$anfractuosity's test setup showing the Pi under test and a few pieces of equipment used to perform the attack$

Cold Boot Attack You Can Do With A Pi

April 1, 2024 by Arya Voronova 2 Comments

A cold boot attack is a way to extract RAM contents from a running system by power cycling it and reading out RAM immediately after loading your own OS. How easy is it for you to perform such an attack? As [anfractuosity] shows, you can perform a cold boot attack with a Raspberry Pi, with a reasonably simple hardware setup and a hefty chunk of bare-metal code.

[anfractuosity]’s setup is simple enough. The Pi 4 under attack is set up to boot from USB drive, and a relay board has it switch between two possible USB drives to boot from: one with a program that fills RAM with , and another with a program that extracts RAM out through UART. The process is controlled by another Pi controlling the relays through GPIOs, that also monitors the target Pi’s UART and uses it as a channel to extract memory.

The outcomes are pretty impressive. After 0.75s of power-down, most of the image could be extracted. That’s without any cooling, so abusing a can of electronics duster is likely to improve these results dramatically. Want to play with cold boot attacks? [anfractuosity]’s code is great for getting your feet wet. Furthermore, the code examples provided serve as a wonderful playground for general memory attack research.

Raspberry Pi not fun enough for you anymore? Well then, you can always start playing with Android phones!

Side-Channel Attacks Hack Chat With Samy Kamkar

March 23, 2020 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, March 25 at noon Pacific for the Side-Channel Attacks Hack Chat with Samy Kamkar!

In the world of computer security, the good news is that a lot of vendors are finally taking security seriously now, with the result that direct attacks are harder to pull off. The bad news is that in a lot of cases, they’re still leaving the side-door wide open. Side-channel attacks come in all sorts of flavors, but they all have something in common: they leak information about the state of a system through an unexpected vector. From monitoring the sounds that the keyboard makes as you type to watching the minute vibrations of a potato chip bag in response to a nearby conversation, side-channel attacks take advantage of these leaks to exfiltrate information.

Side-channel exploits can be the bread and butter of black hat hackers, but understanding them can be useful to those of us who are more interested in protecting systems, or perhaps to inform our reverse engineering efforts. Samy Kamkar knows quite a bit more than a thing or two about side-channel attacks, so much so that he gave a great talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference on just that topic. He’ll be dropping by the Hack Chat to “extend and enhance” that talk, and to answer your questions about side-channel exploits, and discuss the reverse engineering potential they offer. Join us and learn more about this fascinating world, where the complexity of systems leads to unintended consequences that could come back to bite you, or perhaps even help you.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 25 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Continue reading “Side-Channel Attacks Hack Chat With Samy Kamkar” →

Freezing Android To Crack The Encryption

February 20, 2013 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

frozen-phone-encryption-hacking

Build a better lock and someone will make a tool to open it without the key. Or in this case they’ve made a tool to discover the key using a trip to through the deep freeze. The Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones — or FROST — uses cold temperatures and a custom recovery image to crack Android encryption keys.

Cold boot hacks go way back. They leverage use of low temperatures to slow down the RAM in a device. In this case, the target phone must already be powered on. Booting a phone that uses the encryption offered by Android 4.0 and newer requires the owner’s pass code to decrypt the user partition. But it then remains usable until the next power cycle. By freezing the phone, then very quickly disconnecting and reconnecting the battery, researchers were able to flash their own recovery image without having the encryption key cleared from RAM. As you can see above, that recovery package can snoop for the key in several different ways.

[Thanks Rob]

Use The CPU Cache To Prevent Cold Boot? No.

January 18, 2009 by Eliot 21 Comments

coldboot

Frozen Cache is a blog dedicated to a novel way to prevent cold boot attacks. Last year the cold boot team demonstrated that they could extract encryption keys from a machine’s RAM by placing it in another system (or the same machine by doing a quick reboot). Frozen Cache aims to prevent this by storing the encryption key in the CPU’s cache. It copies the key out of RAM into the CPU’s registers and then zeroes it in RAM. It then freezes the cache and attempts to write the key back to RAM. The key is pushed into the cache, but isn’t written back to RAM.

The first major issue with this is the performance hit. You end up kneecapping the processor when you freeze the cache and the author suggests that you’d only do this when the screen is locked. We asked cold boot team member [Jacob Appelbaum] what he thought of the approach. He pointed out that the current cold boot attack reconstructs the key from the full keyschedule, which according to the Frozen Cache blog, still remains in RAM. They aren’t grabbing the specific key bits, but recreating it from all this redundant information in memory. At best, Frozen Cache is attempting to build a ‘ghetto crypto co-processor’.

We stand by our initial response to the cold boot attacks: It’s going to take a fundamental redesign of RAM before this is solved.

[via Slashdot]