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Analysis of USB fan given to journalists at North Korea-Singapore Summit [pdf]
- danso 8y agoContext here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/usb-fan-given-out-at-trump-kim-summit-deemed-safe/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/usb-fan-given-out-at-trump-kim...
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoI'm surprised they didn't disassemble the fan proper- while it's not useful as a USB spy device, if we're going to go full paranoia, those lines could still be powering something in the fan chassis itself.
- 21 8y agoDid you look at the picture? The lines are not connected at all.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoI'm referring to the ones that provide power to the fan, not the data lines.
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoYou could fit an entire array of mics, sensors and radios inside the fan that are powered by the USB port. No need to connect to the laptop to record and broadcast info. Pretty unlikely though.
- therein 8y agoTo me, it looked like the plastic molding was oversized for the circuitry inside, which makes me think there may be variants of these fans. This was the `NOP` variant while perhaps others have `malware drop`, `GPS beacon`, `audio capture` or some other capabilities added inside the same chassis with maximum ease. Of course all of this is entirely speculative. Maybe this design was cheaper to produce or simply shown to be sturdier compared to a smaller alternative. It could even be that they had an earlier circuitry design that was slightly larger and then they realized it could be simplified but at that point that had ordered the chassis.
- unixhero 8y agoNot really. There was a microphone inside a gift that was in the oval office given by the Soviets, which broadcasted info for many years. They called it "the thing".
- sitkack 8y agoAnd the microphone was just the diaphragm that a microwave beam was bounced off of. The device itself was entirely passive.
- codedokode 8y agoWhat if there are chips and wires inside PCB?
- FooHentai 8y agoThat was my thought as well - No visible connection on the surface of a PCB does not prove there is no connection on a pin, only that there is no connection on the surface. Multilayer PCBs are commonplace, and a stealthy version which does not show the layers at the edge of the board and encapsulates ICs is not a stretch. All that said I agree with the sentiment in other posts here that this attack vector is so obvious that the likelihood is higher that this is simple trolling. Then again, that kind of 'discovery' trolling also provides signals intelligence, of a kind, in observing the reactions to it.
- mikec3010 8y agothey dont need to be connected. you could have an airgapped circuit with power fed from the rotation of the fan itself.
- agumonkey 8y agoWhat a quick read..
- 21 8y agoThe meme of infected usb sticks in the parking lot is so old and known by everybody and their grandma, that only a prankster would really do it, with a parody screensaver virus. A serious secret service would use more up to date methods.
- ant6n 8y agoLike rogue USB-charging ports in airplanes?
- countbackula 8y agoTake something super banal (a mobile fan), give it a blindingly obvious hacker-y feature (USB connectivity), and distribute them among visitors from an adversarial country (the U.S.), and you're going to be hard-pressed to find someone who isn't at least the tiniest bit suspicious, This is so entirely Spy Device 101 that the payload is likely just entertainment for DPRK officials– watching everyone stress out and tear it apart looking for something malicious. And that, in and of itself, is pretty damn twisted.
- larkeith 8y agoI'm not sure I would call it twisted - it's humorous to watch, but not particularly malicious, and if there are truly no devices in any of the fans it could even be construed as a gesture of good faith. I, for one, appreciate the show.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
- joemaller1 8y agoJust for the sake of curiosity, wouldn't it be possible to embed some sort of self-contained microdevice inside the motor? A USB "rubber-ducky" type device is kind of expected, piggybacking something else off the USB would be kind of interesting. Cheap throwaways like this wouldn't make sense target-wise, but it's fun to think about.
- agumonkey 8y agoYou can surely have a big case around a small motor (either smaller radius or smaller length) and fill the rest with components
- moolcool 8y agoEven if not the motor, they could likely fit some components in the USB jack itself, before it reaches the pins/board
- larkeith 8y agoWould the magnets in the motor interfere significantly with radio transmissions? Not that it would preclude devices being housed inside either way, just introduce complications.
- namibj 8y agoThat is the reason you have an X-ray to vet electronics before allowing them into secure areas (with potentially secret sound and generic em-waves (from 200nm to 300000km aka 300Mm)). If you don't have that already, you don't have that much physical security...
- bandwitch 8y agoNice, an analysis from the future :) Jokes aside. My guess would be that it is highly unlikely a half decent secret service would use such a method to spread a virus or a trojan. On the other hand, I would also guess that no serious journalist will contemplate using a free device provided by a rogue nation just in case.
- larkeith 8y ago> On the other hand, I would also guess that no serious journalist will contemplate using a free device provided by a rogue nation just in case. I disagree. While tech-minded journalists may be aware of the risks of untrusted USB devices, the same cannot be expected of everyone; even if they know that USB drives are potentially dangerous (already a crapshoot, even in some tech-related jobs), people unfamiliar with computers may not realize that the same risks apply to all USB-powered devices.
- lawrencegs 8y agoha! I didn’t catch that until you pointed that out. I wonder why is it dated July 27, 2018... maybe the report is still a work in progress?
- zenexer 8y agoLast-Modified header: Tue, 03 Jul 2018 12:39:05 GMT It's possible he put the date on which he plans to more formally publish or present it.
- Someone 8y ago”VCONN pin is connected to VBUS via a resistor. There are also diodes on the board” A truly paranoid analyst would check that these things that look like a resistor or diode actually are resistors and diodes. That may not be easy, as they could contain a tiny cpu and a few bits of flash memory that change the behavior from “resistor” to something else after x power ups or, using an on-board real-time clock, at a given date, or that run in parallel to the resistor or diode. A simple RFID chip already could be somewhat of use to spies. Even simpler, that “resistor” could contain a tiny microphone and a radio transmitter (getting reasonable audio quality and reasonable radio range likely would be a challenge, but that’s what big budgets are for).
- spitfire 8y agoI used to think things like these were fun conspiracy theories for a slow afternoon. I remember seeing a guy who got Linux running on a spare ARM CPU on his SATA hard drive, thinking "that'd be a great place for a rootkit". But didn't think much further of it as that can be a dark rabbithole to go down. Then Snowden leaks came out, and it turned out technology was an active, hostile and full scale warzone. These are not unreasonable thoughts to have now. Even if you prove one of these fans is safe, it does not prove that an individual has not been targeted with a fan with a payload. Also, don't discount the entire circuit being the bug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%...
- lainga 8y agoExactly. That's a fantastic tactic. Give out a thousand fans and have only 9 or 10 of them be compromised. A safe fan gets torn down by security researchers and declared vanilla, and those 9 or 10 targets believe their fans are safe to use.
- stordoff 8y agoOr even just fake the analysis outright. North Korea having someone at Cambridge, or at least being able to feed them a benign variant via an unnamed journalist, is not out of the question.
- jaxondu 8y agoJust curious why would a nation secret service organisation spy on journalists? They are not delegates of the summit.
- jrockway 8y agoJournalists have sources that the spy organization would very much like to learn the name of. If you're going to come down hard on leaking, bugging journalists or compromising their phones is the most logical thing to do. The reporter that gave up the fan for analysis was absolutely right to be paranoid here.
- joosteto 8y agoThey may want to know who is leaking the sensitive information to the journalists
- a3n 8y agoThey potentially have contact with dissidents and leakers.
- pocketstar 8y agoA malicious chip inside the USB-C connector with pass through power to the fan seems reasonable.
- schiffern 8y agoThis. There's plenty of space to overmold a chip embedded in the USB-C connector itself, and such a device would naturally open-circuit the data pins when powered off (defeating the multimeter test). This "analysis" is so superficial that I thought it was a joke at first. At the very least the device should be completely disassembled and/or X-rayed.
- kqr2 8y agoPerhaps the bug can only be activated by an external source, e.g. Theremin's bug : https://hackaday.com/2015/12/08/theremins-bug/ https://hackaday.com/2015/12/08/theremins-bug/ The moving fan motor could act a simple microphone.
- zyztem 8y agoSurprised to see USB-C connector. Has it gone mainstream all the way in place of Type-A?
- solarkraft 8y agoNot yet, but we're going there.
- jedberg 8y agoThe going theory at the time was that they only bugged some percent of them in the hopes that someone would publish an analysis exactly like this and then everyone else would plug them in freely.
- blhack 8y agoThe idea that somebody has been waiting around to plug in a $0.50 fan until a security researcher did a tear down is absolutly absurd.
- jedberg 8y agoThey weren't waiting around, but the idea is that they would just hear it through the rumor mill and then decide, "oh hey I guess I can plug this in". Having done security for many years, especially user security, I can say with certainty that some people are this dumb.
- bborud 8y agoBefore clicking the link I took a moment to think about how I’d design such a device for nefarious purposes, hoping that the author ought to be able to defeat whatever a mere hobbyist could come up with. It would appear I’d make a better spy than the author would make a security analyst. Penn Jilette has given interviews on what mindset is needed to trick people. One basic rule is that people will gravely underestimate the lengths he is willing to go to in order to trick the audience. I’m not saying this is a spying device. I am merely pointing out that the author shed no light on whether it is. For your entertainment: https://youtu.be/WvXKSSmItls https://youtu.be/WvXKSSmItls
- baby 8y agoYour comment doesn’t explain how you tricked the analyst so I downvoted you.
- double0jimb0 8y agoWooooosh
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jaredlightman 8y agoSomeone should do an analysis of that pdf to see if anything is embedded in that.
- bananadonkey 8y agoHow about we go full meta and suspect the linked PDF is the malicious payload vector?
- ojosilva 8y agoNo need to. Sergei Skorobogatov is actually a secret North Korean agent, the pictures and report are a lie and the fans are indeed infected.
- jeffalyanak 8y agoI'm glad someone is going full Hari Seldon on this.
- vinchuco 8y agoIt's not necessarily science fiction.
- 1ba9115454 8y agoThat would be an awesome attack. Supply journalists with harmless USB devices. Then pass around a fully weaponised PDF. For the those that think malware in PDF's are history, here's a link to 2 zero days found just this march. https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/07/02/taking-apart-a-double-zero-day-sample-discovered-in-joint-hunt-with-eset/ https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/07/02/...
- narrowingorbits 8y agoOne of those times I should have read the comments first. Thanks.
- canada_dry 8y agoWhoa! That had all the suspense of a Geraldo Rivera special. /s
- BooneJS 8y agoThese usb cables with data switches need to become more commonplace. https://www.adafruit.com/product/3438 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3438
- rainbowmverse 8y agoThat only helps if the spy equipment needs more than power from the USB port. It doesn't need a data connection if it's picking up RF noise from the laptop and audio from people to transmit to nearby agents. It was done in the '80s with much less advanced technology: http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/ http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/
- hymen0ptera 8y agoThere's a lot of hysteria surrounding these freebie swag items, enough that you have to wonder if either exactly this sort of reaction was expected, and their laughing at exactly the expected level of fear and paranoia produced at the mere sight of a USB jack... or... they could only but roll their eyes, as they dropped a USB device into the mix out of curiosity to see if there would be any reaction at all, expecting possibly a muted, cool brush off, unconcerned about exploits, and instead caught ten or one hundred times the wave of hysteria, for something they might have internally estimated would be rated as being perceived as a mild security hazard. Seriously, this has all the alarmist fear mongering of the Cuban embassy sonic weapon mystery, but none of the smoking gun who-dunnit clues. People are going to be chasing their tails on this one, wondering if the fan rotors spin at resonating speeds to give off infra-sonic beam-forming geolocation signals, and that's after they sample scrapings from 1000 different components in a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer only to find that they were some standard chinese USB components, purchased in bulk orders months ago, but had arrived too late for Olympics swag and were basically left-overs. It's funny, but I think the volume of this knee-jerk reaction caused more damage than an actual attack could have. If North Korea was going to try and swindle it's way onto targeted USB interfaces, I'd have to imagine that they'd attempt a level of indirection (at least one), and launder the swag through a secondary shell entity, like some shady third-world press corps gadfly to the event. If they hadn't thought of that before (even though I'm sure they already do think that way), this hair-on-fire reaction has certainly taught them to do so, unconditionally, going forward.
- barrystaes 8y agoFlagged because not worthy of the frontpage. What about inside PCB, motor stator, USB connector, etc. Must be some example of Cambridge on how to NOT to do anything..
- sitkack 8y agoEach device emits a specific RF signature when turned on. Nothing more. The Red Team then knows which journalists are susceptible to these kinds of attacks and will use this information later.