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Security Industry Incapable of Finding Firmware Attackers
New submitter BIOS4breakfast writes "Research presented at CanSecWest has shown that despite the fact that we know that firmware attackers, in the form of the NSA, definitely exist, there is still a wide gap between the attackers' ability to infect firmware, and the industry's ability to detect their presence. The researchers from MITRE and Intel showed attacks on UEFI SecureBoot, the BIOS itself, and BIOS forensics software. Although they also released detection systems for supporting more research and for trustworthy BIOS capture, the real question is: when is this going to stop being the domain of research and when are security companies going to get serious about protecting against attacks at this level?"
The thing is, while these are the hardest to fix and address of attacks, they're among the least useful for attackers. You can't spam people from BIOS. You can't really keylog and transmit over TCP from BIOS.
The operating system is as useful to attackers as it is to us other programmers.
Because you know, if it isn't secure, then it's not firm.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
A good start would be a list of hardware vendors that sell equipment that have hardware jumpers or switches that write protect the BIOS and other flash devices.
So... open source everything, that anyone can compile to executable. Then focus on obfuscated code, about the only avenue left for malicious code. It only takes one major manufacturer to publicly announce that "we're publishing our code so that it can be verified, unlike our competitors" for it to spread to the competitors.
I can remember when there was a jumper on the motherboard that had to be shifted before it was possible to flash the firmware. If all motherboards had that, the only way an attacker could get malware into the BIOS (or whatever other firmware they wanted to target) would be by tricking the user into changing the jumper. Not only that, many of the users who'd be foolish enough to fall for that kind of trick wouldn't have the confidence to open up their box and play with the hardware. Not all, of course, but then, no security measure is 100% effective.
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Most bioses now have a complete TCP/IP stack for things like ipmi. Keylogging only requires a few simple routines to do as well; plenty of room to implement that in current flash chips on main boards.
Hiding in firmware makes you resilient and virtually undetectable on the "normal storage". A rudimentary base to pull next stage software in that will "bootstrap" the full malware once the OS installed is all that is needed. The full malware can be fragmented and re-use existing binaries so it won't be detected. You need a trusted platform and guaranteed "safe" steps to be able to reasonably trust your computer and when firmware contains holes or malicious code, there are plenty of people that don't work for the NSA that can actually build a competent attack for that.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
If the firmware is compromised all you're going to see at the executable level is "everything is A-OK, we're all fine here."
They're never going to fix this. It isn't just a matter of publishing source code, it affects the hardware too. It needs hardware protection on the flash, for example, so that you can control, at a hardware level (eg by a button on the device) whether the flash is writable.
But by now, all of the manufacturers are so infiltrated by other agencies, the NSA, foreign governments, and business interests (having the user in control of their own security directly contradicts the aims of DRM, not to mention marketing companies); this all conspires against ever having any security over your own firmware.
Build it yourself is probably the best bet. And the nice thing is that this is becoming more practical. The biggest problem is that there is no way to verify the hardware at the chip level, but with careful design it is possible to get reasonably good security without 100% trust in all of the individual components.
But for the overwhelming majority of people, who are not motivated or able to build their own, their tech is doomed to be compromised. I don't think there is anything that can be done about that. It is a political issue, rather than technical. And in all "democracies" that I can think of, the political will is against it.
Would that include "attacks" that allow OSs other than the officially state-approved and certificate-signed ones to be booted. Like that hacker-prone and highly illegal "Linux" thing I've been hearing about? I'm glad that researchers are protecting us against such flim-flammery and obviously dangerous stuff.
In a way I find it hilarious that BIOS and UEFI both are vulnerable and that taking away the hardware owner's choice through SecureBOOT doesn't fix it.
And that when back in the day I had a systemboard with a jumper set to make the flash not writable. This is why you want some things to be simple and reliable and with little need to touch them. The resulting low frequency need to use enables things like requiring physical access and changing a jumper for the duration.
In that sense, the peecee platform is hopelessly inadequate and the bolt-on LOMs, ILOs, and such more, even UEFI, are hopelessly complicated where they shouldn't be and under-featured where they should be more powerful. Like, oh, supporting doing a full OS install over nothing but a single serial line, including configuring the network and fetching installation stuff over said network, and configuring the base install, still over serial line. That level of simplicity is entirely absent in the wintendo ecosystem, and is the source of many defects and problems, large and small.
I'm not saying that if every peecee shipped with openboot we wouldn't have infections like this. But at least tracking it down would've been a little less complicated.
There is really no way for any code running on top of another layer to verify that lower layer's integrity - it has to rely on what is reported and a malicious BIOS or UEFI layer can simply just lie to it. Hell, it's possible for a low-level hypervisor to run another, clean, BIOS/UEFI and simply virtualize every piece of hardware in the box. Likewise, it can block visibility of any traffic going in and out that it desires. This type of security has to happen at the network level instead - something outside of the device has to detect the suspicious traffic that such an attack must generate in order to be useful. That in turn requires that the networking gear has to be trustworthy and not itself owned by the attacker or have any backdoors installed at the factory (or chip maker, or etc etc).
Other committers on the project are likely review eachother's commits, especially in OpenBSD and FreeBSD
This is on the heels of an announcement by NIAP that common criteria evaluation of operating systems is too hard:
https://www.niap-ccevs.org/Documents_and_Guidance/ccevs/GPOS%20Position%20Statement.pdf
t we know that firmware attackers, in the form of the NSA, definitely exist, there is still a wide gap between the attackers' ability to infect firmware, and the industry's ability to detect their presence.
I bet the NSA can give a lot of incentives to companies not to look for or remove firmware back-doors - or even to introduce them. This could be carrots (lucrative contracts or info on what overseas competition is doing) or sticks (not getting the government contract or the CIO's wife finding out what he said in those phone-calls to his secretary).
When the kickbacks dry up.
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chewing through my restraints.
When are they going to start taking security seriously? When consumers are willing to pay more money for more secure devices. So, never.
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The most useful thing about the BIOS level hacks is it's ability to persistently keep a system infected with whatever higher level stuff you want to use. I can imagine how it must feel to resign yourself to having to reformat/re-install your OS, only to not solve the problem.
You can use Intel Trusted Execution Technologies (TXT) and Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) in servers to measure that the firmware is in a known, good state for x86 servers. Attesting/validating against a list of known, good values at boot-time would enable you to determine that the server is in a known, good state. There are solutions leveraging TXT and TPMs to protect against this attack vector in Linux servers (example: PrivateCore vCage). A challenge is that some servers do not have TPMs.
when is this going to stop being the domain of research and when are security companies going to get serious about protecting against attacks at this level?"
As soon as someone with a powerful attorney and deep pockets gets hacked via this vector and sues the OEM into oblivion would be my guess.
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You said they either find the firmware hackers or they don't.
You missed the "it's a feature, not a bug" solution.
Please go back to Logic School.
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I've got another one of such a jadoodle for you:
"When companies are willing to make a bit less profit so they protect their customers (from easily being hacked)". So, also never.
By the way: A simple motherboard jumper should cost way less than a dime. Guess why it isn't a part of all current motherboards anymore. You guessed it: removing them gave a direct profit.
When is this going to stop being the domain of research and when are security companies going to get serious about protecting against attacks at this level?
When the NSA stops paying them to ignore it.
they CAN deal with this. require a physical jumper on the device to be moved for firmware loading. all devices leave the factory blank and they flash their firmware in house when they arrive.
They dont want to do that, they want the 100,000 items to ship from china and never be touched again. Boo Hoo. man up and touch every item state side to protect your products integrity.
The CEO's bonus check would cover the required costs.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why do I have to pay more? I suggest they make less obscene profits and lower executive wages to cover the cost of doing business.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is unacceptable. Someone with a contaminated computer should press charges, subpoena Alexander and the rest of those scumbags and charge them with crimes.
Just a thought: Intel and MITRE are both Rockefeller companies (the majority share holders in both Apple and Intel were originally the Rockefeller family, by way of Laurence Rockefeller, and I've yet to see anything suggesting that has changed). And, the owners of the semiconductor company (Freescale Semiconductor) well-represented on that missing Malaysian MH 370 flight are the Blackstone Group and Carlyle Group (Blackstone Group began with seed money from David Rockefeller, and its co-founder, Peter G. Peterson, has long been his protege). Interesting confluence of ownership and financing?
At least one of the systems I've owned in the past required a jumper to be set before BIOS could be written to/flashed/modified.
I thought that was a boon and would certainly defeat any nefarious flashing. Something like that should be standard.
Google tries to get security right for Chromebooks. A read-only portion of the firmware authenticates the read-write firmware. The read-write firmware must be signed by google. You must disassemble the machine to flash the read-only firmware.
I have seen some particularly nasty malware hidden in many BIOSes recently. The payload has the effect of preventing you from installing legitimate operating systems on your own computer without paying large amounts of money to an extortion operation.
So far I have traced the perpetrators as far as Redmond, WA.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I have seen some particularly nasty malware hidden in many BIOSes recently. The payload has the effect of preventing you from installing legitimate operating systems on your own computer without first paying large amounts of money to a large extortion group.
Through my research I have managed to trace the perpetrators to Redmond, WA.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The BIOS has bare back access to the hardware. Why cant it log the keyboard and dump it out the Ethernet? Why cant it access the ram directly?
Built-in threats include more than just BIOS. At least one, and probably most, chip makers build in backdoors that do exactly what you describe, and much more. It's built right into the silicon, too.
Modern laptops and desktops come with remote administration tools built into the chips on the board. (The vendors tout this as a feature, simplifying administration of a large company's workstations. It's easier and cheaper to build it into everything than to be selective, so it's in the machines sold to individuals, too.)
One example: Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and its standard Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), the latter standardized in 1998 and supported by "over 200 hardware vendors". This is built into the northbridge (or, in early models, the Ethernet) chip).
Just TRY to get a "modern laptop" (or desktop), using an Intel chipset, without this feature.
You can't disable it: Dumping the credentials or reverting to factory settings just makes it think it hasn't been configured yet and accept the first connection (ethernet or WiFi, whether powered up or down) claiming to be the new owner's sysadmins.
If the NSA doesn't know how to use this to spy on, or take over, a target computer, they aren't doing their jobs.
Some of the things this can do (from the Wikipedia articles - see them for the footnotes):
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