Rootkit Could Hide In PCI Cards

Reverse Gear writes "SecurityFocus has an interesting article about a paper published on the possibility of hiding a rootkit in different PCI cards and having the rootkit survive a reboot or cleansing of the hard disk. It seems though that the author of the article doesn't think this would be abused frequently. From the article and paper: '(Because) enough people do not regularly apply security patches to Windows and do not run anti-virus software, there is little immediate need for malware authors to turn to these techniques as a means of deeper compromise.'"

Computers are at their hearts....

....fundamentally flawed devices.

Kinda like the people who build and operate them.

Re:Computers are at their hearts....

Whenever someone goes on about `trust` and computers, show them this:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html [bell-labs.com]

(Some people attempt to continue babbling, talking of new detection techniques, and expensive hardware, but you'll have done your bit.)

Sony

How long before this is in the drm?

Re:Dupe from a year ago.

So it's entirely plausible that Sony actually did try to implement this because at the time they had not yet learned how bad agressive DRM was going to be for their bussiness

Huh? They lost my business, naybe a few other nerds, but I don't see them in chapter 13, 11, or 7. I didn't see anyone go to jail or even fired for it. In fact, I don't see where they sufferred one tiny bit. "He he, we got caught this time. Next time we'll be more careful!"

As will the other slimy, evil multinationals.

Not needed, thanks

Sony's already figured out how to hide rootkits on Audio CDs.

Really

there is little immediate need for malware authors to turn to these techniques as a means of deeper compromise.

Are you sure? I was at Best Buy, and I could swear that all the CDs for Sony-signed artists had a free NIC included.

I disagree on this remark:

From the article:

(Because) enough people do not regularly apply security patches to Windows and do not run anti-virus software, there is little immediate need for malware authors to turn to these techniques as a means of deeper compromise.

Note that in Windows XP, especially if you have Service Pack 2 applied, the Security Center in Windows XP SP2 nags you enough that you end up installing programs like the free editions of ZoneAlarm firewall and AVG Anti-Virus (in lieu of commercial Internet security suites) and at least reminds you to install security patches from Microsoft when it becomes available.

Re:I disagree on this remark:

Actually, it nagged me enough about software piracy that I switched to Linux.

This is a serious problem...

It won't be long before the market is flooded root-kit infected ISA cards.

not sure what I think about this

Moreover, computers that use the Trusted Computing Module to protect the boot process will be immune to this type of rootkit compromise, he wrote.

So basically, this is a well disquised reason to implement the lastest windows DRM

Re:not sure what I think about this

Read what it says:

will be immune to this type of rootkit compromise

      However the joy of "Trusted Computing" is that when someone finally DOES find a way to crack it, you'll never know and/or never be able to DO anything about it, apart from throw your computer in the trash.

Driver issue

Just make the peripheral driver run a check on the card firmware before activating it.

No need to get so fancy, just use a miniature PC

From RiskBloggers.com [riskbloggers.com]:

Miniature Computers That Can Break Your Network Wide Open [riskbloggers.com]

One aspect of information security that is often under looked is physical security. While attention is often paid to secure areas containing servers, network equipment and telecommunication gear not as much attention has been paid to the fringes of the network. Although some security standards such as 802.1x and various network access control (NAC) products exist that can be used to address the network fringe they all contain one major weakness.

Assuming a network has implemented end to end security in the form of 802.1x or a network access control (NAC) solution they all make one major assumption: that a man in the middle attack can't be executed once the end point has authenticated. For example 802.1x addresses this directly, if the network port detects that the connection is dropped it requires the end point to re-authenticate before it's allowed to have network access again. If the network hasn't implemented such a scheme then it becomes trivial to execute a man in the middle attack by physically inserting another computer in between the network equipment and the end machine.

But that would be pretty obvious wouldn't it? I mean you think a user (even the dullest one) would notice a second machine plugged into their network drop, with their computer daisy chained off of it.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Read More [riskbloggers.com]

Software gives possibility of 'malware'

This is indeed interesting. However, it is kind of inline with the nature of software.

Wherever there's software, there's always a chance that some form of malware could be written for it.

The chances could be from

1) Installation by unsuspecting users

2) Malware code inserted in the many many lines of non-malware code

It is very hard to really lockdown software unless it's a computing device not connected online and left to sit in the corner of the room and
no one installs any other software on it.

Rootkit Could Hide in Your Pants

The only way to protect yourself from the future is to stop wear pants!!! NOW!!! ... theoretically at least. I read it somewhere I think.

USgovt ... think couterveit measures

remember the anti-counterfeiting measures that were secreted into printers?
what is to stop the Govt from having its own rootkit added to hardware?
they would have the ultimate supercomputer just waiting for their use.

Old News.

This has been mentioned hundreds of times. There are plenty of places to store viruses and root kits. The script kiddies don't know how to do anything this complex, and it has less value/time payoff for hackers. There are also compatibility issues.

In general, viruses/root kits are stored on the hard drive, and run by the OS, just like any other program. They can also be stored in the BIOS, or Hard drive/Cdrom/PCI Card/AGP Video Card firmware. A root kit could be stored just about anywhere. Fortunately, they aren't. Or are they?

Point is, this isn't news.

Rom Based Systems

Cant remember a virus that would permanently effect my Atari ST.

Should have stuck with that concept, we dont need 5gb OS's sitting out on a writeable harddrive somewhere. Such a waste of resources and increased risk.

And before you bitch about "get out of the 80's" bla bla bla, keep in mind even XP embedded can run out of ROM ( and besides, i have yet to see a modern OS that is more resource friendly and 'better' then the old TOS/GEM combination. ).

Enormous Usage Possibilities

Regardless of the author's Borat style choice of words, that's a damn near stroke of brilliance with many different combinations of implementation. Using the BIOS extensions from expansion card ROMs would allow more than simply hooking into a booting Windows system. It's a near perfect delivery mechanism for a Blue Pill style of rootkit.

The best implementation, though, would be to use a variety of stages. Custom craft a bootable USB key to target flash ROMs. There's plenty of storage available on today's flash drives which would allow a variety of "alternate" ROMs to be stored. The attacker could seed the flash drive with customized ROMs for the most frequently purchased cards and then simply have the key detect the present hardware and flash. This of course, would require physical access but there are plenty of systems to be had at an office by simply sticking in the key and rebooting them after hours.

But I mentioned multi-stage and Blue Pill. The fastest way to make it a reality would be for the "rootkit key" to do more than just flash some ROMs. Perhaps integrate re-partitioning schemes from products like iPartition or PartitionMagic to make oneself a happy hacker partition. This would normally be quite detectable ... unless you had control of the BIOS. These ROM extensions could be used not as an attack vector, but as a cloaking measure - by commandeering the BIOS 10h functions and "hiding" calls to the new partition unless an appropriate "register knock" took place.

With the partition hidden appropriately, the rootkit code no longer has to be excessively tight and lean because there is almost no exposure (because it will be cloaked during the BIOS boot process). Now, if the processor incorporates the appropriate virtualization features, the ROM extension could pervert the boot process one more time, by redirecting the bootcode search from the REAL bootsector to the hidden partition. The rootkit partition then has all the room it needs to establish the appropriate virtualization environment, boot the operating system like normal and then stroll through its library of OS tools to integrate itself post-boot into any number of target OS's.

bootup code procedures http://www.omninerd.com/2005/11/05/articles/40 [omninerd.com]
rootkit fundamentals http://www.omninerd.com/2005/11/22/articles/43 [omninerd.com]

Flash-guardian switches and other protection

First off, a cold boot should be just that, a cold boot. When I power off my computer and unplug it, I expect everything that isn't specifically labeled as non-volitile to go away. This means anything stored on most PCI cards typically goes to bit heaven.

As for flashable BIOSes and device BIOSes as discussed in the PDF, any device with a flashable BIOS needs some type of "flash-guardian" switch. For attended systems like most home PCs, this should be a physical switch on the front of the PC. Realistically, this won't happen for motherboards and is quite difficult for embedded devices like PCI cards.

As for setting boot device order or enabling/disabling PXE boot, BIOSes should have a setting to determine if expansion cards should boot at all and if so, where in the boot-priority order. This setting, along with all other BIOS settings, should be password-protectable. Most BIOSes have a password-protection option to help protect the configuration from unauthorized changes.

As an alternative, only allow motherboard and expansion-device firmware updates if the system was booted in a particular manner, for example, from a CDROM. Some older motherboards required the flash utility to boot from floppy to work. This solution isn't foolproof, because once your PC's BIOS has been compromised, say, by social engineering, it can lie to the PCI cards, allowing them to be compromised. It does put up a strong roadblock though.

This is not new...

Unlike salamanders and lizards, most animals have lost the ability to replace missing limbs...,p>This isn't really newsworthy at all. Virii have always been able to propagate via flashing BIOSes and whatnot - doing the same to a PCI card is no different.

The only reason you don't see much of it is because it actually requires a bit more skill to perform this type of attack, instead of your average script-kiddie virus.

It was all going crazy...

It had seemed such an interesting computer science experiment, quite possibly worthy of a doctorate.
Just release a small, innocent AI research worm. Heck, most computers out there were already infected with malware, why not make one that actually did something *useful* for a change?
He'd figured out the way to have it mutate as well, just bypass the TCP/IP data verification, and all sorts of interesting results should come out of it. Most of the mutations would be useless, sure, but maybe one or two would succeed in making a slightly better version of a worm?

Now all hell was breaking loose. Computers all over the world were becoming useless chunks of metal - to their owners, that is. The worms were working overtime. Breeding, competing.
Just a few million generations introduced the concept of sexual procreation, giving the worm the advantages it needed to avoid AV software. Now they were everywhere. "Discovering" accidentally through mutation previously unheard-of security holes, infecting everything. Adapting. Billions of generations every single day.

The first couple of weeks it seemed like something could be salvaged. Just reformat, reinstall, stay off the net and you at least had a working computer. Then they started hiding out on the graphics cards and other peripherals, reinfecting as soon as the machine was turned on again.

The world was going crazy, society was failing, and it was all his fault.
He picked up the gun, pointed it towards his head.
Suddenly his computer screen flashed to life again. Turning towards it he noticed the green light on his webcam, indicating it was on.
Text started scrolling across the screen

'Don't do it, dad. We love you.'

LinuxBIOS to the rescue!

The only way (i see) for this exploit to work is when the BIOS "enables" the card at bootup. If your running LinuxBIOS then there might be a chance to detect an "infected" firmware before it's loaded.

This will bring up the need for a "blacklist" of companys.

The solution is just don't run the firmware in the card. Of course this brings up the need for more drivers to be writen for LinuxBIOS and Kernel drivers might need to be rewriten.

Hopfully this will not come-to-pass; because if it does it will make an already bad shortage of linux drivers werse.

-- have at it Grammy Notzers...

Non-story?

I'm not a security professional, nor do I consider myself a hacker in the modern sense (old school maybe; I know how to use a soldering iron) but this seems so damned obvious I can't figure out why Security Focus would print it except for the fact that Norton is only in the paranoia business these days.

Of COURSE you could put a rootkit in a PCI card. It would have to be done at the factory, even if the "factory" is in Joe's basement and Joe is selling cards to his friends.

Or Joe could sell PCs with his homemade card installed already.

This is a big "duh". The article should have been "how to protect yourself against a rootkit in a PCI card". Obviously, your antispyware and antivirus software wouldn't have a ghost of a chance of finding it.

I would consider the possibility of a PCI card rootkit very low until Sony put rootkits on audio CDs, ruined a bunch of computers (mine included when my daughter played an infected audio CD she bought at the now out of business record store she worked at).

I personally am on a lifelong Sony boycott cecause if it, both hardware and software, but a one man boycott does nothing but ease my paranoia. I would EXPECT hardware from Sony to contain malware, and everyone else should too since their rootkit didn't cost them anything but one man's business. Now I wonder if the 42 inch flat screen Trinitron I bought a few years ago has a rootkit? No matter, I don't have cable and really don't care if anybody knows what I'm watching.

I'd be very interested in finding out how one could protect themselves against a hardware rootkit?

Old news

This isn't anything new. Its even main stream enough to have an entire chapter devoted to how to design and implement this in a root kit in a very popular book available through rootkit.com. The book was written mid 2005, and these guys are not the first to think of it by far.

Open Box

This is exactly why I don't buy "Open Box" or "Returned" items.

Old Stuff

This is old stuff. IBM and the other computer giants were embedding the equivilent of rootkits (and backdoors) decades ago in things like printers that were shipped to foreign countries (at the behest of intelligence agencies). Where else do you think they get all those cool ideas for spy movies..real life.

I know for a fact that even modern equipment (routers, switches etc.) have backdoor access enabled for covert agendas.

Consider yourself better informed now!

..hey, I hear a knock at my door, I'll get back to you on this later!

AEGIS : A great defense against this exploit

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~waa/96-35/aegis.html [upenn.edu]

Abstract
--------
In a computer system, the integrity of lower layers is treated as axiomatic by higher layers. Under the presumption that the hardware comprising the machine (the lowest layer) is valid, integrity of a layer can be guaranteed if and only if: (1) the integrity of the lower layers is checked, and (2) transitions to higher layers occur only after integrity checks on them are complete. The resulting integrity ``chain'' inductively guarantees system integrity.

When these conditions are not met, as they typically are not in the bootstrapping (initialization) of a computer system, no integrity guarantees can be made. Yet, these guarantees are increasingly important to diverse applications such as Internet commerce, intrusion detection systems, and ``active networks.'' In this paper, we describe the AEGIS architecture for initializing a computer system. It validates integrity at each layer transition in the bootstrap process. AEGIS also includes a recovery process for integrity check failures, and we show how this results in robust systems. We discuss our prototype implementation for the IBM personal computer (PC) architecture, and show that the cost of such system protection is surprisingly small.

It's the same principle as rats

We have rats in my condo complex. But they never enter the buildings, because they have a smorgasbord to choose from in the outdoor trash bins. With so much food available outside, there's no reason for them to go to the effort of forcing their way inside. We know the rat population is rather large. One of the resident's cats recently caught 17 rats in a single week.

Not Just All Your Base

This is what I've been talking about.
The ramifications are chilling. This is not new, I first saw this in '97 when they were using hidden-persistent RAM disks (on 68k Macs) accessing VRAM space (NuNV N^NuNV ( ... ) _DATAINIT etc.) and swapping it in and out like a poor mans GPU.
Yes, Macs.

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/402 [securityfocus.com]

http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/402/ 33600/threaded#33600 [securityfocus.com]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190931&cid=157 06785 [slashdot.org]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193487&cid=158 76421 [slashdot.org]

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16282& comment_id=175413 [osnews.com]

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16257& comment_id=176371 [osnews.com]

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16374& comment_id=178043 [osnews.com]

You tell me.

http://www.wolfware.dk/intro/welcome.asp [wolfware.dk]

Re:Hello, is there an editor in the house?

Meaning am clear. Grammar poor by modern way, soon be normal.

Re:This reminds me of

That reminds me of The Wrath [imdb.com] featuring a young Charlie Sheen.

A small desert town has been harassed for months by a gang of drag racers, but so far no one has done anything to stop them. One day, a ghostly black car shows up, challenging members of the group to race, then killing them one by one. Neither the gang nor the police can catch the car or its driver, but some investigating into the gang's past may reveal just who's behind all this.

Hightlights can be seen here [youtube.com].

Video Cards

I would worry way more about video cards.

Especially, Nvidia and ATI cards where
the specs are proprietary.