Security Hacks

Foreshadow: The Sky Is Falling Again for Intel Chips

August 14, 2018 by 39 Comments

It’s been at least a month or two since the last vulnerability in Intel CPUs was released, but this time it’s serious. Foreshadow is the latest speculative execution attack that allows balaclava-wearing hackers to steal your sensitive information. You know it’s a real 0-day because it already has a domain, a logo, and this time, there’s a video explaining in simple terms anyone can understand why the sky is falling. The video uses ukuleles in the sound track, meaning it’s very well produced.

The Foreshadow attack relies on Intel’s Software Guard Extension (SGX) instructions that allow user code to allocate private regions of memory. These private regions of memory, or enclaves, were designed for VMs and DRM.

How Foreshadow Works

The Foreshadow attack utilizes speculative execution, a feature of modern CPUs most recently in the news thanks to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. The Foreshadow attack reads the contents of memory protected by SGX, allowing an attacker to copy and read back private keys and other personal information. There is a second Foreshadow attack, called Foreshadow-NG, that is capable of reading anything inside a CPU’s L1 cache (effectively anything in memory with a little bit of work), and might also be used to read information stored in other virtual machines running on a third-party cloud. In the worst case scenario, running your own code on an AWS or Azure box could expose data that isn’t yours on the same AWS or Azure box. Additionally, countermeasures to Meltdown and Spectre attacks might be insufficient to protect from Foreshadown-NG

The researchers behind the Foreshadow attacks have talked with Intel, and the manufacturer has confirmed Foreshadow affects all SGX-enabled Skylake and Kaby Lake Core processors. Atom processors with SGX support remain unaffected. For the Foreshadow-NG attack, many more processors are affected, including second through eighth generation Core processors, and most Xeons. This is a significant percentage of all Intel CPUs currently deployed. Intel has released a security advisory detailing all the affected CPUs.

Side Channel Attacks Against Mixed Signal Microcontrollers

July 30, 2018 by 7 Comments

You shouldn’t transmit encryption keys over Bluetooth, but that’s exactly what some popular wireless-enabled microcontrollers are already doing. This is the idea behind Screaming Channels, an exploit published by researchers at EUERCOM, and will be a talk at Black Hat next week. So far, the researchers have investigated side-channel attacks on Bluetooth-enabled microcontrollers, allowing them to extract tinyAES keys from up to 10 meters away in controlled environments. A PDF of the paper is available and all the relevant code is available on GitHub.

The experimental setup for this exploit consisted of a BLE Nano, a breakout board for a Nordic nRF52832 Bluetooth microcontroller, a Hack RF, a USRB N210 software defined radio from Ettus, and a few high-gain antennas and LNAs. The example attack relies on installing firmware on the BLE Nano that runs through a few loops and encrypts something with tinyAES. Through very careful analysis of the RF spectrum, the AES keys can be extracted from the ether.

Side channel attacks have received a bit more popularity over recent years. What was once limited to Three Letter Agency-level Van Eck phreaking can now be done inexpensively and in a system with devices like the ChipWhisperer.

Of course, this is only a demonstration of what is possible with side-channel attacks in a highly controlled environment with a significant amount of work gone into the firmware running on the microcontroller. This isn’t evidence that balaclava-wearing hackers are sniffing your phone from across the parking lot to get the password to your Instagram account, but it does show what is possible with relatively cheap, off-the-shelf hardware.

Screaming Channels Attack RF Security

July 27, 2018 by 15 Comments

As long as there has been radio, people have wanted to eavesdrop on radio transmissions. In many cases, it is just a hobby activity like listening to a scanner or monitoring a local repeater. But in some cases, it is spy agencies or cyberhackers. [Giovanni Camurati] and his colleagues have been working on a slightly different way to attack Bluetooth radio communications using a technique that could apply to other radio types, too. The attack relies on the ubiquitous use of mixed-signal ICs to make cheap radios like Bluetooth dongles. They call it “Screaming Channels” and — in a nutshell — it is relying on digital information leaking out on the device’s radio signal.

Does it work? The team claims to have recovered an AES-128 key from 10 meters away. The technique reminds us a bit of TEMPEST in that unintended radio transmissions provide insight into the algorithm the device applies to encrypt or decrypt data. Most (if not all) encryption techniques assume you can’t see inside the “black box.” If you can, then it’s because it is relatively easy to break the code.

Continue reading “Screaming Channels Attack RF Security” →

Freak Out Your Smartphone with Ultrasound

July 17, 2018 by 13 Comments

There’s a school of thought that says complexity has an inversely proportional relation to reliability. In other words, the smarter you try to make something, the more likely it is to end up failing for a dumb reason. As a totally random example: you’re trying to write up a post for a popular hacking blog, all the while yelling repeatedly for your Echo Dot to turn on the fan sitting three feet away from you. It’s plugged into a WeMo Smart Plug, so you can’t even reach over and turn it on manually. You just keep repeating the same thing over and over in the sweltering July heat, hoping your virtual assistant eventually gets the hint. You know, something like that. That exact scenario definitely has never happened to anyone in the employ of this website.

Black Hat 2017 Presentation

So it should come as no surprise that the more sensors we pack into devices, the more potential avenues of failure we open up. [Julio Della Flora] writes in to tell us of some interesting experiments he’s been performing with the MEMS gyroscope in his Xiaomi MI5S Plus smartphone. He’s found that with a function generator and a standard speaker, he’s able to induce false sensor readings.

Now it should be said, [Julio] is not claiming to be the first person to discover that ultrasonic sound can confuse MEMS gyroscopes and accelerometers. At Black Hat 2017, a talk was given in which a “Sonic Gun” was used to do things like knock over self-balancing robots using the same principle. The researchers were also able to confuse a DJI Phantom drone, showing that the technique has the potential to be weaponized in the real-world.

It’s interesting to see more validation that not only is this a continuing issue with consumer devices, but that it doesn’t necessarily take expensive or exotic hardware to execute. Yet another reason to take ultrasound seriously as a potential threat.

Continue reading “Freak Out Your Smartphone with Ultrasound” →

Teardown Of USB Fan Reveals Journalists’ Lack Of Opsec

July 11, 2018 by 109 Comments

Last month, Singapore hosted a summit between the leaders of North Korea and the United States. Accredited journalists invited to the event were given a press kit containing a bottle of water, various paper goods, and a fan that plugs into a USB port.

Understandably, the computer security crowd on Twitter had a great laugh. You shouldn’t plug random USB devices into a computer, especially if you’re a journalist, especially if you’re in a foreign country, and especially if you’re reporting on the highest profile international summit in recent memory. Doing so is just foolhardy.

This is not a story about a USB fan, the teardown thereof, or of spy agencies around the world hacking journalists’ computers. This a story of the need for higher awareness on what we plug into our computers. In this case nothing came of it — the majority of USB devices are merely that and nothing more. One of the fans was recently torn down (PDF) and the data lines are not even connected. (I’ll dive into that later on in this article). But the anecdote provides an opportunity to talk about USB security and how the compulsion to plug every USB device into a computer should be interrupted by a few seconds of thoughtfulness first.

Continue reading “Teardown Of USB Fan Reveals Journalists’ Lack Of Opsec” →

Opening A Ford With A Robot and the De Bruijn Sequence

June 18, 2018 by 71 Comments

The Ford Securicode, or the keyless-entry keypad available on all models of Ford cars and trucks, first appeared on the 1980 Thunderbird. Even though it’s most commonly seen on the higher-end models, it is available as an option on the Fiesta S — the cheapest car Ford sells in the US — for $95. Doug DeMuro loves it. It’s also a lock, and that means it’s ready to be exploited. Surely, someone can build a robot to crack this lock. Turns out, it’s pretty easy.

The electronics and mechanical part of this build are pretty simple. An acrylic frame holds five solenoids over the keypad, and this acrylic frame attaches to the car with magnets. There’s a second large protoboard attached to this acrylic frame loaded up with an Arduino, character display, and a ULN2003 to drive the resistors. So far, everything you would expect for a ‘robot’ that will unlock a car via its keypad.

The real trick for this build is making this electronic lockpick fast and easy to use. This project was inspired by [Samy Kamkar]’s OpenSesame attack for garage door openers. In this project, [Samy] didn’t brute force a code the hard way by sending one code after another; (crappy) garage door openers only look at the last n digits sent from the remote, and there’s no penalty for sending the wrong code. In this case, it’s possible to use a De Bruijn sequence to vastly reduce the time it takes to brute force every code. Instead of testing tens of thousands of different codes sequentially, this robot only needs to test 3125, something that should only take a few minutes.

Right now the creator of this project is putting the finishing touches on this Ford-cracking robot. There was a slight bug in the code that was solved by treating the De Bruijn sequence as circular, but now it’s only a matter of time before a 1993 Ford Taurus wagon becomes even more worthless.

A Close Eye on Power Exposes Private Keys

June 11, 2018 by 37 Comments

Hardware wallets are devices used exclusively to store the highly sensitive cryptographic information that authenticates cryptocurrency transactions. They are useful if one is worried about the compromise of a general purpose computer leading to the loss of such secrets (and thus loss of the funds the secrets identify). The idea is to move the critical data away from a more vulnerable network-connected machine and onto a device without a network connection that is unable to run other software. When designing a security focused hardware devices like hardware wallets it’s important to consider what threats need to be protected against. More sophisticated threats warrant more sophisticated defenses and at the extreme end these precautions can become highly involved. In 2015 when [Jochen] took a look around his TREZOR hardware wallet he discovered that maybe all the precautions hadn’t been considered.

Continue reading “A Close Eye on Power Exposes Private Keys” →