.
3. You have to TEST this combo on many different machines.
We're either looking at someone who has a LOT of free time and hardware on his hands, or a 1st or 2nd world military-level dev team with LOTS of cash to spend, IMO.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
You've discounted the most obvious option - an attention whore who isn't adverse to making shit up.
You can say NSA we're all adults (sic) here. Besides they have a hard time spelling so you're just as likely to not be flagged.
What is being 'proposed' is NOT anything infecting through the speaker/microphone, but a pre-existing inection (that was probably USB based)
then communication through these methods - a VERY VERY different thing.
The hype and BS layers need to be peeled off this.
There is no possible infection vector via microphone/speaker, or via power cord as semi-implied (unless you had a powerline modem..), it is simply a
way to get data out of the airgapped but INFECTED machine to others that may not be airgapped.
The 'solution' here is simple, remove the infection! there is more to security than just network airgapping!
Time to go back to security 101.
Sure they can. Maybe not very efficiently, and not far above the range of human hearing, but they are analog devices, so there is no sharp cutoff at some limit. I agree on your conclusion about the fool nonetheless.
April Fools Day is five months away. Come back and repost this then.
Where, exactly, were these "packets" flowing when the networking cards were removed?
Are they UDP or TCP?
How long does it take you to download a movie over your speaker?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Anyone who identifies a dupe can be moderated +6 awesome for 7 days.
Anyone who submits a dupe is automatically modded -1 for 7 days.
Karma bonus for both memory over a week, and reading comprehension. And fuck dice for ruining what once was mediocre.
I read the original article, but I don't see any part where someone recorded what was going out the speaker and looked at it. If someone is sending data over audio, it will show on a scope. Clearly that's not going to do much unless the receiving side has some kind of modem code listening for it.
Then there are claims like "It seemed to send TLS encrypted commands in the HostOptions field of DHCP packets." Attacking via DHCP packets is plausible; DHCP clients get told a lot of things they're supposed to do, and some of the older vendor-specific extensions are very insecure. But TLS? TLS isn't used within the DHCP protocol itself. There's a way to store DHCP configuration info in an LDAP server and have a DHCP server access it via LDAP.
If someone is seeing strange DHCP packets, and reloading the BIOS won't help, it's possible that what's going on involves an attack via the network controller. The fancier network controller parts now have CPUs and EEPROM. This may be an attack which puts code in the network controller which in turn patches the BIOS.
The people studying this need to list exactly what network ICs the machines involved are using. Some network devices are too dumb to be used as an attack vector, but some have whole protocol stacks, WiFi support, remote administration support, etc. It would not be surprising if those were attackable.
I've expected attacks via network controllers for years. That's been used to attack servers. There's a known attack on PCI controllers which can survive rebooting and reloading the BIOS.
If the machine has wireless networking hardware and the attack exploits the network controller, it may be able to do wireless networking even if the user thinks they have the hardware disabled. Time to open up the machine, clip onto the JTAG port on the network controller, and read out the device memory with a JTAG debugger. Compare the dumps with other machines.
I think it's transmitted by LSD. My computer stopped doing that kind of stuff as soon as I stopped taking it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It would be easier and cheaper to pay the manufacturers (or, if you're the Chinese doing the manufacturing, order them) to hide the basic, hardware-specific components, i.e. the network protocol in the sound card, in the chips at the point of manufacture. The virus itself need only be a command/control module that activates private API's in the hardware and stores itself in a ready-made nest that was built into the machine in the factory. That way, the hardware-specific bits can be modularized and isolated from the C&C, reducing complexity and infection difficulty.
Captcha: horror
It's just a ghost using your machines.
With most sound chips attached directly to the PCI(e) bus, it's not out of the question to initiate a DMA into memory before the bootloader can start. Gives you a very nice pre-BIOS vector.
You need both computers infected. The air gap computer may never get on a network or infected usb again so you try and really keep your code in the computers safe.
The networked computer is easy. The non networked computer needs to be listening for new data/code and to send small amounts of data back out.
The amount of application data needed to sniff passwords, hide the passwords, get them ready to send, the sound sending software and hide from new AV detect might not leave much room for better spoof options.
Hope the user just blames a faulty consumer grade motherboard and reboots as normal vowing never to buy that brand again?
Also the skill set needed to spoof whatever the user sees might get too cute and give the creators origins away. You go from any very skilled global coder to *some* state sponsor. Better to keep the target guessing.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
No, you're still wrong.
Here's how it works:
Because you couldn't here my clear my through [sic] when I typed the word adult in reference to the /. community.
See how easy that is?
Required reading for internet skeptics
From the various leaks it appears that such a thing is technology far beyond what the NSA is capable of. After that Star Trek set thing it's starting to look like the Albanian State Washing Machine Company is far more capable in dealing with technology.
But people just beat their chest and ridiculed the people posting, locking and shuffling threads or in some cases on commercial antivirus forums, deleting threads and moving them to hidden sections or trashed them altogether.
I believe this is a huge conspiracy which has been going on for years. People in malware forums have been shouting from the rooftops about this but no one wanted to listen.
What you overlooked and should have read:
1. Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care - Government & Stealth Malware
http://anonymous.livelyblog.com/2012/10/05/nobody-seems-to-notice-and-nobody-seems-to-care-government-stealth-malware/
2. Spy agency ASIO are hacking into personal computers
http://anonymous.livelyblog.com/2013/01/13/spy-agency-asio-are-hacking-into-personal-computers/
3. Will security firms detect police spyware?
http://anonymous.livelyblog.com/2013/09/17/will-security-firms-detect-police-spyware/
And several PDF files on blackhat pages, forums, and conferences.
These attacks against non-networked computers runs deep - some changes are so subtle and appear to blend into normal black box Windows activities people overlook them. Read article #1 which includes the sad state of malware detection on *nix.
When you Google enough for firmware, PCI, AGP, BIOS, sound card malware, SDR, FRS, and why some distros autoload the ax25, rose, and netrom modules by default (including TAILS, check it for yourself with lsmod), it is quite unusual. Why would a distribution like TAILS need hamradio modules? They're in there, too, in addition to the ax25, rose, netrom modules. Batman mesh networking is included in TAILS too.
People repeat the same mantra: the only safe computer is a non-networked computer. This is a lie. The truth is, an entirely shielded TEMPEST room with no network connections and shielding down to every piece of the computer is the best test environment, but who is going to take such precautions? Is the shielded computer in the shielded room bound for other locations outside of this safe room?
Wikileaks have released Spy Files, listing many companies developing malware to root your box beyond detection often aimed at Governments and Military sources. These secret communications are no secret, and some have been detected via FRS, but that's only one source out of many.
"Because you couldn't here my clear my through when I typed the word adult in reference to the /. community. "
I had to read that about 15 times before it started to make sense. I think you were trying to be sarcastic. Is that possible? English doesn't seem to be your first, or even second language, but to indicate sarcasm one uses quotes.
The latin "sic" means THIS, you use it when you are copying something verbatim but you know it is wrong.
"Sorry that one went over your head"
You might want to check your arrogant attitude and tone it down a bit. You aren't as "adult" as you think you are and could benefit from LISTENING to others and maybe LEARN something instead of looking like a complete JACKASS.
As the Ars article points out, the individual pieces needed to do all this have already been proven over the years.
Here's why it makes even more sense to me.
A military minded person cannot allow threats to exist anywhere. If anyone anywhere has a weapon that they don't, they must immediately take steps to duplicate it, and defend against it.
Now take that mindset, combine it with a large team of military hackers. Now every single exploit ever publicly disclosed becomes a checkbox on a list somewhere. As a recent Snowden leak story showed, 0-day vulnerabilities have been purchased by the government. We can be sure they run the largest honeypot networks in existence and immediately dissect every new worm, root kit and exploit that touches them.
Every theoretical exploit must be tested for feasibility, turned into a proof-of-concept and then packaged as a tool.
And all that $$ and hacker power is under the command of someone who wants turnkey solutions and "kill switches" for everything.
So it's definitely possible that such tools exist. But why would he be a target? I dunno, maybe someone wants advance notice on what the presenters at upcoming security conferences might be talking about so they can Barnaby Jack them?
Sometimes people will claim something they strongly believe already exists in order to motivate people to look for it and find their proof. Sometimes they get lucky and proof is found, other times they get exposed for it. I hope he's wrong, I really want him to be wrong, but part of me believes it's real because it's definitely possible. After all, if it's just a few years out, then "they" have had it for a decade or more.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
These machines do two things:
1. They try to infect other machines. They seem to use several methods for this. One is infecting USB sticks and other media. They have been observed abusing an old windows exploit that uses true type fonts as the vector for that.
2. They are trying to communicate with other infected machines. They use some rather inventive carriers for that it seems. One of these appears to be sound. How it works isn't published yet. Another seems to be to use out-of-band communication by putting data inside host-option packets in DHCP. It's obvious that the malware uses such side channels to avoid detection. The OOB communication is done purely to keep in touch with "the swarm" and is not used to infect other machines.
The real nastiness appears to be that this malware is able to infect multiple operating systems that are usually passed by malware manufacturers and also happens to be able to nest itself on the eeprom of infected machines. Both are more or less "a first" and the combination hasn't been seen in the wild either.
Right now, there's a lot of discovery being done and a lot of speculation taking place as to who made it, what it can do, how it gets itself in eeprom and prevents itself from being overwritten during reflashing of the bios. It's not known if the virus will attempt to infect virtual machines, or will only infect machines that will let it nest in it's bios. Also, anything malicious apart from infecting and communicating hasn't been observed. For all we know, it may be a true worm that does nothing but replicate and is an out of control experiment.
So far, no infections appear to have been seen on virtual machines, or machines that don't have an intel chipset. I haven't seen any linux infected machines mentioned, but don't hold your breath on that, if *BSD and OSX have been infected, Linux may very well be infected too. Windows is infected for certain, but what versions are exactly vulnerable isn't clear to me at this time.
Thus far, the only thing that can be advised to prevent infection is the usual; don't trust content/media from sources that could be spreading infections, knowingly or not and keep your system up to date. If applicable, set your bios read-only with hardware switches or jumpers and if at all possible, put passwords on bioses and put software blocks on updates as well. To this date it's not known if and what software blocks will prevent the malware, but it's best to give it as few attack surfaces as possible.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
"You have to TEST this combo on many different machines."
I'm calling hoax as fuck on this whole thing, but for just your microphone and speakers, the majority of laptops are using RealTek. Bare metal for that shouldn't be too hard to handle, as the driverset remains the same across all AC97 models and HD models. Two compliant bare-metal drivers shouldn't be too hard to fit in. Now, transmitting over ultrasonic is a whole different beast, and to do this through a supposedly truly airgapped room via noise should be impossible, as real airgaps will easily kill those frequencies.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
https://github.com/djrbliss/rose-exploit
Hey buddy its real. The bandwidth of this type of communication is low but the hardware will do it. The startup I work for is focused on transmitting data through high frequency audio and we're not the only ones.
Case studies include Yamaha info sound, Sonic Notify, and LISNR.
The only reason I'd doubt this story is because the bandwidth is less than 300 bits per second in most implementations I've seen.
I haven't yet seen mention of someone setting up microphones sensitive to ultrasonic frequencies to check to see what, if any, odd sounds are being made by the computers. A lot of extraordinary claims are being made and I just don't see the requisite extraordinary evidence.
Yeah, I feel like I'm taking fucking crazy pills reading this idiocy.
> Sure they can. Maybe not very efficiently, and not far above the range of human hearing, but they are analog devices, so there is no sharp cutoff at some limit.
To explain a little more: The requirement for mic/speaker on a Mac is to generate/record audio in the audible frequency range in high quality. To have high quality on the high end of that spectrum, you'll have to use a mic/speaker that will still work at yet higher frequencies (read: ultrasonic), with decreasing quality the higher you go.
So in the ultrasonic range you do have a working mic/speaker with mediocre quality. Add: ... and you have a working network link.
- filters to compensate for different output volume at different frequencies (sorry -- missing the technical terms here)
- detection for frequencies that should better be avoided because the signal/noise ratio is too bad
- error detection/correction on the digital side
- retransmission of lost packets
For an engineer with embedded programming experience, this shouldn't be that big of a deal. The challenge isn't only in coding it up, it is also in looking up and comprehending possibly vast documentation needed to pull it off. The code, presumably, runs in system management mode on x86 machines.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
It really isn't as hard as it sounds. A dedicated engineer (or perhaps two, depending on how many chipsets one wishes to support) could pull it off in a year. Presumably one could leech some driver code from open-source kernels like Linux or FreeBSD.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
An air gap merely means that no network or other data cables cross it. It doesn't mean keeping things physically away!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
LOL, what a bunch of uninformed bullshit. Quality, in audio, generally means distortion. When you've got narrowband signals, typical harmonic distortion is irrelevant in in transmission because the harmonics are way outside of your bandwidth. It is somewhat important in reception, since you've got leakage between frequencies, but that doesn't need much mitigation, typically. Even intermodulation and other kinds of distortion won't matter all that much. It'd take a bit of testing to determine what kind of modulation would get the best S/N ratio, but I presume that BPSK would be easy to deal with as you've got decent ability to detect signal strength to determine if your demodulator output is worth anything.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
A neighbourhood ecologist friend of mine has a bat detector. Shall we settle this once and for all?
Why do you think network security engineers always have headphones on? They're not listening to music, they're packet-sniffing.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
It is.
Is this why my smart phones battery life is so bad?
While ultra-sonic communication seems plausible at first, it fails to take into account that the audio-system is not up to it. For one thing, most microphones are of the ElCheapo variant, and cannot handle signals above the highest frequencies humans can hear in any meaningful way. For another, the typical, sane audio-design has cutoff-filters that prevent ultra-sonics from being processed. Then, the speakers are pretty unsuitable for generating ultra-sonics. All this leads to very, very bad signal transmission capabilities with very, very low bandwidth.
On the other hand, no "packets" sent are visible anywhere when using a channel not known to the OS, and this one is certainly not known to the OS as a data-transmission channel. And ultra-sonics are easy to measure: Just get a ultra-sonics sensor (basically a microphone with a different than normal frequency range) and hook it up to a cheap digital oscilloscope. The signals will be very, very obvious. That this test has not been done indicates the possible/likely fraudulent nature of this story.
The article also seems to suggest that infections can come in that way, which is complete nonsense. Audio-input channels can take _any_ audio signal without buffer overflow or the like and turning an audio signal into code would require advanced demodulation software which is just not available on the target before infection.
I think somebody is looking for some cheap press-exposure and people are (as usual) to gullible to see the obvious large implausibilities and gaps in the explanation given.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. Utter plausibility fail.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Pretty sure the Mac can be set to record and playback af 48k samples per second.That gives you at least 4kHz of bandwidth above the limits of human hearing right there. With modern encodings, that's probably good for around 20kbps.
Did you sample your office full of identical models from the same manufacturer to come up with that statistic?
Dell laptop here (so not an unusual brand), using an audio codec from IDT.
Working with this tech is *literally* my job. The speakers in a common laptop or smartphone can reliably create signals up to 21kHz. Likewise, the microphones found on these devices can hear frequencies in this range. The modulation schemes for inaudible data over audio hardware are limited, but they exist and work pretty damn well.
Not quite true, but signal levels will be extremely low and signal quality will be very bad because of sampling rates in the A/D, D/A that are designed for audible frequencies only, filters that are designed to prevent ultra-sonics getting in or out, unsuitable microphones and speakers, etc. In practice, it could, at best, be suitable for very, very slow data transmission, think acoustic coupler.
So, no, it is not going to work. And of course, there is no way to infect a computer via its microphone.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Tentatively, "this".
Dunno, it's all above my pay grade really, but either this is as you say utter dipshittery or it's so obscure it's irrelevant. Reads like a poorly written April fool joke.
..
I think the claim is that it's going to keep infected through the mic, that is, new rootkit pieces being put in through it.
so the badbios would have mic input drivers built in, which would still allow throughput to regular audio functionality.
the author should have provided examples of the communications. I mean, isn't this missing the usual proofs, like dumps of the said bios supermalware, dumps of the audio communications etc..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I seem to recall some anecdote from at least 10 years ago in which an artificial life program, running/evolving on a desktop machine 'learned' to use the power hardware in the computer to signal externally using emf to an adjacent system (I think the neighboring system was a monitoring system that was empowered to 'dump' "food" into the primary when it hit certain breakpoints, and the AI was triggering that faster or something).
That could be apocryphal, though, as I've never seen anything more about it and can't find anything on the web about it (well, it could be buried under other web hits as anything relating to artificial life/intelligence gets buried in educational hits).
-Styopa
Great. So then we'll have a race to be more annoying than "Frist P0st!".
Um, why did you "sic" up there?
Because there should be punctuation between "NSA" and "we're" and there was none, perhaps?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
What? You didn't know that the NSA was really a front for the Albanian State Washing Machine Company?
They've been running the world all along.
well, that's so that they can bestboy and let in "editorials" and other "original content", so some people get to advertise themselves with shit articles of shit troll quality.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
But what's the upper frequency cutoff of the speaker?
That someone used audio to spread malware is impressive, that they were able to gain control of the machines is even more impressive.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
What a stupid prank article. Oh yeah, my uninfected computer interpreted ultrasonic sounds and saved them as an executable file on the root drive on its own. Ah huh. I can't believe anyone is stupid enough to believe this. The BIOS chip can't even send data directly to the speakers. This is such complete sci-fi nonsense, how are any of you taking this seriously?
It's not a dupe, it's a ghost. whooooo whoooo BOOO!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If it's using some sort of communications ("ultrasonic networking") it's **NOT** airgapped in any way, shape, or form.
"Airgapped" means no remote automated communications of ANY kind would be possible. You can't interact with it by remote, period- you have to have a human being log into a local console to do things with it. This is a failure of the airgapping measures being exploited is all- or it was never really airgapped to begin with.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Dude...lay down the crack pipe. It's making you post bullshit- and Anonymously at that.
Any OS? Really? This would mean you're using OpenCL or OpenGL/OpenGLES to do things- just for starters. But, in truth, there's no inbound/outbound pathway from or to the GPU (The GPU generally doesn't have I/O access to things and for good reasons...) without an additional OpenGL/OpenCL application as a front-end. Which would be VERY OS specific.
Sorry, but the person in question that claimed that it was possible hasn't the foggiest about what he was talking about. But...nice try.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You also have to get the target machines to successfully RECEIVE and IMPLEMENT the payload.
Are you paying attention? A speaker is an analog device. It doesn't have a "cutoff", it has a frequency response curve. Speakers typically used in laptops are quite small, so tend to perform better at higher frequencies than lower ones. Typically I'd guess they're +/- 3dB between 200Hz and 15kHz, with more attenuation outside of that range. Better ones (as might be fitted to a Mac) might manage to stay within +/- 3dB between 100Hz and 20kHz.
Ultrasonic communications should be possible, but remote exploits with them is complete BS...It shouldn't be too hard to capture these signals if regular computer mics are picking them up.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This problem will solve itself just as soon as the RIAA lawyers decide the malware is transmitting copyrighted works.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You've discounted the most obvious option - an attention whore who isn't adverse to making shit up.
Says a random person on a random site. Let's see your fantastic work that makes Ruiu's body of work nothing more than that of a small-fry amateur who has to resort to lying to make a name for himself. Oh wait, Ruiu is actually a seasoned security researcher, running multiple well-known cons and contests? Who already gets more attention than anything but a handful of other security researchers?
I think the only thing your post does is demonstrate your own thinking: that the only way to make waves in the world is to be an attention whore.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
"Did you sample your office full of identical models from the same manufacturer to come up with that statistic?"
I build every computer myself. What identical model? What fucking manufacturer? This is slashdot, if you aren't building your own system, you should be shutting the fuck up.
Did you bother to ensure your brain was functioning this morning before making such a smart-ass and obviously wrong question?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
A real secure air gapped room allows NOTHING in or out without permission. This includes sound.
I know someone who will never obtain a security clearance.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Are you paying attention? We're talking about usable output above 22k. A 3dB rolloff at 15k is going to be what at 22k?
Fact-check: the "star trek set thing" concerned Keith Alexander's time at the Army's Intelligence and Security Command. Alexander is now head of the NSA, yes. And it was intelligence-related. It was not, however, the NSA.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mind-keith-alexander-star-trek
but nobody ever took it seriously.
A.K.A. "call the modem library," A.K.A. "done in 30 seconds with a quick Google search."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When he said the main indication of infection was being unable to read a CD-Rom, I immediately thought of SONY Corporation. They had a pretty good rootkit for DRM (digital rights management) last century that they were trying to get installed everyplace possible (just to ensure profits so we know it was legal).
They would have a vested interest in not reading CDs and having Bulgarians or Disney over-write Sony's DRM.
When they finally had to let it go, their engineers probably contracted for some security work with another shell company owned by the Chinese or the NSA.
Slashdot used to check for duped link in the submission...Somehow that requirement was gone - along with the dupe-link check.
Probably some kind of bios infection on the server. ;-)
Just a guess
We're either looking at someone who has a LOT of free time and hardware on his hands, or a 1st or 2nd world military-level dev team with LOTS of cash to spend, IMO.
Or a corporation like Sony looking to really fix DRM or like Apple looking at easier ways to update bad software without letting any of its customers know there actually was a problem. There was never a problem because it's not happening now and all the comments about the problem were removed. It's a Chinese way of doing things, like yin-yank, I mean yin-yang.
What? You didn't know that the NSA was really a front for the Albanian State Washing Machine Company?
They've been running the world all along.
Well thank God someone's in charge. Sometimes it seems as if everything is just running on its own with no planning or forethought, just everybody trying to grab as much sex and money as possible ;-)
The speakers and microphones are analog, but they're behind D/A and A/D converters - which are in turn behind lowpass filters. So, there is actually a cutoff.
That is a true statement--there actually is a cutoff in the possible sound the speakers generate.
However, there is not a severe cut-off about the electrical signals any specific circuit could generate. I'd be interested to know how the speakers were turned off. If they were disabled as hardware (which I assume since he turned them both (speaker and microphone) off at once) or if the speaker was merely muted yet the infection still worked.
Enquiring minds want to know,
Anyone who identifies a dupe can be moderated +6 awesome for 7 days.
Anyone who submits a dupe is automatically modded -1 for 7 days.
So, I submit a story and you submit a story. Mine is accepted in five minutes, yours in two hours and they're both the same story. Why should you be penalized for submitting a story? However, I've tagged dupes in the firehose before, how about of you spot a dupe you get mod points (to moderate others) as a reward?
Free Martian Whores!
That gives you at least 4kHz of bandwidth above the limits of human hearing right there.
Actually only 2KHz because of sampling theory.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I agree that this may be possible. But after reading the article there are several things that don't pass the sniff test. Hopefully this will get the peer review it needs.
My first thought was the website for this story was infected with a browser virus, and the incredible story was there as candy to draw us in.
Infecting multiple OS, using some common hidden/unknown USB feature seems difficult to believe. What is the commonality in chipsets? The virus would have to run at the BIOS level.. right? Under the OS? Injecting itself up into OS' that it supports? Sure, there are few motherboards. and I've also heard of viruses that live in RAM/GPU and survive reboots. I'll also forgive people for possible misusing "ultrasonic" when they might mean - higher/lower frequencies than humans can hear but the PC can generate. Also don't forget - video cards and other electronics make noises too - I had a video card that when drawing at high FPS made a very high pitch sound that could be manipulated (I'm one of those weirdos who can "hear" CRTs). Maybe the fan is sending Morse-code.
This is also an interesting network driver. I assume he was doing packet sniffing from within the OS. I can see the following - the OS sends data packets to the network card (which go nowhere because the cable is pulled out) - but the infected BIOS sees those and copies them out the speaker. However, he pulled the network card... so I would expect the OS to shutdown all connectivity features - so what was the sniffer attaching to? (or rather - what was he sniffing? - no pun) Either that or a software driver had to be installed (or hook the virtual loopback). All possible. Although on my laptop only the wifi/bluetooth can come out - the Ethernet is on the mainboard.
All of it may be hypothetically possible. I can't wait for an update and see the results. Need to think simple - those kinds of attacks tend to work.
The author on Ars is Dan Goodin, not Goodwin.
most DACs can actually do 96khz if they want. (so 48khz max reproducible freq.) and most humans can really only hear up to 16khz even though the "theoretical max" is 22khz. with all that bandwidth to work in, 300 baud shouldnt be hard.
Except that's not what the article is saying. The article doesn't claim that the system's bios was remotely compromised using audio. What it is saying is that a system that _has been compromised_ is using its sound equipment to communicate with other systems that have likewise been compromised, allowing infected systems to maintain communication with one another despite an airgap.
This could be viewed as 'extraordinary' in the sense of 'something that does not ordinarily happen', but it is not 'extraordinary' in the sense of 'something that defies conventional belief'. As many people have pointed out this is the same basic principle that modems use, merely in a somewhat different 'packaging'.
In that sense it is no more extraordinary than claiming that someone has painted an elephant blue. It is not something which commonly happens yet the possibility of its existence hardly defy belief.
That gives you at least 4kHz of bandwidth above the limits of human hearing right there.
Actually only 2KHz because of sampling theory.
The upper limit of human hearing is generally considered to be 20 kHz, mainly because that's a nice round number (it's substantially above the mean for all humans, but a decent estimate for children). If you mean to assert that we should be considering the limit to be 22kHz, you might want to make that assertion explicitly, and be prepared to back it up; if so, do consider the demographics of the people any such malware is at risk of detection from (IT workers, sysadmins, security researchers, but generally not grade-school children).
GP specifically mentioned 48 kHz sample-rate, giving a maximum representable frequency of 24 kHz. So his claim of 4 kHz (the band from 20 kHz to 24 kHz) above the limits of human hearing is rather accurate. (Perhaps you were thinking of the red book CD sample-rate of 44.1 kHz, instead of the one GP actually mentioned?)
p.s. SI. Learn it!
"kHz" means 1000 Hz.
"KHz" means 1 kelvin * Hz.
Quickly! To the Batdetector!
Just curious, was assembly tank game Tank Wars or Scorched Earth?
Everyone swears by Scorched Earth - there's even a Scorched Earth 3D version now, but I always preferred Tank Wars.
Maybe this is the new "hearing voices"
Some minor problems:
In general: laptop speakers and microphones are optimized for recording and producing sounds the human ear can detect. Lousy for networking.
Laptop speakers and microphones are also not calibrated with a high degree of precision.
You would need access to the boot loader which would have to come from a different "virus" or at the factory -- in which case, you already "own" the computer.
Recommendations:
Decent anti-virus software and a reasonable security policy.
Tin Foil lined Laptop Bag.
-Dan
Well, he didn't explicitly consider it, but I doubt he would deny the possibility. I wouldn't.
OTOH...if, as reported, many different people have already examined the case that's probably not the most likely alternative.
Still, I don't think the evidence I've heard supports some of the more extreme suppositions. Personally, I'd start looking for a Java, Javascript, or Mono/NET application. One that can demonize itself. I think that infection from a USB stick sound highly plausible, but that's not a sufficient explanation of the mechanism. After that, there's nothing particularly unreasonable about ultrasonic communications, just unexpected.
P.S.: As for those who say you wouldn't expect to find OpenBSD on a system outside of a laboratory, I believe that that's where he's working. He *was* reported as a security researcher.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That can be done, but that's a lot more extreme than a simple air gap. An air gap just means there's no electrical or radio connection, i.e., the signal has to go over air. Isolated is what I would call what you're referring to, and I have no reason to believe that that was meant.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's using Microcode in the CPU that is received over 3G cellular.
Remember SandyBridge advertised this capability for supposedly stopping theft....
But it's really just a backdoor so they always have a network connection to your box. They can run compiler trust attacks or just read arbitrary data from memory after scanning application fingerprints.
I've been saying for awhile now that this is the next attack vector but the last few times I've mentioned it, you trolls downmodded me to infinity.
So please listen again. It's not the sound card.... they use that to detect when people are close to avoid transmitting if I were to guess. His tinkering proved they should stop before being detected.
Yeah, I thought of this, too. Here's some background info on the tech involved. It seems to fit, the article doesn't specifically say only certain newer intel processors are at risk, but it doesn't give any counterexamples that would rule it out, either. This is an obscure deliberately OOB data transmission channel that seems like it could well be the hidden vector, only... Surely a security specialist would be aware of this as a possible mechanism? Also, why would disconnecting the mic/speakers stop a transmission if it's really using 3G? Could be wrong, but I've reluctantly concluded that this line of investigation is probably a red herring in regards to the case at hand, although it's certainly alarming enough in its own right.
It is missing the proofs, and you are asking exactly the right questions. Some people with the relevant experience have looked at parts of them and found nothing. Here is one link: http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/1pm66y/meet_badbios_the_mysterious_mac_and_pc_malware/
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The theoretical max always used to be considered 20kHz (as another user pointed out, for adults the limit is more like 16kHz - I've measured my own limit at about 15kHz, with significant drop off starting at around 12kHz, but I may have above average hearing loss). The 22.05kHz theoretical max for CDs was supposed to leave some room for anti-alias filters.
Oh - so you mean the place is OK because it's only the guy at the top that's a complete loony?
OK, you have a point, I've seen a few places where the new CEO was a complete loony and it took a while for everything to go bad, however this is just one thing out of many that happens to sum up that shambolic web of subcontractors who should have been a tight knit group of professionals.
makes a fine covert channel to get data to or from a compromised router, and NSA has shown interest in mass-pwning routers.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
I haven't seen that apostrophe in two decades or more
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.