disruption strategies against intelligence community

[coderman]

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the next session of instruction gets into some nitty gritty:

sometimes you need a ground truth; low level, via external system.

this is of course reading flash and disassembling differences.
this is observing RF spectrum and deciphering accordingly.
this is measuring power consumption to the milli-ampere.

- ---

pre-boot attacks on the management plane of a system
 ( think about https://github.com/Cr4sh/ThinkPwn :)
will leave your OS & app level view oblivious to malfeasance.


sure, you could coreboot an x220, but we're trying to fish...


the themes of this approach are as follow:

- - use an external flash reader to regularly extract and compare
  the persisted information. note that some types of systems will
  append to memory, while others will update values in place.
  for EUFI BIOS there are more options, and in particular you'll
  want to dissect suspect code that may appear on your system.

- - flexible binary diff and disassembly tools. when you observe
  difference, you must verify them as usual operation, or flag
  malicious modifications for further analysis.

- - low level monitoring can see the invisible!
  i mentioned two laptops at the beginning of this excursion.
  it follows for other devices employed as targets.
  power usage : temperature : responsiveness - these values
  should be identical for identical hardware running identical
  workloads. malware recursing a very large codebase running
  pattern matching (for intelligence/espionage subjects) will
  consume a visible and non-trivial amount of computing resources.
  you'll be able to see this, even if running in ring-3 SMM and
  otherwise completely invisible to the operating system itself.

- - EMSEC : emission security is about your RF environment. devices
  used for exfiltration may show an RF footprint while device
  driver shows hardware idle or in power save mode.
  Stingray detection (IMSI Catcher Detector) also worth running,
  as you should never see your phones re-routed off a standard
  roaming list.

  there was recently a DF capable crowdsupply campaign... :P


in short: you should have the following capabilities:

1.) be able to observe changes to flash memory controlling BIOS,
 HDD state, embedded device firmware, and other controller storage.

2.) be able to contrast with baseline activity - power consumption,
 heat dissipation, RF emissions. this is where identical hardware
 can be crucial to discovering malicious activity.

3.) be able to observe malicious RF activity. once upon a time they
 even shined a high watt retro reflector source at my farm. so high
 power my wife felt the hairs on her neck rise. pro tip: metal pole
 barns are great faraday cages :P   and DF with an SDR pointed out
 their location up the hill...


the hunter becomes the hunted!


until nex time, and best regards,
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