A SAFE Journey to Selling Devices to Cloud and Datacenter Providers
Observations from the OCP Global Summit | San Jose, CA | October, 18, 2023 If you missed it, there was a significant launch of the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation’s new community-led security program for improving device security underpins a fundamental change in the way device vendors and manufacturers engage and sell their products to the worlds leading cloud and datacenter providers. Beyond standing up a framework for driving continuous security conformance assurance, the Security Appraisal Framework and…
Commonalities in Vehicle Vulnerabilities | 2022 Decade Examination | Samantha Beaumont
With the connected car now commonplace in the market, automotive cybersecurity has become the vanguard of importance as it relates to road user safety. At the forefront of transportation cybersecurity research, IOActive has amassed over a decade of real-world vulnerability data illustrating the issues and potential solutions to cybersecurity threats today’s vehicles face. This analysis is a major update and follow-up to IOActive’s paper on vehicle vulnerabilities originally published in 2016 and updated in 2018. The goal of…
IOActive Silicon Security Services
Our silicon security team helps risk managers, product owners, designers, and cybersecurity professionals understand and manage the emerging risks of silicon-level and hardware-based supply chain attacks. IOActive has spent over two decades at the forefront of cybersecurity research and providing critical security services fueled by the research. As the security of systems (and systems of systems) increasingly depends upon proper hardware security design and implementation, we have invested in honing silicon-level attack techniques that complement the advanced expertise we have long developed in identifying the embedded-device, side-channel, and fault-injection attacks. …
Shuffle Up and Deal: Analyzing the Security of Automated Card Shufflers | Joseph Tartaro, Enrique Nissim, Ethan Shackelford
Joseph Tartaro, Principal Security Consultant, Enrique Nissim, Principal Security Consultant, and Ethan Shackelford, Associate Principal Security Consultant, conducted a comprehensive analysis of the security aspects of ShuffleMaster’s Deck Mate 1 (DM1) and Deck Mate 2 (DM2) automated shuffler machines. Primarily used at poker tables, these machines are widely adopted by casinos and cardrooms and are commonly used in private games. While the primary objective of these devices is to enhance game speed by assisting dealers in shuffling, they also ensure security through various deck checks, and their control over the…
Back to the Future with Platform Security | Enrique Nissim, Krzysztof Okupski, Joseph Tartaro
During our recent talk at HardwearIO (see here, slides here) we described a variety of AMD platform misconfigurations that could lead to critical vulnerabilities, such as: TSEG misconfigurations breaking SMRAM protections SPI controller misconfigurations allowing SPI access from the OS Platform Secure Boot misconfigurations breaking the hardware root-of-trust Here we are providing a brief overview of essential registers settings and explain how our internally developed tool Platbox (see here) can be used to verify them and ultimately exploit them. In a previous…
Drone Security and Fault Injection Attacks | Gabriel Gonzalez | IOActive Labs Blog
I recently published the full technical details to the research in this IOActive whitepaper. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, continues to grow. Drones implement varying levels of security, with more advanced modules being resistant to typical embedded device attacks. IOActive’s interest is in developing one or more viable Fault Injection attacks against hardened UAVs. IOActive has been researching the possibility of achieving code execution on a commercially available drone with significant security features using non-invasive techniques, such as electromagnetic (EM)…
Drone Security and Fault Injection Attacks | Gabriel Gonzalez
Gabriel Gonzalez, IOActive Director of Hardware Security presents full technical detail of his research into drone security and side-channel/fault injection attacks in this whitepaper. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, continues to grow. Drones implement varying levels of security, with more advanced modules being resistant to typical embedded device attacks. IOActive’s interest is in developing one or more viable Fault Injection attacks against hardened UAVs. This paper covers IOActive’s work in setting up a platform for launching side-channel and fault injection attacks using a…
Adventures in the Platform Security Coordinated Disclosure Circus
IOActive research members continue the work on UEFI security and coordinated disclosure challenges. Platform security is one of the specialized service lines IOActive offers and we have worked with many vendors across the industry. In a previous blog, IOActive research conducted research on various targets while developing tooling that we believe will help the industry make platform security improvements focused on AMD systems. In that blog we disclosed a number of security issues to ASUS and AMI in an SMM module called SecSMIFlash. This module garnered…
Interdependencies – Handshakes Between Critical Infrastructures | Ernie Hayden
As of this writing, the United States was recently threatened by a major railroad union strike. The railroads are a major element of the country’s critical infrastructure. Their shutdown could lead to multiple, cascading impacts on the delivery of goods and services, not only in the US but also in Canada and Mexico. Shipping lines could also be impacted by a railroad strike, since they will not be able to receive or offload containers and cargo to and from rail cars. Per a CNN article, a…
Exploring the security configuration of AMD platforms
TLDR: We present a new tool for evaluating the security of AMD-based platforms and rediscover a long-forgotten vulnerability class that allowed us to fully compromise SMM in the Acer Swift 3 laptop (see Acer’s advisory). Introduction In the last decade, a lot of interesting research has been published around UEFI and System Management Mode (SMM) security. To provide a bit of background, SMM is the most privileged CPU mode on x86-based systems; it is sometimes referred to as ring -2 as it is more privileged than the…