Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Wrong. All an infected BIOS call needs to do is launch a process that will keep running and do its damndest when the system is up.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Yes you can.
Especially if the system is attached to a network with a DHCP server.
UEFI is equivalent to an OS, and is written the same way.
BIOS is a little bit more limited - but not much. You can include a DHCP client to get a local IP number.
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.
What you CAN do is exploit an otherwise secure OS so that you CAN do those things in spite of OS-level security methods.
I miss the days of needing a move a jumper in order to flash the system ROM. I've seen plenty of gaudy 'overlocking' boards with push-buttons on the motherboard itself for various esoteric functions. A toggle-switch for BIOS-write-enable would be a relatively cheap addition, and manufacturers can market the board with some extra security buzzwords.
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.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Nice try, but it runs in ring 0, so it can jump into the kernel anywhere it wants.
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?
On some machines, they have out of band management features, even dedicated NICs for this purpose. Get full access to a BIOS, and the machine can easily have a functioning IP stack and be at the control of an attacker even if the machine has no OS present.
Another item would be a flashable BIOS like a security issue with some Apple keyboards. Nothing beats using the keyboard controller itself for a keylogger.
Actually most BIOS (legacy or UEFI) have a network stack of some sort in order to support PXE boot. Recall that the PoC BIOS malware Rakshasa (https://media.blackhat.com/bh-us-12/Briefings/Brossard/BH_US_12_Brossard_Backdoor_Hacking_Slides.pdf) used the open source SeaBIOS and iPXE network stacks to perform networking from the BIOS. And here's a talk where some McAfee and Intel folks talked about how keylogging can be done from UEFI thanks to function pointer hooking (http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2012/sf/aep/EFIS003/EFIS003.html I couldn't find the slides, just video) And you seem to have missed the point about spammers != state-sponsored attackers who clearly find attacking at this level plenty practical.
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.
The vast, vast majority of personal computer units with integrated LAN cards happen to have network boot capability built in. It's been there since before they were an integrated component, even. Intel and Realtek make most of the ethernet chipsets I see around, and they both use a pretty bog standard PXE network booting stack. BIOS hackers would be acutely aware of it, I wouldn't be surprised if that's been exploited in some strikingly silly manner and used for this kind of thing.
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.
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).
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
Seconded. Hear, hear!
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Big problem with BIOS is that it is board/chipset-specific. And very tiny. Not un-doable, but not scalable.
These were some of the BIOS constraints that EFI/UEFI were created to surpass.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
Some days it's just not worth
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.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Which means basically when they start intercepting hardware between the manufacturer and the user, security becomes an impossible mind fuck. Once it all shifted to firmware and hardware hacks the security game is over. Parallel networks where the inside network is fully air gapped from outside networks and the building itself is secured from wireless communications. Basically all internet function are done on disposable net books, this more for typical businesses rather than internet business. Apparently Russian security has gone back to typewriters and hard copy for the most secure documents, actual physical penetration is required. With the NSA continuing to fuck around with security, how long will it be before banks go back to manual systems and internet banking becomes a memory.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The NSA implant known as SOUFLETROUGH allegedly uses SMM and is even referenced on the SMM page on Wikipedia.
www.wavefront-av.com
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.
You're conflating a lot of things.
-Secure boot is a UEFI protocol not a Windows 8 feature
-UEFI secure boot is part of Windows 8 secured boot architecture
-Secure boot doesn’t “lock out” operating system loaders, but is a policy that allows firmware to validate authenticity of components
-OEMs have the ability to customize their firmware to meet the needs of their customers by customizing the level of certificate and policy management on their platform
-Microsoft does not mandate or control the settings on PC firmware that control or enable secured boot from any operating system other than Windows
Above is from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/arc... with some modifications.
In the Intel reference UEFI implementation I have used, I could easily add and remove keys and customize it to implement the trust policy I wanted. This is up to your OEM to implement these features, nothing to do with Microsoft. For their certification program, Microsoft *requires* that SecureBoot is disableable and that the secureboot policy (list of trusted signatures) is customizable by a physically-present user. People whining that they can't install Linux on their systems because of Microsoft have no idea what they are talking about.
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.
The problem is, firmware is *tiny*. There is only so much it can be capable of. No matter how much ingenuity the attackers will put into its programming, the attack won't be able to survive aggressive threat mitigation actions such as airgapping the computer. Even recording and monitoring all the incoming and outgoing network traffic and using the computer in a sufficiently restricted way would at least tell you if something is going on. It's like with submarines, they're only stealthy until they pump out a torpedo. If you're actually wary of what can happen with your machine or network, it would be a suicidal mission for the firmware to actually do anything detectable.
Ezekiel 23:20
and internet banking becomes a memory.
That depends. No level of compromising your (general purpose) computer should be able to defeat the security of your manually operated hardware token/calculator.
Ezekiel 23:20
Well, that's what you get for still using a C-64. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
Have you seen newer motherboards? They have 16mb+ of flash for the BIOS.
Oodles of room to do fun stuff in.
Have you seen newer motherboards? They have 16mb+ of flash for the BIOS.
Oodles of room to do fun stuff in.
And they are all infested with UEFI, the worst malware foisted upon the general public in decades.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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?
The term you were looking for is "bare metal".
Bare back is something totally different.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Can you point me to a signed firmware image which is in a known, good state? One that has been properly independently audited by someone who can be reasonably assumed to not be under the influence of the NSA?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Modern motherboards (even cheap ones) can access the filesystem in BIOS.
Good-bye
That's not what I had in mind. You can't cram a strong AI system into it. Without that, the machine would have to be fully connected for the exploit to be adaptive to any possible attack mitigation technique. On its own, it can't perform miracles like adapting to software systems that didn't exist when the firmware was written (for example, a new file system, since you're mentioning that - or whole kernels, for that matter). Not without visibly breaking something.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
And? Malware get depreciated quicker than any other type of software, due to exploited getting found and fixed. Obviously any malware targeted at firmware has an air or permanence to it, but even that will get depreciated when the hardware is replaced or firmware upgraded.
Also worth noting is it depends on the particular device being targeted. For example, the firmware in the SCADA systems Stuxnet targeted is completely reliant on the PC connected to it. Disable the PC and you effectively disable the malware. On the other hand, BIOS/UEFI exploits could be programmed to be OS agnostic, meaning that no matter how often you reformat your disks and no matter what OS you install, the malware could potentially still update itself over ethernet and wreak havoc. Cellphone baseband firmware is also susceptible to this sort of "sophisticated" attack.
In the end, almost all firmware is worth attacking by someone somewhere. As malware becomes more sophisticated, firmware will be targeted more often, and malware such as Stuxnet may well become the norm.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Sorry, but "bare back access" was so titillating that it distracted me from finishing the rest of your post...
.... then it's not firm.
No, it's too easy ...
Nice try, but it runs in ring 0, so it can jump into the kernel anywhere it wants.
Worse than that after boot, the BIOS runs in System Management Mode, which is delberatly designed to be non-interceptable by the OS.
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):
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
BIOS malware can install System Management Mode code that logs keystrokes. Please read: http://www.phrack.com/issues.h... http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/~czou/...
That's exactly what Mebromi malware does. Its BIOS rootkit component restores infected Master Boot Record (MBR): http://www.webroot.com/blog/20...
and internet banking becomes a memory.
That depends. No level of compromising your (general purpose) computer should be able to defeat the security of your manually operated hardware token/calculator.
Attacker has control of my computer. I read a number off my MFA device and input it into the bank's form along with my username and password.
Now attacker has a banking session they can do whatever they want with. How has having a hardware token prevented them from attacking me?
No, they can't. At most they would be able to, say, view your account balance etc., but the token can be (and most of the time is) used to authenticate any transaction based on its input values (how much to transfer, where, with what payment codes etc.).
Ezekiel 23:20