Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps

Eugen Leitl eugen@leitl.org
Thu Oct 31 13:23:52 PDT 2013


http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and-pc-malware-that-jumps-airgaps/ 

Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps

Like a super strain of bacteria, the rootkit plaguing Dragos Ruiu is
omnipotent.

by Dan Goodin - Oct 31 2013, 3:07pm CET

BLACK HAT HACKING
 
Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Three years ago, security consultant Dragos Ruiu was in his lab when he
noticed something highly unusual: his MacBook Air, on which he had just
installed a fresh copy of OS X, spontaneously updated the firmware that helps
it boot. Stranger still, when Ruiu then tried to boot the machine off a CD
ROM, it refused. He also found that the machine could delete data and undo
configuration changes with no prompting. He didn't know it then, but that odd
firmware update would become a high-stakes malware mystery that would consume
most of his waking hours.

In the following months, Ruiu observed more odd phenomena that seemed
straight out of a science-fiction thriller. A computer running the Open BSD
operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data
without explanation or prompting. His network transmitted data specific to
the Internet's next-generation IPv6 networking protocol, even from computers
that were supposed to have IPv6 completely disabled. Strangest of all was the
ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with
other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were
unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed. Further
investigation soon showed that the list of affected operating systems also
included multiple variants of Windows and Linux.

"We were like, 'Okay, we're totally owned,'" Ruiu told Ars. "'We have to
erase all our systems and start from scratch,' which we did. It was a very
painful exercise. I've been suspicious of stuff around here ever since."

In the intervening three years, Ruiu said, the infections have persisted,
almost like a strain of bacteria that's able to survive extreme antibiotic
therapies. Within hours or weeks of wiping an infected computer clean, the
odd behavior would return. The most visible sign of contamination is a
machine's inability to boot off a CD, but other, more subtle behaviors can be
observed when using tools such as Process Monitor, which is designed for
troubleshooting and forensic investigations.

Another intriguing characteristic: in addition to jumping "airgaps" designed
to isolate infected or sensitive machines from all other networked computers,
the malware seems to have self-healing capabilities.

"We had an air-gapped computer that just had its [firmware] BIOS reflashed, a
fresh disk drive installed, and zero data on it, installed from a Windows
system CD," Ruiu said. "At one point, we were editing some of the components
and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can
that happen? How can the machine react and attack the software that we're
using to attack it? This is an air-gapped machine and all of the sudden the
search function in the registry editor stopped working when we were using it
to search for their keys."

Over the past two weeks, Ruiu has taken to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus
to document his investigative odyssey and share a theory that has captured
the attention of some of the world's foremost security experts. The malware,
Ruiu believes, is transmitted though USB drives to infect the lowest levels
of computer hardware. With the ability to target a computer's Basic
Input/Output System (BIOS), Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), and
possibly other firmware standards, the malware can attack a wide variety of
platforms, escape common forms of detection, and survive most attempts to
eradicate it.

But the story gets stranger still. In posts here, here, and here, Ruiu
posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a
post-apocalyptic movie: "badBIOS," as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the
ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers
and microphones to bridge airgaps.

Bigfoot in the age of the advanced persistent threat

At times as I've reported this story, its outline has struck me as the stuff
of urban legend, the advanced persistent threat equivalent of a Bigfoot
sighting. Indeed, Ruiu has conceded that while several fellow security
experts have assisted his investigation, none has peer reviewed his process
or the tentative findings that he's beginning to draw. (A compilation of
Ruiu's observations is here.)

Also unexplained is why Ruiu would be on the receiving end of such an
advanced and exotic attack. As a security professional, the organizer of the
internationally renowned CanSecWest and PacSec conferences, and the founder
of the Pwn2Own hacking competition, he is no doubt an attractive target to
state-sponsored spies and financially motivated hackers. But he's no more
attractive a target than hundreds or thousands of his peers, who have so far
not reported the kind of odd phenomena that has afflicted Ruiu's computers
and networks.

In contrast to the skepticism that's common in the security and hacking
cultures, Ruiu's peers have mostly responded with deep-seated concern and
even fascination to his dispatches about badBIOS.

"Everybody in security needs to follow @dragosr and watch his analysis of
#badBIOS," Alex Stamos, one of the more trusted and sober security
researchers, wrote in a tweet last week. Jeff Moss—the founder of the Defcon
and Blackhat security conferences who in 2009 began advising Department of
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on matters of computer
security—retweeted the statement and added: "No joke it's really serious."
Plenty of others agree.

"Dragos is definitely one of the good reliable guys, and I have never ever
even remotely thought him dishonest," security researcher Arrigo Triulzi told
Ars. "Nothing of what he describes is science fiction taken individually, but
we have not seen it in the wild ever."

Been there, done that

Triulzi said he's seen plenty of firmware-targeting malware in the
laboratory. A client of his once infected the UEFI-based BIOS of his Mac
laptop as part of an experiment. Five years ago, Triulzi himself developed
proof-of-concept malware that stealthily infected the network interface
controllers that sit on a computer motherboard and provide the Ethernet jack
that connects the machine to a network. His research built off of work by
John Heasman that demonstrated how to plant hard-to-detect malware known as a
rootkit in a computer's peripheral component interconnect, the
Intel-developed connection that attaches hardware devices to a CPU.

It's also possible to use high-frequency sounds broadcast over speakers to
send network packets. Early networking standards used the technique, said
security expert Rob Graham. Ultrasonic-based networking is also the subject
of a great deal of research, including this project by scientists at MIT.

Of course, it's one thing for researchers in the lab to demonstrate viable
firmware-infecting rootkits and ultra high-frequency networking techniques.
But as Triulzi suggested, it's another thing entirely to seamlessly fuse the
two together and use the weapon in the real world against a seasoned security
consultant. What's more, use of a USB stick to infect an array of computer
platforms at the BIOS level rivals the payload delivery system found in the
state-sponsored Stuxnet worm unleashed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. And
the reported ability of badBIOS to bridge airgaps also has parallels to
Flame, another state-sponsored piece of malware that used Bluetooth radio
signals to communicate with devices not connected to the Internet.

"Really, everything Dragos reports is something that's easily within the
capabilities of a lot of people," said Graham, who is CEO of penetration
testing firm Errata Security. "I could, if I spent a year, write a BIOS that
does everything Dragos said badBIOS is doing. To communicate over ultrahigh
frequency sound waves between computers is really, really easy."

Coincidentally, Italian newspapers this week reported that Russian spies
attempted to monitor attendees of last month's G20 economic summit by giving
them memory sticks and recharging cables programmed to intercept their
communications.

Eureka

For most of the three years that Ruiu has been wrestling with badBIOS, its
infection mechanism remained a mystery. A month or two ago, after buying a
new computer, he noticed that it was almost immediately infected as soon as
he plugged one of his USB drives into it. He soon theorized that infected
computers have the ability to contaminate USB devices and vice versa.

"The suspicion right now is there's some kind of buffer overflow in the way
the BIOS is reading the drive itself, and they're reprogramming the flash
controller to overflow the BIOS and then adding a section to the BIOS table,"
he explained.

He still doesn't know if a USB stick was the initial infection trigger for
his MacBook Air three years ago, or if the USB devices were infected only
after they came into contact with his compromised machines, which he said now
number between one and two dozen. He said he has been able to identify a
variety of USB sticks that infect any computer they are plugged into. At next
month's PacSec conference, Ruiu said he plans to get access to expensive USB
analysis hardware that he hopes will provide new clues behind the infection
mechanism.

He said he suspects badBIOS is only the initial module of a multi-staged
payload that has the ability to infect the Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, and Linux
operating systems.


Dragos Ruiu

Julia Wolf

"It's going out over the network to get something or it's going out to the
USB key that it was infected from," he theorized. "That's also the conjecture
of why it's not booting CDs. It's trying to keep its claws, as it were, on
the machine. It doesn't want you to boot another OS it might not have code
for." To put it another way, he said, badBIOS "is the tip of the warhead, as
it were."

“Things kept getting fixed”

Ruiu said he arrived at the theory about badBIOS's high-frequency networking
capability after observing encrypted data packets being sent to and from an
infected laptop that had no obvious network connection with—but was in close
proximity to—another badBIOS-infected computer. The packets were transmitted
even when the laptop had its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed. Ruiu also
disconnected the machine's power cord so it ran only on battery to rule out
the possibility it was receiving signals over the electrical connection. Even
then, forensic tools showed the packets continued to flow over the airgapped
machine. Then, when Ruiu removed the internal speaker and microphone
connected to the airgapped machine, the packets suddenly stopped.

With the speakers and mic intact, Ruiu said, the isolated computer seemed to
be using the high-frequency connection to maintain the integrity of the
badBIOS infection as he worked to dismantle software components the malware
relied on.

"The airgapped machine is acting like it's connected to the Internet," he
said. "Most of the problems we were having is we were slightly disabling bits
of the components of the system. It would not let us disable some things.
Things kept getting fixed automatically as soon as we tried to break them. It
was weird."

It's too early to say with confidence that what Ruiu has been observing is a
USB-transmitted rootkit that can burrow into a computer's lowest levels and
use it as a jumping off point to infect a variety of operating systems with
malware that can't be detected. It's even harder to know for sure that
infected systems are using high-frequency sounds to communicate with isolated
machines. But after almost two weeks of online discussion, no one has been
able to rule out these troubling scenarios, either.

"It looks like the state of the art in intrusion stuff is a lot more advanced
than we assumed it was," Ruiu concluded in an interview. "The take-away from
this is a lot of our forensic procedures are weak when faced with challenges
like this. A lot of companies have to take a lot more care when they use
forensic data if they're faced with sophisticated attackers."



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