3 ms·

What is it that the firmware can achieve? Is the firmware capable hijacking data, communicating with the NIC and transmitting data? Or is it somehow injecting h

by acadien 12y ago

What is it that the firmware can achieve? Is the firmware capable hijacking data, communicating with the NIC and transmitting data? Or is it somehow injecting harmful code? I feel like I'm missing something here.

bzbarsky 12y ago
The drive firmware can change the bits going to/from the drive, no? For example, it could binary-patch (either at write time or read time) your kernel image on disk to communicate with the NIC, etc...
toomuchtodo 12y ago
Yes. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/kaspersky_labs_equation_group/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/kaspersky_labs_equat...
ohazi 12y ago
Brilliant demonstration from a few years ago of what's possible with a hard drive firmware hack. You're basically completely fucked. http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1
- acadien 12y ago
  Thanks, exactly the kind of information I was trying to elicit.
panarky 12y ago
Ripped from yesterday's headlines ... ... rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers—a never-before-seen engineering marvel that worked on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate. The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived military-grade disk wiping and reformatting, making sensitive data stolen from victims available even after reformatting the drive and reinstalling the operating system. The firmware also provided programming interfaces that other code in Equation Group's sprawling malware library could access. Once a hard drive was compromised, the infection was impossible to detect or remove. http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/how-omnipotent-hackers-tied-to-the-nsa-hid-for-14-years-and-were-found-at-last/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/how-omnipotent-hacke...
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  That appears to be the act of a nation-state though. I don't really sweat those, because I'm pretty sure if the NSA really wants in to my machine, I can't stop them.
  - nly 12y ago
    They don't want in to just your machine though, they want a backdoor in to everyones machine, by default, without cause.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      I'm not saying it is acceptable or that it doesn't matter. Just that, when it comes to my own personal computer, it isn't worth worrying about. I have a lot of friends who haven't figured out the whole security-as-a-spectrum thing, and they spend a lot of time giving themselves grey hairs over adversaries that 1) they can't beat, 2) aren't worth beating, and 3) don't care about them anyway.

by acadien 12y ago

bzbarsky 12y ago

The drive firmware can change the bits going to/from the drive, no? For example, it could binary-patch (either at write time or read time) your kernel image on disk to communicate with the NIC, etc...

toomuchtodo 12y ago

Yes. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/kaspersky_labs_equation_group/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/kaspersky_labs_equat...

ohazi 12y ago

Brilliant demonstration from a few years ago of what's possible with a hard drive firmware hack. You're basically completely fucked. http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1

acadien 12y ago
Thanks, exactly the kind of information I was trying to elicit.

panarky 12y ago

Ripped from yesterday's headlines ... ... rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers—a never-before-seen engineering marvel that worked on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate. The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived military-grade disk wiping and reformatting, making sensitive data stolen from victims available even after reformatting the drive and reinstalling the operating system. The firmware also provided programming interfaces that other code in Equation Group's sprawling malware library could access. Once a hard drive was compromised, the infection was impossible to detect or remove. http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/how-omnipotent-hackers-tied-to-the-nsa-hid-for-14-years-and-were-found-at-last/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/how-omnipotent-hacke...

sliverstorm 12y ago
That appears to be the act of a nation-state though. I don't really sweat those, because I'm pretty sure if the NSA really wants in to my machine, I can't stop them.
- nly 12y ago
  They don't want in to just your machine though, they want a backdoor in to everyones machine, by default, without cause.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    I'm not saying it is acceptable or that it doesn't matter. Just that, when it comes to my own personal computer, it isn't worth worrying about. I have a lot of friends who haven't figured out the whole security-as-a-spectrum thing, and they spend a lot of time giving themselves grey hairs over adversaries that 1) they can't beat, 2) aren't worth beating, and 3) don't care about them anyway.