Category: Uncategorized

Gigabyte UEFI firmware advisory

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

It must be big if CERT notices a UEFI issue! 🙂

https://twitter.com/osxreverser/status/847870483525754880

https://twitter.com/osxreverser/status/847848364058312704

https://twitter.com/osxreverser/status/847847913590059008

https://www.cylance.com/en_us/blog/uefi-ransomware-full-disclosure-at-black-hat-asia.html

 

6-part Youtube BIOS system architecture series

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

 

BIOS Session 1 – System Memory Map
BIOS Session 2 – Legacy Region
BIOS Session 3 – HIgh Level Overview of the BOOT flow
BIOS Session 4 – Transaction flows and address decoding part 1
BIOS Session 5 – Transaction flows and address decoding part 2
BIOS Session 6 – PCI Basics and Bus Enumeration

 

 

 

UEFI Plugfest slides uploaded

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

https://uefi.blogspot.com/2017/03/uefi-plugfest-2017-in-nanjing.html

Tim Lewis of Insyde has a blog post with an update for the UEFI plugfest. *Multiple* presentations on security!!

 State of UEFI – Mark Doran (Intel)
 Keynote: China Information Technology Ecosystem – Guangnan Ni (Chinese Academy of Engineering).
 The Role of UEFI Technologies Play in ARM Platform Architecture – Dong Wei (ARM)
 ARM Server’s Firmware Security – Zhixiong (Jonathan) Zhang, Cavium
 SMM Protection in EDK II – Jiewen Yao (Intel)
 Server RAS and UEFI CPER – Mao Lucia and Spike Yuan (Intel)
 A More Secure and Better User Experience for OS-based Firmware Update – David Liu (Phoenix)
 UEFI and IoT: Best Practices in Developing IoT Firmware Solutions – Hawk Chen (Byosoft)
 Establishing and Protecting a Chain of Trust with UEFI – David Chen (Insyde)
 Implementation of Hypervisor in UEFI Firmware – Kangkang Shen (Huawei)
 Lessons Learned from Implementing a Wi-Fi and BT Stack – Tony Lo (AMI)
  UEFI Development Anti-Patterns – Chris Stewart (HP)

http://www.uefi.org/learning_center/presentationsandvideos

TPM firmware updates (and BiosSledgehammer)

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

The below tweet made me realize I’ve not been looking enough for TPM utilities. I’ve seen tools from HP, Dell, and Lenovo. Still looking for tools from other OEMs. The only community tool I can find is BiosSledgehammer, which only works on HP systems.

https://github.com/texhex/BiosSledgehammer

BiosSledgehammer: Automated BIOS update, TPM firmware update and BIOS settings for HP devices.

http://h20566.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c05381064

http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c05192291

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/4/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=2105J

http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c05192291

http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds038226

https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/SLN300914/trusted-platform-module–tpm–upgrade-downgrade-process-for-windows-7-and-10-operating-system-upgrade-downgrade?lang=EN

PEXternalizer (and USB Sanitizer)

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Pci Express eXternalizer lets you pull a PCIE1x port outside of your case using a usb3 cable.

 

https://github.com/securelyfitz/PEXternalizer

https://www.securinghardware.com/

Joe is always making fun toys.

https://github.com/securelyfitz/USBSanitizer

https://www.securinghardware.com/

Wikileaks: Vault 7: Dark Matter

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Today, March 23rd 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 “Dark Matter”, which contains documentation for several CIA projects that infect Apple Mac firmware (meaning the infection persists even if the operating system is re-installed) developed by the CIA’s Embedded Development Branch (EDB). These documents explain the techniques used by CIA to gain ‘persistence’ on Apple Mac devices, including Macs and iPhones and demonstrate their use of EFI/UEFI and firmware malware. Among others, these documents reveal the “Sonic Screwdriver” project which, as explained by the CIA, is a “mechanism for executing code on peripheral devices while a Mac laptop or desktop is booting” allowing an attacker to boot its attack software for example from a USB stick “even when a firmware password is enabled”. The CIA’s “Sonic Screwdriver” infector is stored on the modified firmware of an Apple Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter. “DarkSeaSkies” is “an implant that persists in the EFI firmware of an Apple MacBook Air computer” and consists of “DarkMatter”, “SeaPea” and “NightSkies”, respectively EFI, kernel-space and user-space implants. Documents on the “Triton” MacOSX malware, its infector “Dark Mallet” and its EFI-persistent version “DerStarke” are also included in this release. While the DerStarke1.4 manual released today dates to 2013, other Vault 7 documents show that as of 2016 the CIA continues to rely on and update these systems and is working on the production of DerStarke2.0. Also included in this release is the manual for the CIA’s “NightSkies 1.2” a “beacon/loader/implant tool” for the Apple iPhone. Noteworthy is that NightSkies had reached 1.2 by 2008, and is expressly designed to be physically installed onto factory fresh iPhones. i.e the CIA has been infecting the iPhone supply chain of its targets since at least 2008. While CIA assets are sometimes used to physically infect systems in the custody of a target it is likely that many CIA physical access attacks have infected the targeted organization’s supply chain including by interdicting mail orders and other shipments (opening, infecting, and resending) leaving the United States or otherwise.

https://wikileaks.org/vault7/darkmatter/?cia

https://wikileaks.org/vault7/darkmatter/document/SonicScrewdriver_1p0/
https://wikileaks.org/vault7/darkmatter/document/DerStarke_v1_4_DOC/
https://wikileaks.org/vault7/darkmatter/document/DerStarke_v1_4_RC1_IVVRR_Checklist/
https://wikileaks.org/vault7/darkmatter/document/Triton_v1_3_DOC/
https://wikileaks.org/vault7/darkmatter/document/DarkSeaSkies_1_0_URD/

 

awesome-safety-critical

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

This is a list of resources about programming practices for writing safety-critical software. Disclaimer: I don’t work on safety-critical software so the resources presented here are not necessarily authoritative or latest documents on topic.

https://github.com/stanislaw/awesome-safety-critical

On a related note, SEI just made their Secure C and Secure C++ books freely-available (registration required), those are worth reading:

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/news/article.cfm?assetID=495412

 

Tianocore gets Brotli compression support

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

BinX Song of Intel has submitted a patch to EDK2 with support for Google’s Brotli compression algorithm.

[PATCH 0/4] MdeModulePkg/BaseTools: Add Brotli algorithm support

Brotli algorithm has a little less compress ratio than Lzma, but has better decompress performance than it.  Add Brotli algorithm support, include Brotli decompression library and tool set.

Brotli is a generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm that compresses data using a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modeling, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods. It is similar in speed with deflate but offers more dense compression.

More info:
https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/edk2-devel
https://github.com/google/brotli
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7932.txt
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/brotli

Siemens industrial plant firmware malware

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Quoting the Register article:

[…]Malware posing as legitimate firmware for Siemens control gear has apparently infected industrial equipment worldwide over the past four years. The cyber-nasty is packaged as software to be installed on Siemens programmable logic controllers (PLC), we’re told. At least 10 industrial plants – seven in the US – were found running the infected firmware, a study by industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos claims. According to the Texas-based biz, this particular malware was specifically thrown at industrial control equipment. Exactly what it does, or did, is not explained, although it is described as “crimeware”. […]

The Dragos blog post is worth reading:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/22/malware_siemens_plc_firmware/

https://dragos.com/blog/mimics/

 

 

UTTOS: UEFI testing research

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

A paper from October 2016 that I just noticed:

UTTOS: A Tool for Testing UEFI Code in OS Environment

Unit tests are one of the most widely used tools to assure a minimal level of quality and compliance during development. However, they are not used in many projects where development takes place at low-level contexts. The main reason is that unit test development itself demands more time and becomes expensive in this context and tools that assist test creation are rare or absent. In UEFI development this scenario matches the reality of most teams and unit testing as well as other testing techniques are often not used. To address this fault we propose UTTOS, a tool that parses EDKII build configuration files, mocks the UEFI-specific functions for C development and enables UEFI test suite code to run in the operating system. We show that UTTOS is able to run the test suit in the operating system and save development time.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313074852_UTTOS_A_Tool_for_Testing_UEFI_Code_in_OS_Environment
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307547569_UTTOS_A_Tool_for_Testing_UEFI_Code_in_OS_Environment
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-47443-4_14/fulltext.html

Did not find any source code… 😦 If you do, please leave a Comment!

Redfish and SDI

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Redfish Emerges as an Interoperability Standard for SDI
The world’s data centers are working to adopt Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) – but they are far from reaching their goals. The single biggest challenge in SDI is achieving interoperability between many kinds of hardware. Without that, a data center’s systems become a Tower of Babel, preventing IT system admins from seeing a unified view of all resources – and managing them. Built to leverage virtualized infrastructure, SDI will be easier to achieve if there are more bridges between platforms – leading to better management. This blog focuses on an emerging management standard called Redfish, which is designed to help make SDI a day-to-day reality for hybrid cloud.[…]

http://hurwitz.com/blogs/bozmanblog/entry/redfish-emerges-as-an-interoperability-standard-for-sdi

Facebook seeks Oculus Firmware Manager

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Manager, Firmware (Oculus)
As a Firmware Engineering Manager at Oculus you will lead, manage, and inspire engineering teams developing next-generation platforms for virtual reality. Firmware for VR systems spans multiple target classes, requires deep collaboration across engineering disciplines and the full software stack (from content to RTL), and directly impacts user immersion. You’ll guide architecture and delivery of highly performant and reliable firmware across multiple platforms and product lines. The ideal candidate will have deep embedded system technical knowledge along with a passion for building top teams who deliver great consumer products focused on incredible customer experiences.[…]

https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0I1200000JIZv3EAH/

John Deere tractors and cracked firmware

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

US farmers are asking for open source tractor hardware and firmware, resorting to using aftermarket firmware:

[…]A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for “crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software.” The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and “authorized” repair shops can work on newer tractors.[…]

[…]  I went searching for one of the forums where pirated John Deere firmware is sold. After I found it, I couldn’t do much of anything without joining. I was sent an email with instructions, which required me to buy a $25 dummy diagnostic part from a third-party website. Instead of the part, I was sent a code to join the forum. Once I was on it, I found dozens of threads from farmers desperate to fix and modify their own tractors. According to people on the forums and the farmers who use it, much of the software is cracked in Eastern European countries such as Poland and Ukraine and then sold back to farmers in the United States.[…]

[…] Farmers worry what will happen if John Deere is bought by another company, or what will happen if the company decides to stop servicing its tractors. And so they have taken matters into their own hands by taking control of the software themselves. “What happens in 20 years when there’s a new tractor out and John Deere doesn’t want to fix these anymore?” the farmer using Ukrainian software told me. “Are we supposed to throw the tractor in the garbage, or what?”[…]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware

Companies actively contributing to U-Boot

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Here are some statistics on the U-Boot project, from a U-Boot list posting by Wolfgang Denk of DENX Software Engineering. The Full List is at the below URL. The subset list below are just the top contributing companies. The posting by Wolfgang also shows the top individuals.

Processed 664 csets from 126 developers
26 employers found
A total of 41330 lines added, 31385 removed (delta 9945)

Top changeset contributors by employer
(Unknown)                  170 (25.6%)
Socionext Inc.             105 (15.8%)
Google, Inc.                88 (13.3%)
NXP                         80 (12.0%)
Konsulko Group              42 (6.3%)
Texas Instruments           28 (4.2%)
Samsung                     26 (3.9%)
Xilinx                      26 (3.9%)
ARM                         20 (3.0%)
DENX Software Engineering   14 (2.1%)
…

Top lines changed by employer
Konsulko Group            21331 (35.5%)
(Unknown)                 8685 (14.4%)
Socionext Inc.            8227 (13.7%)
NXP                       8112 (13.5%)
Google, Inc.              5308 (8.8%)
DENX Software Engineering 1904 (3.2%)
ST Microelectronics       1801 (3.0%)
Openedev                  1105 (1.8%)
Samsung                    866 (1.4%)
CompuLab                   844 (1.4%)
…

Employers with the most signoffs (total 111)
NXP                         28 (25.2%)
Xilinx                      16 (14.4%)
DENX Software Engineering   15 (13.5%)
Samsung                     13 (11.7%)
(Unknown)                    9 (8.1%)
Google, Inc.                 9 (8.1%)
Collabora Ltd.               6 (5.4%)
ARM                          5 (4.5%)
Intel                        4 (3.6%)
Socionext Inc.               3 (2.7%)
…

Employers with the most hackers (total 128)
(Unknown)                   65 (50.8%)
NXP                         17 (13.3%)
Texas Instruments            7 (5.5%)
Xilinx                       4 (3.1%)
DENX Software Engineering    4 (3.1%)
Google, Inc.                 3 (2.3%)
Intel                        3 (2.3%)
Socionext Inc.               3 (2.3%)
Samsung                      2 (1.6%)
Collabora Ltd.               2 (1.6%)
…

More info:

http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot/UbootStat_2017_03
https://lists.denx.de/listinfo/u-boot