Fwd: [Cryptography] trojans in the firmware

[grarpamp]

> http://www.recover.co.il/SA-cover/SA-cover.pdf

Since the firmware rules over everything, all the spare sectors
for block reallocation must be considered too, not just the
service areas. Then there is the per sector CRC space that could
perhaps be reutilized if CRC is implemented as software function.

Kernel options to permit only your approved list of opcodes
and block all else by default would seem useful to have.

> http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35661.pdf

Again, look at the list of Unix operating systems and file systems.
These guys are calling Unix out by name, and soon the common
script kid will be too. Unix is under attack and this stuff can't be
ignored as "too rare and/or hard and/or low market share to be
relavent" anymore.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 12:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Cryptography] trojans in the firmware


FYI -- CMU has been hacking disk drive firmware since the 1990's for
"smart disks" and "performance"; UCSD has been hacking flash drive
firmware more recently.  I believe that DARPA has also openly
solicited for disk drive/flash drive firmware hacking capabilities.
Both CMU & UCSD are hotbeds of NSA recruitment activity.

We now know that in NSA parlance "smart" anything = "spying" anything;
e.g., "smart disks" = "spying disks"; "smart phones" = "spying
phones", etc.

BTW, hiding stuff in a flash memory stick is even easier than in a
hard drive.  This is because flash memory is so unreliable, that there
is typically a huge percentage of unused space; the cheaper the flash
memory, the smaller the fraction of usable reliable memory space.  So
it wouldn't be at all surprising to find that your 32GB flash drive is
really constructed from 64GB chips, and that 50% of the device is
unavailable for use.  It is highly unlikely that _all_ of this unused
space is unreliable, so this leaves plenty of room for NSA lurking.
But even if the device were 100% reliable, noticing that only 50% was
actually in use would be unremarkable, given the typical degree of
unreliability of these types of devices.

For these reasons, it is critical for flash memory devices to _open
up_ their API's, so that the raw memory (with all of its warts) can be
inspected and verified.


http://www.wired.com/2015/02/nsa-firmware-hacking/

How the NSA’s Firmware Hacking Works and Why It’s So Unsettling

By Kim Zetter 02.22.15 8:09 pm

One of the most shocking parts of the recently discovered spying
network Equation Group is its mysterious module designed to reprogram
or reflash a computer hard drive’s firmware with malicious code.  The
Kaspersky researchers who uncovered this said its ability to subvert
hard drive firmware—-the guts of any computer—-“surpasses anything
else” they had ever seen.

The hacking tool, believed to be a product of the NSA, is significant
because subverting the firmware gives the attackers God-like control
of the system in a way that is stealthy and persistent even through
software updates.  The module, named “nls_933w.dll”, is the first of
its kind found in the wild and is used with both the EquationDrug and
GrayFish spy platforms Kaspersky uncovered.

It also has another capability: to create invisible storage space on
the hard drive to hide data stolen from the system so the attackers
can retrieve it later.  This lets spies like the Equation Group bypass
disk encryption by secreting documents they want to seize in areas
that don’t get encrypted.

Kaspersky has so far uncovered 500 victims of the Equation Group, but
only five of these had the firmware-flashing module on their systems.
The flasher module is likely reserved for significant systems that
present special surveillance challenges.  Costin Raiu, director of
Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team, believes these are
high-value computers that are not connected to the internet and are
protected with disk encryption.

Here’s what we know about the firmware-flashing module.

How It Works

Hard drive disks have a controller, essentially a mini-computer, that
includes a memory chip or flash ROM where the firmware code for
operating the hard drive resides.

When a machine is infected with EquationDrug or GrayFish, the firmware
flasher module gets deposited onto the system and reaches out to a
command server to obtain payload code that it then flashes to the
firmware, replacing the existing firmware with a malicious one.  The
researchers uncovered two versions of the flasher module: one that
appears to have been compiled in 2010 and is used with EquatinoDrug
and one with a 2013 compilation date that is used with GrayFish.

The Trojanized firmware lets attackers stay on the system even through
software updates.  If a victim, thinking his or her computer is
infected, wipes the computer’s operating system and reinstalls it to
eliminate any malicious code, the malicious firmware code remains
untouched.  It can then reach out to the command server to restore all
of the other malicious components that got wiped from the system.

Even if the firmware itself is updated with a new vendor release, the
malicious firmware code may still persist because some firmware
updates replace only parts of the firmware, meaning the malicious
portions may not get overwritten with the update.  The only solution
for victims is to trash their hard drive and start over with a new
one.

The attack works because firmware was never designed with security in
mind.  Hard disk makers don’t cryptographically sign the firmware they
install on drives the way software vendors do.  Nor do hard drive disk
designs have authentication built in to check for signed firmware.
This makes it possible for someone to change the firmware.  And
firmware is the perfect place to conceal malware because antivirus
scanners don’t examine it.  There’s also no easy way for users to read
the firmware and manually check if it’s been altered.

The firmware flasher module can reprogram the firmware of more than a
dozen different hard drive brands, including IBM, Seagate, Western
Digital, and Toshiba.

“You know how much effort it takes to land just one firmware for a
hard drive?  You need to know specifications, the CPU, the
architecture of the firmware, how it works,” Raiu says.  The Kaspersky
researchers have called it “an astonishing technical accomplishment
and is testament to the group’s abilities.”

Once the firmware is replaced with the Trojanized version, the flasher
module creates an API that can communicate with other malicious
modules on the system and also access hidden sectors of the disk where
the attackers want to conceal data they intend to steal.  They hide
this data in the so-called service area of the hard drive disk where
the hard disk stores data needed for its internal operation.

Hidden Storage Is the Holy Grail

The revelation that the firmware hack helps store data the attackers
want to steal didn’t get much play when the story broke last week, but
it’s the most significant part of the hack.  It also raises a number
of questions about how exactly the attackers are pulling this off.
Without an actual copy of the firmware payload that gets flashed to
infected systems, there’s still a lot that’s unknown about the attack,
but some of it can be surmised.

The ROM chip that contains the firmware includes a small amount of
storage that goes unused.  If the ROM chip is 2 megabytes, the
firmware might take up just 1.5 megabytes, leaving half a megabyte of
unused space that can be employed for hiding data the attackers want
to steal.

This is particularly useful if the computer has disk encryption
enabled.  Because the EquationDrug and GrayFish malware run in
Windows, they can grab a copy of documents while they’re unencrypted
and save them to this hidden area on the machine that doesn’t get
encrypted.  There isn’t much space on the chip for a lot of data or
documents, however, so the attackers can also just store something
equally as valuable to bypass encryption.

“Taking into account the fact that their GrayFish implant is active
from the very boot of the system, they have the ability to capture the
encryption password and save it into this hidden area,” Raiu says.

Authorities could later grab the computer, perhaps through border
interdiction or something the NSA calls “customs opportunities,” and
extract the password from this hidden area to unlock the encrypted
disk.

http://cryptome.org/2014/05/nsa-customs.htm

Raiu thinks the intended targets of such a scheme are limited to
machines that are not connected to the internet and have encrypted
hard drives. One of the five machines they found hit with the firmware
flasher module had no internet connection and was used for special
secure communications.

“[The owners] only use it in some very specific cases where there is
no other way around it,” Raiu says.  “Think about Bin Laden who lived
in the desert in an isolated compound—-doesn’t have internet and no
electronic footprint.  So if you want information from his computer
how do you get it?  You get documents into the hidden area and you
wait, and then after one or two years you come back and steal it.  The
benefits [of using this] are very specific.”

Raiu thinks, however, that the attackers have a grander scheme in
mind.  “In the future probably they want to take it to the next level
where they just copy all the documents [into the hidden area] instead
of the password.  [Then] at some point, when they have an opportunity
to have physical access to the system, they can then access that
hidden area and get the unencrypted docs.”

They wouldn’t need the password if they could copy an entire directory
from the operating system to the hidden sector for accessing later.
But the flash chip where the firmware resides is too small for large
amounts of data.  So the attackers would need a bigger hidden space
for storage.  Luckily for them, it exists.  There are large sectors in
the service area of the hard drive disk that are also unused and could
be commandeered to store a large cache of documents, even ones that
might have been deleted from other parts of the computer.  This
service area, also called the reserved are or system area, stores the
firmware and other data needed to operate drives, but it also contains
large portions of unused space.

An interesting paper (.pdf) published in February 2013 by Ariel
Berkman, a data recovery specialist at the Israeli firm Recover, noted
“not only that these areas can’t be sanitized (via standard tools),
they cannot be accessed via anti-virus software [or] computer
forensics tools.”

http://www.recover.co.il/SA-cover/SA-cover.pdf

Berkman points out that one particular model of Western Digital drives
has 141 MB reserved for the service area, but only uses 12 MB of this,
leaving the rest free for stealth storage.

To write or copy data to service area requires special commands that
are specific to each vendor and are not publicly documented, so an
attacker would need to uncover what these are.  But once they do,
“[b]y sending Vendor Specific Commands (VSCs) directly to the
hard-drive, one can manipulate these [service] areas to read and write
data that are otherwise inaccessible,” Berkman writes.  It is also
possible, though not trivial, to write a program to automatically copy
documents to this area.  Berkman himself wrote a proof-of-concept
program to read and write a file of up to 94 MB to the service area,
but the program was a bit unstable and he noted that it could cause
some data loss or cause the hard drive to fail.

One problem with hiding large amounts of data like this, however, is
that its presence might be detected by examining the size of the used
space in the service area.  If there should be 129 MB of unused space
in this sector but there’s only 80 MB, it’s a dead giveaway that
something is there that shouldn’t be.  But a leaked NSA document that
was written in 2006 but was published by Der Spiegel last month
suggests the spy agency might have resolved this particular problem.

NSA Interns to the Rescue

The document (.pdf) is essentially a wish list of future spy
capabilities the NSA hoped to develop for its so-called Persistence
Division, a division that has an attack team within it that focuses on
establishing and maintaining persistence on compromised machines by
subverting their firmware, BIOS, BUS or drivers.  The document lists a
number of projects the NSA put together for interns to tackle on
behalf of this attack team.  Among them is the “Covert Storage”
project for developing a hard drive firmware implant that can prevent
covert storage on disks from being detected.  To do this, the implant
prevents the system from disclosing the true amount of free space
available on the disk.

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35661.pdf

“The idea would be to modify the firmware of a particular hard drive
so that it normally only recognizes, say, half of its available
space,” the document reads.  “It would report this size back to the
operating system and not provide any way to access the additional
space.”  Only one partition of the drive would be visible on the
partition table, leaving the other partitions—-where the hidden data
was stored—-invisible and inaccessible.

The modified firmware would have a special hook embedded in it that
would unlock this hidden storage space only after a custom command was
sent to the drive and the computer was rebooted.  The hidden partition
would then be available on the partition table and accessible until
the secret storage was locked again with another custom command.

How exactly the spy agency planned to retrieve the hidden data was
unclear from the eight-year-old document.  Also unclear is whether the
interns ever produced a firmware implant that accomplished what the
NSA sought.  But given that the document includes a note that interns
would be expected to produce a solution for their project within six
months after assignment, and considering the proven ingenuity of the
NSA in other matters, they no doubt figured it out.

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