5 ms·

In case it's helpful, here's the first paragraph from the post: "The original KiCad domain name (kicad-pcb.org) was recently sold to an unnamed third party tha

In case it's helpful, here's the first paragraph from the post: "The original KiCad domain name (kicad-pcb.org) was recently sold to an unnamed third party that is not affiliated with the KiCad Project or members of the KiCad Development Team. This sale was unexpected and may pose a risk to KiCad users. The new owners may simply post advertisements or (worst-case scenario) they may host malicious versions of the KiCad software for download."

cookiengineer 5y ago
> they may host malicious versions of the KiCad software for download Imagine someone using this as an attack vector to smuggle in exfiltration appliances in the form of hardware circuits in the KiCad software itself, so that the generated PCB files contain spyware in hardware form. That would be a first of its kind: Supply chain attack at hardware level.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  pcb's today contain too much 'made by hand' to hide much without the designer noticing... It would be like photoshop trying to sneak extra people into photos without the photographer noticing.
  - cookiengineer 5y ago
    > pcb's today contain too much 'made by hand' to hide much without the designer noticing... Doesn't mean the layers have to be rendered with the modified/malicious version of KiCAD. They could just try to hide it if they detect a layer with id=spyware. I'm just saying that this would be a very sneaky way to infiltrate the hardware industry, because currently all installed versions rely on the old domain - and that's where they will pull their updates from, too. So pushing out a newer release with that "spyware" modification would be super easy to realize.
    - okl 5y ago
      What kind of spyware do you imagine? Rogue copper traces? Any extra parts to populate suddenly appearing on the BOM, that would be obvious.
      - cookiengineer 5y ago
        Well, depends on how the Q&A process is in the pipeline after the design. What I thought of is maybe it might be feasible to sneak in some circuits that reroute e.g. a network port's traffic to a specific public IP/CnC. Depending on how complex the PCB layout is, it could be feasible to encode or modify the modulation of easy network busses (aside from ethernet). But I guess that would involve deployment of malicious firmware or availability of a specific "malicious" chipset, too, because ethernet is quite complex in the sense that there are too many physical parts necessary to implement it in hardware form. I was just thinking about the Q&A pipelines in the industrial process. Usually they never validate anything because of proprietary/protected intellectual property contracts, so suppliers down the line always claim it's according to specifications and that is blindly trusted by the manufacturers. Identifying something like this is much harder in the organizational sense, because it involves a lot of time for verification down the line, and involves a lot of organizational blamestorm before anything really happens to fix it.
        okl 5y ago
        If you are willing to go that far, just sell them fake ICs. No need to meddle with PCB layouts.
      - londons_explore 5y ago
        There are a few neat and potentially evil things you can do with copper traces alone. For example, you might be able to make a spy radio emitter[1]. Despite this, I very much doubt any software is going to be inserting those into designs automatically anytime soon! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
  - josefx 5y ago
    So probably trivial with any shot that contains more than a dozen people the photographer barely knows?
- rcxdude 5y ago
  Extremely difficult to achieve undetected. Firstly just successfully smuggling a working design for spyware into the PCB design would require an impressive feat of CAD engineering, then there's no way to achieve this just with copper traces, you would need to add new components to the board. Both changes in the traces and new components would be extremely obvious in all but the most automated workflows (getting a PCB manufactured is a very manual process). It's typical to inspect the output gerber files manually for any errors, as well as for PCB manufacturers to offer a preview of their interpretation of the gerber. Similarly with the BOM, which has a different flow with a lot of human touch. Also, the techniques which would allow hiding the components within the PCB itself (which do exist) are extremely rare. The only places with the slightest chance of this working (massive organisations with a huge amount of siloing) aren't using KiCAD as a tool.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Perhaps there's some chip that has some functionality enabled by a logic input. The designer intended it to be off but KiCad tied it high or low or open to turn it on instead. That functionality might enable a serial interface or reading or writing some sensitive memory or whatever that might become a vulnerability.
  - dTal 5y ago
    You're correct of course. It's wildly infeasible, prone to rapid detection, and there's no plausible profit to sneaking subtle backdoors into random KiCAD projects. Now let's brainstorm possible vectors anyway... You could manipulate PCB traces in such a way as to leak data over RF? No topological change to the circuit and very hard to pin down.
    - polishdude20 5y ago
      Any data leaked would just leak more than it already does. If your data is encrypted, it would just be encrypted but louder.
- ameminator 5y ago
  I imagine it would be much more likely to have a "backdoor"-ed version of kicad that would phone in with intellectual property rather than PCB spyware. Making a PCB is too much like writing assembly for it to go unnoticed...
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    Exfiltrating KiCAD project files and manually designing a subtly backdoored version is a much more likely attack. An automatically inserted backdoor has a high risk of detection, dragging the entire plot out into the open. Stealthily phoning home is harder to detect and most small operations that would use KiCAD are probably not well equipped to detect such network traffic. The downside is of course that physical access to the product is required to install the backdoored electronics.

cookiengineer 5y ago

> they may host malicious versions of the KiCad software for download Imagine someone using this as an attack vector to smuggle in exfiltration appliances in the form of hardware circuits in the KiCad software itself, so that the generated PCB files contain spyware in hardware form. That would be a first of its kind: Supply chain attack at hardware level.

londons_explore 5y ago
pcb's today contain too much 'made by hand' to hide much without the designer noticing... It would be like photoshop trying to sneak extra people into photos without the photographer noticing.
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  > pcb's today contain too much 'made by hand' to hide much without the designer noticing... Doesn't mean the layers have to be rendered with the modified/malicious version of KiCAD. They could just try to hide it if they detect a layer with id=spyware. I'm just saying that this would be a very sneaky way to infiltrate the hardware industry, because currently all installed versions rely on the old domain - and that's where they will pull their updates from, too. So pushing out a newer release with that "spyware" modification would be super easy to realize.
  - okl 5y ago
    What kind of spyware do you imagine? Rogue copper traces? Any extra parts to populate suddenly appearing on the BOM, that would be obvious.
    - cookiengineer 5y ago
      Well, depends on how the Q&A process is in the pipeline after the design. What I thought of is maybe it might be feasible to sneak in some circuits that reroute e.g. a network port's traffic to a specific public IP/CnC. Depending on how complex the PCB layout is, it could be feasible to encode or modify the modulation of easy network busses (aside from ethernet). But I guess that would involve deployment of malicious firmware or availability of a specific "malicious" chipset, too, because ethernet is quite complex in the sense that there are too many physical parts necessary to implement it in hardware form. I was just thinking about the Q&A pipelines in the industrial process. Usually they never validate anything because of proprietary/protected intellectual property contracts, so suppliers down the line always claim it's according to specifications and that is blindly trusted by the manufacturers. Identifying something like this is much harder in the organizational sense, because it involves a lot of time for verification down the line, and involves a lot of organizational blamestorm before anything really happens to fix it.
      - okl 5y ago
        If you are willing to go that far, just sell them fake ICs. No need to meddle with PCB layouts.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      There are a few neat and potentially evil things you can do with copper traces alone. For example, you might be able to make a spy radio emitter[1]. Despite this, I very much doubt any software is going to be inserting those into designs automatically anytime soon! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
- josefx 5y ago
  So probably trivial with any shot that contains more than a dozen people the photographer barely knows?
rcxdude 5y ago
Extremely difficult to achieve undetected. Firstly just successfully smuggling a working design for spyware into the PCB design would require an impressive feat of CAD engineering, then there's no way to achieve this just with copper traces, you would need to add new components to the board. Both changes in the traces and new components would be extremely obvious in all but the most automated workflows (getting a PCB manufactured is a very manual process). It's typical to inspect the output gerber files manually for any errors, as well as for PCB manufacturers to offer a preview of their interpretation of the gerber. Similarly with the BOM, which has a different flow with a lot of human touch. Also, the techniques which would allow hiding the components within the PCB itself (which do exist) are extremely rare. The only places with the slightest chance of this working (massive organisations with a huge amount of siloing) aren't using KiCAD as a tool.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Perhaps there's some chip that has some functionality enabled by a logic input. The designer intended it to be off but KiCad tied it high or low or open to turn it on instead. That functionality might enable a serial interface or reading or writing some sensitive memory or whatever that might become a vulnerability.
- dTal 5y ago
  You're correct of course. It's wildly infeasible, prone to rapid detection, and there's no plausible profit to sneaking subtle backdoors into random KiCAD projects. Now let's brainstorm possible vectors anyway... You could manipulate PCB traces in such a way as to leak data over RF? No topological change to the circuit and very hard to pin down.
  - polishdude20 5y ago
    Any data leaked would just leak more than it already does. If your data is encrypted, it would just be encrypted but louder.
ameminator 5y ago
I imagine it would be much more likely to have a "backdoor"-ed version of kicad that would phone in with intellectual property rather than PCB spyware. Making a PCB is too much like writing assembly for it to go unnoticed...
- gmueckl 5y ago
  Exfiltrating KiCAD project files and manually designing a subtly backdoored version is a much more likely attack. An automatically inserted backdoor has a high risk of detection, dragging the entire plot out into the open. Stealthily phoning home is harder to detect and most small operations that would use KiCAD are probably not well equipped to detect such network traffic. The downside is of course that physical access to the product is required to install the backdoored electronics.