Adventures in the Platform Security Coordinated Disclosure Circus
IOActive research members continue the work on UEFI security and coordinated disclosure challenges. Platform security is one of the specialized service lines IOActive offers and we have worked with many vendors across the industry. In a previous blog, IOActive research conducted research on various targets while developing tooling that we believe will help the industry make platform security improvements focused on AMD systems. In that blog we disclosed a number of security issues to ASUS and AMI in an SMM module called SecSMIFlash. This module garnered…
Interdependencies – Handshakes Between Critical Infrastructures | Ernie Hayden
As of this writing, the United States was recently threatened by a major railroad union strike. The railroads are a major element of the country’s critical infrastructure. Their shutdown could lead to multiple, cascading impacts on the delivery of goods and services, not only in the US but also in Canada and Mexico. Shipping lines could also be impacted by a railroad strike, since they will not be able to receive or offload containers and cargo to and from rail cars. Per a CNN article, a…
Exploring the security configuration of AMD platforms
TLDR: We present a new tool for evaluating the security of AMD-based platforms and rediscover a long-forgotten vulnerability class that allowed us to fully compromise SMM in the Acer Swift 3 laptop (see Acer’s advisory). Introduction In the last decade, a lot of interesting research has been published around UEFI and System Management Mode (SMM) security. To provide a bit of background, SMM is the most privileged CPU mode on x86-based systems; it is sometimes referred to as ring -2 as it is more privileged than the…
Remote Writing Trailer Air Brakes with RF | Ben Gardiner, NMFTA
Over the course of a few years and a pandemic, we (AIS and NMFTA) tested several tractor-trailers for the security properties of the trailer databus, J2497 aka PLC4TRUCKS. What we discovered was that 1) this traffic could be read remotely with SDRs and active antennas but, more importantly, 2) that valid J2497 traffic could be induced on the trailer databus using SDRs, power amplifiers and simple antennas. In this blog post we will introduce you to some concepts and the discoveries overall – for the full technical details please get…
NFC Relay Attack on Tesla Model Y
Josep Pi Rodriguez, Principal Security Consultant, walks you through the proof-of-concept and technical details of exploitation for the NFC relay attack research on the newest Tesla vehicle, the Model Y. To successfully carry out the attack, IOActive reverse-engineered the NFC protocol Tesla uses between the NFC card and the vehicle, and we then created custom firmware modifications that allowed a Proxmark RDV4.0 device to relay NFC communications over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi using the Proxmark’s BlueShark module. It is known in the vehicle security industry that NFC relay attacks (as well as Radio…
NFC Relay Attack on Tesla Model Y
Josep Pi Rodriguez, Principal Security Consultant, walks you through the proof-of-concept and technical details of exploitation for IOActive’s recent NFC relay attack research on the newest Tesla vehicle, the Model Y. To successfully carry out the attack, IOActive reverse-engineered the NFC protocol Tesla uses between the NFC card and the vehicle, and we then created custom firmware modifications that allowed a Proxmark RDV4.0 device to relay NFC communications over Bluetooth/Wi -Fi using the Proxmark’s BlueShark module. It’s well-known in the vehicle security industry that NFC relay attacks (as well as…
Vulnerability and Patch Management: Every Day is a Zero Day
SC Media on-demand presentation | John Sheehy, SVP of Research and Strategy, participated as a panelist on the CyberRisk Alliance’s eSummit live broadcast.Patch management can be an especially precarious proposition when you’re operating in a work environment where machines and devices must constantly remain operational. Hospitals, factories and power plants are among the many examples of settings where security professionals need to “keep the lights on,” even as they strive to ensure that software and hardware are hardened against the latest vulnerabilities and exploits. The discussion focused on the…
The Battle of Good versus Evil: Regulations and Cybersecurity | Urban Jonson
We all recognize the importance of the DRS Organization Policy within a GCP Org, now we’d like to discuss Cross-Domain Sharing, or XDS as we are calling it. Do you know where your organization’s identities are being used externally? If not, we want to share details on the risks and how SADA can help assess your GCP org.
Update on SATCOM Terminal Attacks During the War in Ukraine
In a prior post titled “Missed Calls for SATCOM Cybersecurity: SATCOM Terminal Cyberattacks Open the War in Ukraine,” I shared three hypotheses about the identity of the threat actor responsible for the SATCOM terminal attacks that opened the war.[1] On 31 March 2022, shortly after my post went live, other posts examining forensic evidence from the attack provided some of the additional information needed to support or reject these hypotheses. Open-Source Forensic Analysis Ruben Santamarta published a blog post titled “VIASAT Incident: From Speculation to Technical Details”…
Reverse Engineering of DAL-A Certified Avionics: Collins’ Pro Line Fusion—AFD-3700
Ruben Santamarta, IOActive Security Researcher, presents a highly technical and detailed look into reverse engineering the DAL-A Certified Avionics: Collins’ Pro Line Fusion—AFD-3700. Modern avionic systems are designed according to the Integrated Modular Avionics concept. Under this paradigm, safety-certified avionic applications and non-critical airborne software share the same computing platform but are running at different partitions. In this context the underlying safety-critical certified RTOS provides the logical isolation, which should prevent unintended interactions between software with different criticalities. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the architecture and vulnerabilities found…