Thunderbolt Rootkit Vector

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Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 23, 2014 @07:46AM from the like-USB-but-better dept.

New submitter Holi sends this news from PC World: Attackers can infect MacBook computers with highly persistent boot rootkits by connecting malicious devices to them over the Thunderbolt interface. The attack, dubbed Thunderstrike, installs malicious code in a MacBook's boot ROM (read-only memory), which is stored in a chip on the motherboard. It was devised by a security researcher named Trammell Hudson based on a two-year old vulnerability and will be demonstrated next week at the 31st Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg.

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uh - by design? by Nerrd · 2014-12-23 07:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

It shouldn't surprise anybody that a malicious PCI-E card can access a system.
1. Re:uh - by design? by darkain · 2014-12-23 07:58 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  DisplayPort monitor pre-infected with malware?
2. Re:uh - by design? by jeffb+(2.718) · 2014-12-23 08:09 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Thunderbolt is more like USB to the user - it's a thing you use to connect untrusted devices to your system.
  Thunderbolt is more like PCIe to the system -- it's a thing you use to connect trusted devices to your system. In fact, it is PCIe, along with DisplayPort.
  The one mitigating factor is that, while there are Thunderbolt devices out there, users are less likely to find one lying in the company parking lot and decide "durr, let me plug this into my work computer and see what's on it". That seems to be a pretty effective delivery method for hostile USB devices.
Hasn't this been known? by maccodemonkey · 2014-12-23 08:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

Firewire, USB 3.0, and Thunderbolt all have DMA, which means any device hooked to a host can pretty much do anything they want to the host, no matter what the host hardware or OS is. I didn't think this sort of thing was still news?
1. Re:Hasn't this been known? by maccodemonkey · 2014-12-23 08:46 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Well, now I'm reading specs on USB 3.0 controllers. Ugh. There's a lot on mapping a bus address to a memory address for DMA, but nothing addressing the security implications of doing so, or what devices are allowed to do, just broad hints like the buffer has to exist in a DMA-able part of memory without saying if that's a security implication or a hardware implication.
  It would be nice to see a follow up article on if/how USB 3.0 protects against these things, because I'm not a kernel USB developer sort of guy, so while I know DMA is there, I'm not feeling like I'd be able to dissect these implementation specs.
Attacker does *not* need physical access ... by perpenso · 2014-12-23 09:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

An attacker with physical access to the target is usually a bad thing (tm),
The attacker does not need physical access. All the attacker needs to do is sell hacked thunderbolt cables on ebay or alibaba.
Re:In other news... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2014-12-23 09:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

I'm frankly surprised to hear that Apple still manufactures a device that will boot after you tinker with its boot ROM. The notion that a device that is, for most purposes, right on the PCIe bus can scribble all over the place isn't exactly a shock; but it doesn't seem much like Apple to build hardware that would still boot if the cryptographic signatures didn't check out.