Tag: cisco

Multiple Cisco UCS-Based Products UEFI Secure Boot Bypass Vulnerability

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Advisory ID: cisco-sa-20200219-ucs-boot-bypass
First Published: 2020 February 19 16:00 GMT
Workarounds: No workarounds available
Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvn09490 CSCvq27796 CSCvq27803

A vulnerability in the firmware of the Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers could allow an authenticated, physical attacker to bypass Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot validation checks and load a compromised software image on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to improper validation of the server firmware upgrade images. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by installing a server firmware version that would allow the attacker to disable UEFI Secure Boot. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to bypass the signature validation checks that are done by UEFI Secure Boot technology and load a compromised software image on the affected device. A compromised software image is any software image that has not been digitally signed by Cisco.
[…]There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability. Cisco has released firmware updates that address this vulnerability.
[…]UEFI Secure Boot is enabled only in a small subset of Cisco UCS-based appliances. For all the other appliances, the feature is not used, so the vulnerability does not apply.

https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20200219-ucs-boot-bypass

Cisco Trustworthy Technologies Data Sheet [updated?]

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I believe this is a new white paper (or at least revised) from Cisco, on their HW/FW security technologies:

Trustworthy solutions encompass Cisco’s commitment to deliver products and solutions with multilayered security that protect against today’s threats. Trustworthy technologies provide a foundation of security and resilience across Cisco’s solutions portfolio. Trustworthy technologies such as image signing, secure boot, Cisco Trust Anchor module (TAm), and runtime defenses help ensure that the code running on Cisco hardware platforms is authentic, unmodified, and operating as intended. A hardware-level root of trust, unique device identity, and validation of all levels of software during startup establish a chain of trust for the system.

Click to access trust-anchor-technologies-ds-45-734230.pdf

CVE-2018-3968: Cisco using outdated U-boot in Cujo

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Let’s hope Cisco Talos will let Mitre/NVD about the details soon. No info on the Talos or Cisco security sites, nor even *Twitter*!, AFAICT. 🙂

https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2018-August/336973.html

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2018-3968

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: [U-Boot] Talos Security Advisory (TALOS-2018-0633/CVE-2018-3968 )
Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2018 18:52:03 +0000

Hello,

Cisco Talos team discovered a security issue impacting Cujo product using an outdated version of U-boot. We’ve assigned a CVE for this issue (CVE-2018-3968) and have attached a copy of the security advisory provided to Cujo.

Cisco seeks embedded security researcher

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Cisco Advisory Security Services is at the forefront of securing today’s emerging technologies. Consulting activities include analyzing, evaluating, and assessing a variety of complex embedded systems. Candidate must be capable of analyzing, dissecting, and attacking hardware.

* Working knowledge of fundamental electronics concepts including passive components and transistors
* Familiarity with various pieces of electrical test equipment
* Identify and interface with hardware attack vectors. (UART, JTAG, SWD, NVRAM, Flash, USB Peripherals, SD Cards, etc)
* Physically interfacing with processors / electrical buses
* Protocol reverse engineering and fuzzing
* Reverse engineer firmware targeting ARM / PPC
* Bus message analysis, instrumentation, and fault injection (SPI, I2C, USB, CAN, LIN)
* Network message instrumentation, collection and analysis (TCP/IP, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G, 4G)
* Practical experience with RF systems and SDR
* Practical experience glitching hardware
* Practical experience identifying and executing side channel attacks

https://jobs.cisco.com/jobs/ProjectDetail/Embedded-Systems-Security-Consultant/1206415?

Hagfish: UEFI Bootloader for Barrelfish

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Barrelfish is a new research operating system being built from scratch and released by ETH Zurich in Switzerland, originally in collaboration with Microsoft Research and now partly supported by HP Enterprise Labs, Huawei, Cisco, Oracle, and VMware. […]

Hagfish is the Barrelfish/ARMv8 UEFI loader prototype: Hagfish (it’s a basal chordate i.e. something like the ancestor of all fishes). Hagfish is a second-stage bootloader for Barrelfish on UEFI platforms, most importantly the ARMv8 server platform. […]

http://www.barrelfish.org/

https://github.com/BarrelfishOS/hagfish

https://github.com/BarrelfishOS/uefi-sdk

Cisco on firmware malware

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[…]Instead, security has to be comprehensive and pervasive on every network device (switches, routers, etc.) as hackers get more sophisticated and unpredictable and capable of exploiting both hardware and software vulnerabilities. These attackers, with cutting-edge techniques, can access memory chips, use tools to extract the contents of those chips and then use the content to build/configure systems to act as imposters on the customer’s networrk. Bottom line – Malware can be installed on a router or switch. Are you protected ?[…]

https://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/building-data-center-trustworthy-systems

U-Root: firmware solution written in Go

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From 2015, something I missed because I didn’t know Go then. ;-(

U-root: A Go-based, Firmware Embeddable Root File System with On-demand Compilation
Ronald G. Minnich, Google; Andrey Mirtchovski, Cisco

U-root is an embeddable root file system intended to be placed in a FLASH device as part of the firmware image, along with a Linux kernel. The program source code is installed in the root file system contained in the firmware FLASH part and compiled on demand. All the u-root utilities, roughly corresponding to standard Unix utilities, are written in Go, a modern, type-safe language with garbage collection and language-level support for concurrency and inter-process communication. Unlike most embedded root file systems, which consist largely of binaries, U-root has only five: an init program and 4 Go compiler binaries. When a program is first run, it and any not-yet-built packages it uses are compiled to a RAM-based file system. The first invocation of a program takes a fraction of a second, as it is compiled. Packages are only compiled once, so the slowest build is always the first one, on boot, which takes about 3 seconds. Subsequent invocations are very fast, usually a millisecond or so. U-root blurs the line between script-based distros such as Perl Linux and binary-based distros such as BusyBox; it has the flexibility of Perl Linux and the performance of BusyBox. Scripts and builtins are written in Go, not a shell scripting language. U-root is a new way to package and distribute file systems for embedded systems, and the use of Go promises a dramatic improvement in their security.

Video and audio on first URL.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc15/technical-session/presentation/minnich

https://github.com/u-root/u-root

http://u-root.tk/

Cisco adds Redfish support

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Ken Spear has a new post on the Cisco blog about Redfish support, and there’s some code on Github related to the post:

Cisco Supports Redfish Standard: API Enhances UCS Programmability

Cisco has added Redfish™ support to IMC to extend our unified and open API to manage server components and to help customers integrate solutions within their existing tool chains. […]

http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/cisco-supports-redfish-standard-api-enhances-ucs-programmability

https://github.com/CiscoUcs/imcsdk

https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-69991

MBRFilter: MBR security for Windows

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Lucian Constantin has an article about a new MBR-based Windows-centric tool created by Cisco’s Talos. From his article on CSO Online:

[…]Cisco’s Talos team has developed an open-source tool that can protect the master boot record of Windows computers from modification by ransomware and other malicious attacks. threat intelligence The tool, called MBRFilter, functions as a signed system driver and puts the disk’s sector 0 into a read-only state. It is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions and its source code has been published on GitHub. The master boot record (MBR) consists of executable code that’s stored in the first sector (sector 0) of a hard disk drive and launches the operating system’s boot loader. The MBR also contains information about the disk’s partitions and their file systems. Since the MBR code is executed before the OS itself, it can be abused by malware programs to increase their persistence and gain a head start before antivirus programs. Malware programs that infect the MBR to hide from antivirus programs have historically been known as bootkits — boot-level rootkits. […]

From the project’s readme:

[…]This is a simple disk filter based on Microsoft’s diskperf and classpnp example drivers. The goal of this filter is to prevent writing to Sector 0 on disks. This is useful to prevent malware that overwrites the MBR like Petya. This driver will prevent writes to sector 0 on all drives. This can cause an issue when initializing a new disk in the Disk Management application. Hit  ‘Cancel’ when asks you to write to the MBR/GPT and it should work as expected. Alternatively, if OK was clicked, then quitting and restarting the application will allow partitoning/formatting. […]

http://www.csoonline.com/article/3133115/security/free-tool-protects-pcs-from-master-boot-record-attacks.html

https://github.com/vrtadmin/MBRFilter/releases/tag/1.0

Talos creates Intel PT driver

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Talos Intel PT Driver
This driver implements the Intel Processor Trace functionality in Intel Skylake architecture for Microsoft Windows.
Intel Processor Trace is a high performance hardware supported branch tracing mechanism in Intel Skylake architecure.
[…]

https://github.com/talos-vulndev/TalosIntelPtDriver

https://github.com/talos-vulndev/FuzzFlow

http://www.talosintelligence.com/

ROPMEMU

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ROPMEMU is a framework to analyze, dissect and decompile complex code-reuse attacks. It adopts a set of different techniques to analyze ROP chains and reconstruct their equivalent code in a form that can be analyzed by traditional reverse engineering tools. In particular, it is based on memory forensics (as its input is a physical memory dump), code emulation (to faithfully rebuild the original ROP chain), multi-path execution (to extract the ROP chain payload), CFG recovery (to rebuild the original control flow), and a number of compiler transformations (to simplify the final instructions of the ROP chain). Specifically, the memory forensics part is based on Volatility plugins. The emulation and the multi-path part is implemented through the Unicorn emulator. […]

https://github.com/vrtadmin/ROPMEMU

https://github.com/vrtadmin/ROPMEMU/wiki

Using TPMs in embedded systems

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Stefan Thom (Microsoft), Steve Hanna (Infineon), and Stacy Cannady (Cisco) have an article in Electronic Design on TPM use in embedded systems. If you are new to TPM, this is a nice introduction.

Standardizing Trust for Embedded Systems

It’s time to get more serious about the lack of security in embedded products. With recently developed standards, it’s implementation just got easier. If you haven’t been concerned about malicious players hacking into your products in the past, or haven’t found success with previous efforts, it’s time for renewed attention and action. Hacking efforts aren’t slowing and, in fact, are on the rise. These days, hackers can accomplish far more than ever before—and the repercussions are far more costly. […]

Full article:
http://electronicdesign.com/embedded/standardizing-trust-embedded-systems

Luca Hall on writing Cisco IOS rootkits

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As announced on PacketStormSecurity, Luca Hall of Grid32 has written an article on Cisco IOS rootkits:

Writing Cisco IOS Rootkits

This paper is about the work involved in modifying firmware images with the test case focused on Cisco IOS. It will show how it is a common misconception that doing such a thing involves advanced knowledge or nation state level resources. I think that one of the main reasons people think it’s so difficult is because there are no commonly known papers or tutorials that walk the reader through the entire process or give all the resources necessary in order to end the paper with a working rootkit. This paper will change that. This paper will provide sound methodologies, show how to approach the subject, and walk the reader through the entire process while providing the necessary knowledge so that by the end of the paper, if the reader is to follow it completely through, they will have a basic but functional firmware rootkit.

PDF is here:

https://packetstormsecurity.com/files/133917/Writing-Cisco-IOS-Rootkits.html

Cisco malware-detection tool

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Cisco has a new tool to help with malware detection:

The most recent addition to the toolkit Cisco is providing customers comes after the Cisco PSIRT worked with internal teams and customers to acquire copies of the malware. Talos has now developed a tool for customers to scan their own network to identify routers that may have been compromised by this specific malware. The tool works by scanning devices and networks, looking for routers answering the SYNful Knock malware. Note: This tool can only detect hosts responding to the malware “knock” as it is known at a particular point in time. This tool can be used to help detect and triage known compromises of infrastructure, but it cannot establish that a network does not have malware that might have evolved to use a different set of signatures. The tool was developed in Python and requires Python version 2.7 along with the scapy v2.3.1 packet manipulation library. During its operation, the tool injects custom crafted packets at the Ethernet layer (layer 2) and monitors and parses the responses. This functionality requires that the tool be run with root privileges.

http://blogs.cisco.com/security/talos/sysadmin-phish

http://blogs.cisco.com/talos

http://blogs.cisco.com/security/talos/synful-scanner

Cisco ROMMON advisory

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Security Activity Bulletin
Evolution in Attacks Against Cisco IOS Software Platforms
IntelliShield ID:    40411
First Published:    2015 August 11 18:17 GMT

Cisco PSIRT has released information regarding increasingly complex attacks against platforms running Cisco IOS Software. Cisco PSIRT has contacted customers to describe an evolution in attacks against Cisco IOS Classic platforms. Cisco has observed a limited number of cases where attackers, after gaining administrative or physical access to a Cisco IOS device, replaced the Cisco IOS ROMMON (IOS bootstrap) with a malicious ROMMON image. In all cases seen by Cisco, attackers accessed the devices using valid administrative credentials and then used the ROMMON field upgrade process to install a malicious ROMMON. Once the malicious ROMMON was installed and the IOS device was rebooted, the attacker was able to manipulate device behavior. Utilizing a malicious ROMMON provides attackers an additional advantage because infection will persist through a reboot. No product vulnerability is leveraged in this attack, and the attacker requires valid administrative credentials or physical access to the system to be successful. The ability to install an upgraded ROMMON image on IOS devices is a standard, documented feature that administrators use to manage their networks. No CVE ID will be assigned. The Cisco PSIRT has recently updated a number of technical documents to include information regarding the ROMMON attack as well as other threats to Cisco IOS devices. The following white papers are publicly available and provide information for preventing, detecting, and remediating potential compromise on Cisco IOS devices.

  Cisco IOS Software Integrity Assurance
  Cisco Guide to Harden IOS Devices
  Telemetry-Based Infrastructure Device Integrity Monitoring

Read Cisco’s full announcement:

http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/viewAlert.x?alertId=40411

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2970952/cisco-warns-customers-about-attacks-installing-rogue-firmware-on-networking-gear.html
https://threatpost.com/cisco-warns-customers-about-attacks-installing-malicious-ios-bootstrap-images/114250
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2970500/network-security/cisco-warns-customers-about-attacks-installing-rogue-firmware-on-networking-gear.htm