Last week Kaspersky Lab (a virus and security company) alleged in a New York Times article that the U.S. government has gone on the offensive with respect to cyber tools. Specifically, Kaspersky Lab alleged that hackers associated with the U.S. government's National Security Agency have buried spy software in the low-level firmware which controls all aspects of a computer system.
Given our experiences in designing and engineering various ROM BIOS and Flash component, there are only two ways this purported activity could have happened. The first way would be the knowing cooperation, if not assistance, of the hardware device manufacturers; it is our opinion that post-manufacture firmware manipulation simply could not have happened. The second way would be surreptitious physical entry of the facilities of these hardware device manufacturers. This concept should come as no particular surprise. These are the kinds of things that intelligence services the world over do to in their view to protect and advance their country's cause, whether right or wrong as viewed in the eyes of others.
To understand why we believe one of these two methods to be the case, we should begin by reviewing the history of firmware flash procedure and components. Firmware flash attacks have been known for years. Here is a quick chronology of firmware flash incidents and responses:
With this background, lets talk about what needs to be done to enable the attack: the first question is where and how can this bad flash mechanism be introduced?
Net / Net - Without actual knowledge of who is getting the system, it becomes impossible to target a facility from the outside.
Now lets look at the attack from the hard drive manufacturer's perspective. First, lets assume that they are talking about the three major hard drive manufacturers - Seagate Technology (including Maxtor and Samsung), Toshiba, and Western Digital (including HGST). If we assume that the hard drives were the vector for the malware, we still have the issues of the flash controls, lack of end user knowledge, and shear volume of hard drives being made and sold (estimated to be .6B to 1B units in 2014) to get past. So can this really be a viable vector mechanism?
Kaspersky goes on to say 'In many cases, it also allows the American intelligence agencies to grab the encryption keys off a machine, unnoticed, and unlock scrambled contents'. This statement is interesting in that it raises the question of 'how can this be done.' Some drives enable hard drive encryption at the drive level. In this case, the key may be stored in the NVRAM on the drive or re-constituted when the system is booted. If the key is stored in the NVRAM then this makes sense. However if it is not, then can we assume that the back door enables direct access to the files on the hard disk. While this sounds reasonable, they still need to scrape the key from the drive. Of course this could be done except for the technical issue of locating and identifying encryption keys on a file-system.
Kaspersky's researchers then go onto say 'what makes these attacks particularly remarkable is their way of attacking the actual firmware of the computers. But if the firmware becomes infected, security experts say, it can turn even the most sophisticated computer into a useless piece of metal.' Given the boot block and other mechanisms above, this may be an overstatement, but then again without the backups, it could be really difficult to repair.
That kind of attack also makes for a powerful encryption-cracking tool, Mr. Raiu of Kaspersky Lab noted, because it gives attackers the ability to capture a machine's encryption password, store it in "an invisible area inside the computer's hard drive" and unscramble a machine's contents. From a security perspective, if you have the key, you do not have an encryption cracking tool, you have the key. Of course, a key without knowing the algorithm that was used to encrypt data is worthless. This having been said, a recent article alleges the malware resides on the hard drive and can be squirted into the drive rom part. While this may be true and data can be hidden in partitions that are marked bad or irrecoverable, the real question is how can the drive logic know what data it wants to capture and then capture it (from either the drive or memory)? Phrased a different way, how can the drive know when valuable data is decrypted in memory and then capture that? In this case the malware author would need to be able to overcome this issue and be aware of the data and or environment to capture it.
While we may not agree with some of the statements by Kaspersky's article, this is another illustration of just how advanced and sophisticated nation-state cyberwarfare is compared to the cyberattacks widely known in the public information security community. Of course, it should be noted that Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab is only pointing fingers at the moment at American intelligence. Kaspersky Lab is silent about the fact that their own government's intelligence services are conducting sophisticated hardware and software cyberattacks of their own, even possibly the very same attacks that Kaspersky blamed last week on the NSA.
Cyberwar between nation state adversaries is ramping up. Both sides use an array of sophisticated attacks, and the battle ebbs and flows. All of us should remember when reading such news reports that is every reason for foreign investigators such as Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab to slam the American NSA every chance it gets, while remaining silent on what their own intelligence services are up to.
One thing all of us should be able to readily agree on: cybersecurity in the unclassified domain remains as elusive as always. It will be many years if not decades before true cybersecurity becomes mainstream for most commercial organizations.
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Michael F. Angelo is the Chief Security Architect at NetIQ. Michael has been active in security for over 30 years, and is a named inventor for pre-boot bios authentication mechanisms infrastructures. Currently he spends his time generating threat models and certifying products for common criteria as well as presenting on low tech attacks.
Paul Williams is the Chief Technology Officer of Pennsylvania-based White Badger Group. Paul has decades of innovation in the fields of cyber security, artificial intelligence, high speed databases, software quality test engineering, and defense related technologies. Paul is an active public speaker nationally and internationally on the subject of information security.