Airgap-Jumping Malware May Use Ultrasonic Networking To Communicate 265
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Dan Goodwin writes at Ars Technica about a rootkit that seems straight out of a science-fiction thriller. According to security consultant Dragos Ruiu one day his MacBook Air, on which he had just installed a fresh copy of OS X, spontaneously updated the firmware that helps it boot. Stranger still, when Ruiu then tried to boot the machine off a CD ROM, it refused and he also found that the machine could delete data and undo configuration changes with no prompting. Next a computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting and further investigation showed that multiple variants of Windows and Linux were also affected. But the story gets stranger still. Ruiu began observing encrypted data packets being sent to and from an infected laptop that had no obvious network connection with—but was in close proximity to—another badBIOS-infected computer. The packets were transmitted even when the laptop had its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed. Ruiu also disconnected the machine's power cord so it ran only on battery to rule out the possibility it was receiving signals over the electrical connection. Even then, forensic tools showed the packets continued to flow over the airgapped machine. Then, when Ruiu removed internal speaker and microphone connected to the airgapped machine, the packets suddenly stopped. With the speakers and mic intact, Ruiu said, the isolated computer seemed to be using the high-frequency connection to maintain the integrity of the badBIOS infection as he worked to dismantle software components the malware relied on. It's too early to say with confidence that what Ruiu has been observing is a USB-transmitted rootkit that can burrow into a computer's lowest levels and use it as a jumping off point to infect a variety of operating systems with malware that can't be detected. It's even harder to know for sure that infected systems are using high-frequency sounds to communicate with isolated machines. But after almost two weeks of online discussion, no one has been able to rule out these troubling scenarios, either. 'It looks like the state of the art in intrusion stuff is a lot more advanced than we assumed it was,' says Ruiu. 'The take-away from this is a lot of our forensic procedures are weak when faced with challenges like this. A lot of companies have to take a lot more care when they use forensic data if they're faced with sophisticated attackers.'"
Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/31/1955239/ars-cross-platform-malware-communicates-with-sound
Re:Dupe (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Well the link could have been to the previous slashdot article instead
No! I hate when they do that. When I click on a link, I expect to be taken to the source material. If you're going to link to a previous slashdot article, *indicate* that you're doing that.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, I resent that!
Re: (Score:2)
well, that's so that they can bestboy and let in "editorials" and other "original content", so some people get to advertise themselves with shit articles of shit troll quality.
Re: (Score:2)
wow. this is a new low. a dupe while first one is still on the first page. maybe it's time do downscale to weed and alcohol.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:solution (Score:2)
Anyone who identifies a dupe can be moderated +6 awesome for 7 days.
Anyone who submits a dupe is automatically modded -1 for 7 days.
Karma bonus for both memory over a week, and reading comprehension. And fuck dice for ruining what once was mediocre.
Re: (Score:2)
Great. So then we'll have a race to be more annoying than "Frist P0st!".
Re:Dupe (Score:5, Funny)
Give them a break. Somebody made a funny noise in their office and now all their machines are infected with SlashDupeW32.exe.
Re: (Score:2)
It's so infectous, it's already reproducing on Slashdot.
ghost (Score:2)
It's not a dupe, it's a ghost. whooooo whoooo BOOO!
Dupe (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it really SO hard to get rid of dupes that are less than 24 hours old? You seriously call yourself editor if you don't even manage to get those basic things straight?
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe one of the editors is trying to get an FP.
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bust out an oscilloscope and a logic analyzer and start looking at these signals. It shouldn't be hard to get a waveform capture of the audio running over the speaker and the handshake between a USB device and the host.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
But be sure to use oxygen-free copper cables and - many people get this wrong - remember that top quality cables are directional.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the internal mic and speaker on a standard laptop can be used to maintain the ultrasonic connection, I don't think this requires an ultra-hifi mic in order to capture the frequencies being used.
Re: So? (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a company specializing in this tech on mobile devices. It's startlingly reliable but very low bandwidth.
Check out Yamaha Infosound, Sonic Notify, and LISNR for real world uses.
Re: (Score:3)
That was something I wondered about. Sure, you could get information across an airgap this way, but could you get enough information across to be worthwhile? If the purpose of the ultrasonic link is to permit the virus to repair itself against attack, it must be able to download patches and software modules on the fly. Could you do that with bandwidth limited to, say, several kbps?
Re: (Score:2)
Several kbps...sounds like dial-up modem speeds back in the day.
Yes, I'm old enough to remember using 2400 baud dial-up.
Re: (Score:3)
Several kbps...sounds like dial-up modem speeds back in the day.
Yes, I'm old enough to remember using 2400 baud dial-up.
What's interesting, is that transferring data via audio using modems was artificially limited in data rates, not by the technical capacity of our modems, but because the telephone system basically applied a bandpass filter for voice audio. IIRC it was something like 4khz was the upper frequency that was allowed to pass on voice lines, because human voice reproduction didn't really require the frequencies above 4khz to be understood. That resulted in an artificial boundary compared to the theoretical maxi
Re: So? (Score:4, Funny)
Or wags it tail more to the left than the right when the computer is broadcasting.
Maybe John McAffee could hear those sorts of infections and that's what drove him crazy.
Re: (Score:3)
well if it is hard to detect, it could run for days, weeks, or even years at a time. I remember when people used to start downloads and then go do something else for a day while they waited. (less common these days but with slow VPNs and DVD images, it still happens)
Even a MB per day is a lot when you figure high value files tend to be on the smaller side. A quick ls -lRt of the majority of the RHEL box I am typing on now: 39 MB
Might take a day or two at those speeds, but with only a little intelligence you
Re: (Score:3)
I just called it "tanks", modeled it from games I'd played in arcades. There's a Windows tanks game from a decade ago that's very similar, except it's in color (the computer I wrote it for was black and white only). The Windows tanks game weighed in at over 4 megabytes, mine was probably less than 400 bytes including timing loops to slow it down enough to be playable. This was 1983 on a really primitive TS-1000, 1 mHz Z-80 CPU and 4k of memory.
As to favorite tanks games, I haven't really played many in the
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You made it very badly.
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
I call bullshit: if a machine running OpenBSD is claimed to be compromised, the claim is probably suspect. OpenBSD machines are normally servers, and don't have microphones (and any on-board speakers would have trouble at 300 baud over the noise in a server closet).
As for the story that "its the BIOS wot done it": how is the bios supposed to interact with the OS in the manner described in an OS independent way? And who the hell has a TCP/IP stack that takes its input from a sound card? Its hard enough get one that works on Ubuntu with a Ralink wifi card!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A couple notes:
* You don't need a IP stack for a sound card to transmit data - just like you don't need an IP stack over Tor to use Tor
* This BIOS interacts with the OS in an OS-independent way the same way Mac deals with printers -- think `apt-get install $(uname)-driver`
* Lower than 300 baud
Re: (Score:3)
What's the difference between a sound card and a modem?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Bust out an oscilloscope and a logic analyzer and start looking at these signals.
As long as you have a microphone that can work at those frequencies.
1. As several posters have already pointed out, that's not much of a hurdle.
2. Who said anything about a microphone? The easy way is to connect your scope directly to the electrical signal that drives the speaker -- one channel to each of the compromised machines, and you get the signal you want with no hassle. Unless the software is being particularly clever, you won't even have to crack open the case -- just plug in a Y-cable with an external speaker on one leg and a pigtail with bare wires to clip the sc
Re: (Score:2)
Why would I die if I put a computer in vacuum? In fact, I'll do that all the time...
And vacuum might even be ineffective. What if the sound waves get transported outside through the materials?
Re: (Score:2)
Why would I die if I put a computer in vacuum? In fact, I'll do that all the time...
You won't, but it will sure screw up your vacuum. Even one of those that they show on TV sucking up ball bearings will choke on a laptop. Imagine a Cyclone with your computer going round and round and round ....
Complexity, Resources and Skill. Could it be...? (Score:5, Interesting)
A certain alphabet agency that's been in trouble for tapping all kinds of folks lately? Or are they too clueless to put together a monster like this?
1. You'd have to write a boot loader that a) loads your bare-metal-level sound and microphone driver, networking driver, sonic network protocol, and payload.
2. You'd have to write the forementioned a) bare-metal-level sound and mic drivers. Network drivers that might as well be bare-metal, implement a sonic network protocol, and then get them to successfully transmit your payload.
3. You have to TEST this combo on many different machines.
We're either looking at someone who has a LOT of free time and hardware on his hands, or a 1st or 2nd world military-level dev team with LOTS of cash to spend, IMO.
Re:Complexity, Resources and Skill. Could it be... (Score:5, Insightful)
You've discounted the most obvious option - an attention whore who isn't adverse to making shit up.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Um, why did you "sic" up there?
Because there should be punctuation between "NSA" and "we're" and there was none, perhaps?
Re:Complexity, Resources and Skill. Could it be... (Score:5, Funny)
No, you're still wrong. [wikipedia.org]
Here's how it works:
Because you couldn't here my clear my through [sic] when I typed the word adult in reference to the /. community.
See how easy that is?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
"Because you couldn't here my clear my through when I typed the word adult in reference to the /. community. "
I had to read that about 15 times before it started to make sense. I think you were trying to be sarcastic. Is that possible? English doesn't seem to be your first, or even second language, but to indicate sarcasm one uses quotes.
The latin "sic" means THIS, you use it when you are copying something verbatim but you know it is wrong.
"Sorry that one went over your head"
You might want to check yo
Re: (Score:2)
From the various leaks it appears that such a thing is technology far beyond what the NSA is capable of. After that Star Trek set thing it's starting to look like the Albanian State Washing Machine Company is far more capable in dealing with technology.
Re: (Score:2)
What? You didn't know that the NSA was really a front for the Albanian State Washing Machine Company?
They've been running the world all along.
Re:Complexity, Resources and Skill. Could it be... (Score:5, Interesting)
"You have to TEST this combo on many different machines."
I'm calling hoax as fuck on this whole thing, but for just your microphone and speakers, the majority of laptops are using RealTek. Bare metal for that shouldn't be too hard to handle, as the driverset remains the same across all AC97 models and HD models. Two compliant bare-metal drivers shouldn't be too hard to fit in. Now, transmitting over ultrasonic is a whole different beast, and to do this through a supposedly truly airgapped room via noise should be impossible, as real airgaps will easily kill those frequencies.
Re: (Score:3)
An air gap merely means that no network or other data cables cross it. It doesn't mean keeping things physically away!
Re: (Score:2)
Did you sample your office full of identical models from the same manufacturer to come up with that statistic?
Dell laptop here (so not an unusual brand), using an audio codec from IDT.
Re: (Score:3)
For an engineer with embedded programming experience, this shouldn't be that big of a deal. The challenge isn't only in coding it up, it is also in looking up and comprehending possibly vast documentation needed to pull it off. The code, presumably, runs in system management mode [wikipedia.org] on x86 machines.
Re: (Score:2)
It really isn't as hard as it sounds. A dedicated engineer (or perhaps two, depending on how many chipsets one wishes to support) could pull it off in a year. Presumably one could leech some driver code from open-source kernels like Linux or FreeBSD.
What a load of complete rubbish! (Score:5, Insightful)
What is being 'proposed' is NOT anything infecting through the speaker/microphone, but a pre-existing inection (that was probably USB based)
then communication through these methods - a VERY VERY different thing.
The hype and BS layers need to be peeled off this.
There is no possible infection vector via microphone/speaker, or via power cord as semi-implied (unless you had a powerline modem..), it is simply a
way to get data out of the airgapped but INFECTED machine to others that may not be airgapped.
The 'solution' here is simple, remove the infection! there is more to security than just network airgapping!
Time to go back to security 101.
Re:What a load of complete rubbish! (Score:5, Interesting)
You can also add, a pre-existing infection in hardware into the mix. The extra electronic component fitting into the hardware at the manufacturers that doesn't do what you expect it to do but rather simply carries a payload that it uploads into the system. You can fit an awful lot of data into a pretty small easily concealable chip but you would want to maintain some pretty surreptitious communication methods to hide the presence of that chip. The best place by far to do this stuff is always going to be at the manufacturers.
In that case, the best place for security is at the manufacturers, so essential infrastructure, local audited manufacture on all hardware otherwise you are just guessing whether it is secure or not. Hell, the chip could be embedded within a layer actually inside the motherboard completely invisible, picking up connections as they go through the mother board. Once you can insert and or substitute stuff inside the manufacturers with the use of secret do not tell warrants under threat of treason, anything at all is possible.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
He's clarifying what the OP seems to suggest -- that infection might be happening thru the speaker. A detailed read shows they think this is rootkits using USB for the initial infection, then burrowing into various hardware such that reflashing the bios, replacing the HD, and reloading windows off a known CD isn't enough -- the stuff burrowed into PCI or other hardware re-infects the BIOS. The exact role in the speaker ultrasonic data is not yet known, but it also sounds like he's suggesting some communic
Re: (Score:3)
It doesn't work that way. Just because you get decent performance up to 20kHz doesn't mean that suddenly and abruptly the sensitivity drops off a cliff right above 20kHz. Remember: sharp filters are expensive, you won't get one by accident.
Re:What a load of complete rubbish! (Score:5, Interesting)
It all depends on what timespan you have. All you need to do is to emit sounds that are quite inaudible or at least indistinguishable from high frequency noise that we have been trained to accept (PWM noise from LCD brightness control etc). If you have plenty of time, you can reduce your bitrate heavily in the handshaking step, basically looking for just a few bits of signature in a very wide span of frequencies and encodings. When you have a basic channel, you can tell your counterpart what SNR you are getting and successively tune the channel.
You would never want this for regular networking with any kind of latency demands. If you are rather just trying to get a specific updated payload across at some point, with any number of retransmissions, then I find it quite believable.
Re: (Score:2)
The low pass hardware filter in any remotely decent D/A converter should wipe that out pulse out.
You Are Five Months Early (Score:2, Insightful)
April Fools Day is five months away. Come back and repost this then.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. It's perfectly posted on Halloween. I read this just as Jamie Lee was stabbing Michael Meyers with a hanger pokie, but this story had already raised about 80% of the hair on the back of my neck.
Huh? (Score:3)
Where, exactly, were these "packets" flowing when the networking cards were removed?
Are they UDP or TCP?
How long does it take you to download a movie over your speaker?
Re: (Score:2)
How long does it take you to download a movie over your speaker?
Assuming a movie is 2GB and the data can be transferred at phone-modem speeds (say 57kb/sec), about 3 days.
Of course, nobody was suggesting transmitting a movie via sound waves; malware (and/or the data it wants to exfiltrate) would be much smaller than that.
Re: (Score:2)
The suggestion is that even air gapped machines that are infected can still leak information to network connected machines via audio. In future air gapped machines need to have their speakers disconnected or maybe just uninstall/disable the audio drivers.
Re: (Score:2)
Surely you'd want to download a movie through your camera, not your speaker, wouldn't you? ;-)
May be an attack via the network controller. (Score:5, Informative)
I read the original article, but I don't see any part where someone recorded what was going out the speaker and looked at it. If someone is sending data over audio, it will show on a scope. Clearly that's not going to do much unless the receiving side has some kind of modem code listening for it.
Then there are claims like "It seemed to send TLS encrypted commands in the HostOptions field of DHCP packets." Attacking via DHCP packets is plausible; DHCP clients get told a lot of things they're supposed to do, and some of the older vendor-specific extensions are very insecure. But TLS? TLS isn't used within the DHCP protocol itself. There's a way to store DHCP configuration info in an LDAP server and have a DHCP server access it via LDAP.
If someone is seeing strange DHCP packets, and reloading the BIOS won't help, it's possible that what's going on involves an attack via the network controller. The fancier network controller parts now have CPUs and EEPROM [intel.com]. This may be an attack which puts code in the network controller which in turn patches the BIOS.
The people studying this need to list exactly what network ICs the machines involved are using. Some network devices are too dumb to be used as an attack vector, but some have whole protocol stacks, WiFi support, remote administration support, etc. It would not be surprising if those were attackable.
I've expected attacks via network controllers [slashdot.org] for years. That's been used to attack servers. [slashdot.org] There's a known attack on PCI controllers [oracle.com] which can survive rebooting and reloading the BIOS.
If the machine has wireless networking hardware and the attack exploits the network controller, it may be able to do wireless networking even if the user thinks they have the hardware disabled. Time to open up the machine, clip onto the JTAG port on the network controller, and read out the device memory with a JTAG debugger. Compare the dumps with other machines.
Re: (Score:3)
Now that is somewhat embarrassing and puts this entire issue somewhere below the level of a high school project.
IP over DHCPOptions (Score:3)
makes a fine covert channel to get data to or from a compromised router, and NSA has shown interest in mass-pwning routers.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Update: Intel vPro seems to have known vulnerabilities -- announced at Black Hat conference 2009, matching the time when he first noticed something fishy?
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-vPro-Hacked-101286.shtml
I also suspect that it's not USB or "ultrasonic networking", it's someone with access to his network... vPro allows remote access any time when the machine has an IP address via DHCP.. even when the machine is powered off. Removing ALL standby power from the laptop (=the battery), for the purpose
Re: (Score:2)
It's not malware. (Score:2)
It's just a ghost using your machines.
DMA (Score:2)
You were all warned about this malware for years (Score:4, Interesting)
But people just beat their chest and ridiculed the people posting, locking and shuffling threads or in some cases on commercial antivirus forums, deleting threads and moving them to hidden sections or trashed them altogether.
I believe this is a huge conspiracy which has been going on for years. People in malware forums have been shouting from the rooftops about this but no one wanted to listen.
What you overlooked and should have read:
1. Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care - Government & Stealth Malware
http://anonymous.livelyblog.com/2012/10/05/nobody-seems-to-notice-and-nobody-seems-to-care-government-stealth-malware/ [livelyblog.com]
2. Spy agency ASIO are hacking into personal computers
http://anonymous.livelyblog.com/2013/01/13/spy-agency-asio-are-hacking-into-personal-computers/ [livelyblog.com]
3. Will security firms detect police spyware?
http://anonymous.livelyblog.com/2013/09/17/will-security-firms-detect-police-spyware/ [livelyblog.com]
And several PDF files on blackhat pages, forums, and conferences.
These attacks against non-networked computers runs deep - some changes are so subtle and appear to blend into normal black box Windows activities people overlook them. Read article #1 which includes the sad state of malware detection on *nix.
When you Google enough for firmware, PCI, AGP, BIOS, sound card malware, SDR, FRS, and why some distros autoload the ax25, rose, and netrom modules by default (including TAILS, check it for yourself with lsmod), it is quite unusual. Why would a distribution like TAILS need hamradio modules? They're in there, too, in addition to the ax25, rose, netrom modules. Batman mesh networking is included in TAILS too.
People repeat the same mantra: the only safe computer is a non-networked computer. This is a lie. The truth is, an entirely shielded TEMPEST room with no network connections and shielding down to every piece of the computer is the best test environment, but who is going to take such precautions? Is the shielded computer in the shielded room bound for other locations outside of this safe room?
Wikileaks have released Spy Files, listing many companies developing malware to root your box beyond detection often aimed at Governments and Military sources. These secret communications are no secret, and some have been detected via FRS, but that's only one source out of many.
This is interesting or informative ! (Score:2)
It is.
No points atm sorry (Score:2)
..
It's definitely possible... (Score:4, Interesting)
As the Ars article points out, the individual pieces needed to do all this have already been proven over the years.
Here's why it makes even more sense to me.
A military minded person cannot allow threats to exist anywhere. If anyone anywhere has a weapon that they don't, they must immediately take steps to duplicate it, and defend against it.
Now take that mindset, combine it with a large team of military hackers. Now every single exploit ever publicly disclosed becomes a checkbox on a list somewhere. As a recent Snowden leak story showed, 0-day vulnerabilities have been purchased by the government. We can be sure they run the largest honeypot networks in existence and immediately dissect every new worm, root kit and exploit that touches them.
Every theoretical exploit must be tested for feasibility, turned into a proof-of-concept and then packaged as a tool.
And all that $$ and hacker power is under the command of someone who wants turnkey solutions and "kill switches" for everything.
So it's definitely possible that such tools exist. But why would he be a target? I dunno, maybe someone wants advance notice on what the presenters at upcoming security conferences might be talking about so they can Barnaby Jack them?
Sometimes people will claim something they strongly believe already exists in order to motivate people to look for it and find their proof. Sometimes they get lucky and proof is found, other times they get exposed for it. I hope he's wrong, I really want him to be wrong, but part of me believes it's real because it's definitely possible. After all, if it's just a few years out, then "they" have had it for a decade or more.
communication versus infection (Score:5, Informative)
These machines do two things:
1. They try to infect other machines. They seem to use several methods for this. One is infecting USB sticks and other media. They have been observed abusing an old windows exploit that uses true type fonts as the vector for that.
2. They are trying to communicate with other infected machines. They use some rather inventive carriers for that it seems. One of these appears to be sound. How it works isn't published yet. Another seems to be to use out-of-band communication by putting data inside host-option packets in DHCP. It's obvious that the malware uses such side channels to avoid detection. The OOB communication is done purely to keep in touch with "the swarm" and is not used to infect other machines.
The real nastiness appears to be that this malware is able to infect multiple operating systems that are usually passed by malware manufacturers and also happens to be able to nest itself on the eeprom of infected machines. Both are more or less "a first" and the combination hasn't been seen in the wild either.
Right now, there's a lot of discovery being done and a lot of speculation taking place as to who made it, what it can do, how it gets itself in eeprom and prevents itself from being overwritten during reflashing of the bios. It's not known if the virus will attempt to infect virtual machines, or will only infect machines that will let it nest in it's bios. Also, anything malicious apart from infecting and communicating hasn't been observed. For all we know, it may be a true worm that does nothing but replicate and is an out of control experiment.
So far, no infections appear to have been seen on virtual machines, or machines that don't have an intel chipset. I haven't seen any linux infected machines mentioned, but don't hold your breath on that, if *BSD and OSX have been infected, Linux may very well be infected too. Windows is infected for certain, but what versions are exactly vulnerable isn't clear to me at this time.
Thus far, the only thing that can be advised to prevent infection is the usual; don't trust content/media from sources that could be spreading infections, knowingly or not and keep your system up to date. If applicable, set your bios read-only with hardware switches or jumpers and if at all possible, put passwords on bioses and put software blocks on updates as well. To this date it's not known if and what software blocks will prevent the malware, but it's best to give it as few attack surfaces as possible.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't believe the whole thing for that very reason. It infected both an OSX and FreeBSD machine, which in itself is quite impressive. Two pretty tough systems with low market share, versus a single much weaker target with large market share: Windows.
Then it managed to infect two totally different BIOSes - hard to imagine the OSX and BSD machine were the exact same hardware. So it can handle various BIOSes, too.
And then there must be a quite complex bit of software that can talk to the network stack (there
Re: (Score:2)
I don't believe market share is relevant. This seems to be a specially crafted attack for a very specific task. You're mistaken to think virus and rootkit writer always want to reach the biggest pool possible.
Re: (Score:2)
You have a point there.
However it's quite interesting that it can infect not only two different OSes, but also two different BIOSes. And that researcher happened to have the exact right version of both, for the malware to infect, and managed to get infected. Possible? Yes. Plausible? Not really.
Did he bother to check for actual sounds? (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't yet seen mention of someone setting up microphones sensitive to ultrasonic frequencies to check to see what, if any, odd sounds are being made by the computers. A lot of extraordinary claims are being made and I just don't see the requisite extraordinary evidence.
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt you'd even need a special mic - obviously (allegedly) the receiving computer can record the sound.
Re: (Score:2)
Quite frankly, I see basically no evidence at all. Also, measuring ultra-sonics is easy: Just get an ultrasonic microphone (basically a 5 USD/EUR microphone with a higher-than-normal frequency range) and hook it up to a cheap digital oscilloscope. You will even see spread-spectrum signals that way immediately. And you can do even better: Connect the oscilloscope directly to the speaker input lines. There are obvious other problems, for example that nobody going to so much trouble will be as careless as to m
This has always been known... (Score:4, Funny)
Why do you think network security engineers always have headphones on? They're not listening to music, they're packet-sniffing.
GrpA
Sounds like nonsense once you look at details (Score:2)
While ultra-sonic communication seems plausible at first, it fails to take into account that the audio-system is not up to it. For one thing, most microphones are of the ElCheapo variant, and cannot handle signals above the highest frequencies humans can hear in any meaningful way. For another, the typical, sane audio-design has cutoff-filters that prevent ultra-sonics from being processed. Then, the speakers are pretty unsuitable for generating ultra-sonics. All this leads to very, very bad signal transmis
Re: (Score:2)
Well, shows what you know with all your fancy book-learnin'.
While you may be correct if you go by the dictionary definition of ultrasonics, the adult human ear - my adult human ear, certainly - is incapable of hearing anything over around 15kHz. Freakin' 8kHz in my case :(
I generated an 18kHz tone in Audacity, played it through my 10-year-old Dell desktop's built-in speaker, and my phone's mic picked up the spike clearly from a few feet away in a mildly noisy office. None of the younger humans around me hea
Re: (Score:2)
"Book learning"?? 18kHz is not ultrasound. Some people will hear it. I am over 40, and my hearing goes up to 13.5kHz (just measured). People seem to have incredible bad hearing these days...
You also forget that in order to transmit anything useful, you have to put modulation on it and make sure people do not hear that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't dispute that. But for one thing, 21kHz is not high enough for nobody to hear it. And your dog may get nervous, as it can hear up to 45kHz if healthy and not too old. Also, the very low data-transmission rate makes it basically unusable except for very specific things. Sure, if you do a targeted attack where you want to avoid the network, have a way of later collecting the data without the network and you are looking for something very specific and very small (encryption key, e.g.), it can make sense
Not unique (Score:2)
I seem to recall some anecdote from at least 10 years ago in which an artificial life program, running/evolving on a desktop machine 'learned' to use the power hardware in the computer to signal externally using emf to an adjacent system (I think the neighboring system was a monitoring system that was empowered to 'dump' "food" into the primary when it hit certain breakpoints, and the AI was triggering that faster or something).
That could be apocryphal, though, as I've never seen anything more about it and
I can't believe anyone is falling for this (Score:2)
I call BS... (Score:2)
If it's using some sort of communications ("ultrasonic networking") it's **NOT** airgapped in any way, shape, or form.
"Airgapped" means no remote automated communications of ANY kind would be possible. You can't interact with it by remote, period- you have to have a human being log into a local console to do things with it. This is a failure of the airgapping measures being exploited is all- or it was never really airgapped to begin with.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure they can. Maybe not very efficiently, and not far above the range of human hearing, but they are analog devices, so there is no sharp cutoff at some limit. I agree on your conclusion about the fool nonetheless.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
> Sure they can. Maybe not very efficiently, and not far above the range of human hearing, but they are analog devices, so there is no sharp cutoff at some limit.
To explain a little more: The requirement for mic/speaker on a Mac is to generate/record audio in the audible frequency range in high quality. To have high quality on the high end of that spectrum, you'll have to use a mic/speaker that will still work at yet higher frequencies (read: ultrasonic), with decreasing quality the higher you go.
So in t
Re: (Score:2)
LOL, what a bunch of uninformed bullshit. Quality, in audio, generally means distortion. When you've got narrowband signals, typical harmonic distortion is irrelevant in in transmission because the harmonics are way outside of your bandwidth. It is somewhat important in reception, since you've got leakage between frequencies, but that doesn't need much mitigation, typically. Even intermodulation and other kinds of distortion won't matter all that much. It'd take a bit of testing to determine what kind of mo
Re: (Score:2)
A neighbourhood ecologist friend of mine has a bat detector. Shall we settle this once and for all?
Re: (Score:3)
Quickly! To the Batdetector!
Re:BUNCH OF CRAP !! (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty sure the Mac can be set to record and playback af 48k samples per second.That gives you at least 4kHz of bandwidth above the limits of human hearing right there. With modern encodings, that's probably good for around 20kbps.
Re:BUNCH OF CRAP !! (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you paying attention? A speaker is an analog device. It doesn't have a "cutoff", it has a frequency response curve. Speakers typically used in laptops are quite small, so tend to perform better at higher frequencies than lower ones. Typically I'd guess they're +/- 3dB between 200Hz and 15kHz, with more attenuation outside of that range. Better ones (as might be fitted to a Mac) might manage to stay within +/- 3dB between 100Hz and 20kHz.
Re: (Score:2)
Not quite true, but signal levels will be extremely low and signal quality will be very bad because of sampling rates in the A/D, D/A that are designed for audible frequencies only, filters that are designed to prevent ultra-sonics getting in or out, unsuitable microphones and speakers, etc. In practice, it could, at best, be suitable for very, very slow data transmission, think acoustic coupler.
So, no, it is not going to work. And of course, there is no way to infect a computer via its microphone.
Re: (Score:3)
I think the claim is that it's going to keep infected through the mic, that is, new rootkit pieces being put in through it.
so the badbios would have mic input drivers built in, which would still allow throughput to regular audio functionality.
the author should have provided examples of the communications. I mean, isn't this missing the usual proofs, like dumps of the said bios supermalware, dumps of the audio communications etc..
Re: BUNCH OF CRAP !! (Score:2, Interesting)
Hey buddy its real. The bandwidth of this type of communication is low but the hardware will do it. The startup I work for is focused on transmitting data through high frequency audio and we're not the only ones.
Case studies include Yamaha info sound, Sonic Notify, and LISNR.
The only reason I'd doubt this story is because the bandwidth is less than 300 bits per second in most implementations I've seen.
Re: (Score:3)
I think it's transmitted by LSD. My computer stopped doing that kind of stuff as soon as I stopped taking it.
Re: (Score:2)
The networked computer is easy. The non networked computer needs to be listening for new data/code and to send small amounts of data back out.
The amount of application data needed to sniff passwords, hide the passwords, get them ready to send, the sound sending software and hide from new AV detect might not leave much room for better spoof opt
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Utter plausibility fail.
doubtful (Score:3)
It's using Microcode in the CPU that is received over 3G cellular.
Remember SandyBridge advertised this capability for supposedly stopping theft....
But it's really just a backdoor so they always have a network connection to your box. They can run compiler trust attacks or just read arbitrary data from memory after scanning application fingerprints.
I've been saying for awhile now that this is the next attack vector but the last few times I've mentioned it, you trolls downmodded me to infinity.
So please listen again. It's not the sound card.... they use that to detect when people are close to avoid transmitting if I were to guess. His tinkering proved they should stop before being detected.
Yeah, I thought of this, too. Here's some background info [softpedia.com] on the tech involved. It seems to fit, the article doesn't specifically say only certain newer intel processors are at risk, but it doesn't give any counterexamples that would rule it out, either. This is an obscure deliberately OOB data transmission channel that seems like it could well be the hidden vector, only... Surely a security specialist would be aware of this as a possible mechanism? Also, why would disconnecting the mic/speakers stop a tr