Content deleted Content added
m →Acoustic emanations: "It is assume" → "It is assumed" |
m clean up spacing around commas and other punctuation fixes, replaced: ; → ; (12) |
||
(47 intermediate revisions by 24 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{essay|date=May 2011}}
'''Computer security compromised by hardware failure''' is a branch of [[computer security]] applied to hardware.
The objective of computer security includes protection of information and property from theft, corruption, or [[natural disaster]], while allowing the information and property to remain accessible and productive to its intended users.<ref name="ComSec1">[[Computer security]]</ref> Such secret information could be retrieved by different ways. This article focus on the retrieval of data thanks to misused hardware or hardware failure. Hardware could be misused or exploited to get secret data. This article collects main types of attack that can
Computer security can be comprised by devices, such as keyboards, monitors or printers (thanks to electromagnetic or acoustic emanation for example) or by components of the computer, such as the memory, the network card or the processor (thanks to time or temperature analysis for example).
Line 16 ⟶ 13:
==== Electromagnetic emanations ====
Video display units radiate:
* narrowband harmonics of the digital clock signals
* broadband harmonics of the various 'random' digital signals such as the video signal.<ref name="Eck1">[[#Eck1|Eck, 1985, p.2]]</ref>
Known as compromising emanations or [[Tempest (codename)|TEMPEST]] radiation, a code word for a U.S. government programme aimed at attacking the problem, the electromagnetic broadcast of data has been a significant concern in sensitive computer applications. Eavesdroppers can reconstruct video screen content from radio frequency emanations.<ref name="Kuhn1">[[#Kuhn1|Kuhn,1998, p.1]]</ref> Each (radiated) harmonic of the video signal shows a remarkable resemblance to a broadcast TV signal. It is therefore possible to reconstruct the picture displayed on the video display unit from the radiated emission by means of a normal television receiver.<ref name="Eck1"/> If no preventive measures are taken, eavesdropping on a video display unit is possible at distances up to several hundreds of meters, using only a normal black-and-white TV receiver, a directional antenna and an antenna amplifier. It is even possible to pick up information from some types of video display units at a distance of over 1 kilometer. If more sophisticated receiving and decoding equipment is used, the maximum distance can be much greater.<ref name="Eck2">[[#Eck1|Eck, 1985, p.3]]</ref>
==== Compromising reflections ====
What is displayed by the monitor is reflected on the environment. The time-varying diffuse reflections of the light emitted by a CRT monitor can be exploited to recover the original monitor image.<ref name="[Back1]">[[#Back1|Backes, 2010, p.4]]</ref> This is an eavesdropping technique for spying at a distance on data that is displayed on an arbitrary computer screen, including the currently prevalent LCD monitors.
The technique exploits reflections of the
Many objects that may be found at a usual workplace can be exploited to retrieve information on a
The reflections gathered from curved surfaces on close
=== Keyboard ===
Line 87 ⟶ 84:
Attacks against emanations caused by human typing have attracted interest in recent years. In particular, works showed that keyboard acoustic emanations do leak information that can be exploited to reconstruct the typed text.<ref name="[Ber1]">[[#Ber1|Berger, 2006, p.1]]</ref>
PC keyboards, notebook keyboards are vulnerable to attacks based on differentiating the sound emanated by different keys.<ref name="[Aso1]">[[#Aso1|Asonov, 2004, p.1]]</ref> This attack takes as input an audio signal containing a recording of a single word typed by a single person on a keyboard, and a dictionary of words. It is assumed that the typed word is present in the dictionary. The aim of the attack is to reconstruct the original word from the signal.<ref name="[Ber2]">[[#Ber1|Berger, 2006, p.2]]</ref> This attack, taking as input a 10-minute sound recording of a user typing English text using a keyboard, and then recovering up to 96% of typed characters.<ref name="[Zhu1]">[[#Zhu1|Zhuang, 2005, p.1]]</ref> This attack is inexpensive because the other hardware required is a parabolic microphone and non-invasive because it does not require physical intrusion into the system. The attack employs a neural network to recognize the key being pressed.<ref name="[Aso1]"
On average, there were only 0.5 incorrect recognitions per 20 clicks, which shows the exposure of keyboard to the eavesdropping using this attack.<ref name="[Aso2]">[[#Aso1|Asonov, 2004, p.4]]</ref>
The attack is very efficient, taking under 20 seconds per word on a standard PC. A 90% or better success rate of finding the correct word for words of 10 or more characters, and a success rate of 73% over all the words tested.<ref name="[Ber1]"/> In practice, a human attacker can typically determine if text is random. An attacker can also identify occasions when the user types user names and passwords.<ref name="[Zhu2]">[[#Zhu1|Zhuang, 2005, p.4]]</ref> Short audio signals containing a single word, with seven or more characters long was considered. This means that the signal is only a few seconds long. Such short words are often chosen as a password.<ref name="[Ber1]"/> The dominant factors affecting the attack's success are the word length, and more importantly, the number of repeated characters within the word.<ref name="[Ber1]"/>
This is a procedure that makes it possible to efficiently uncover a word out of audio recordings of keyboard click sounds.<ref name="[Ber3]">[[#Ber1|Berger, 2006, p.8]]</ref> More recently, extracting information out of
==== Video Eavesdropping on Keyboard ====
While extracting private information by watching somebody typing on a keyboard might seem to be an easy task, it becomes extremely challenging if it has to be automated. However, an automated tool is needed in the case of long-lasting surveillance procedures or long user activity, as a human being is able to reconstruct only a few characters per minute. The paper [[#Balz|"ClearShot: Eavesdropping on Keyboard Input from Video"]] presents a novel approach to automatically recovering the text being typed on a keyboard, based solely on a video of the user typing.<ref name="Balz1">[[#Balz1|Balzarotti, 2008, p.1]]</ref>
Automatically recognizing the keys being pressed by a user is a hard problem that requires sophisticated motion analysis. Experiments show that, for a human, reconstructing a few sentences requires lengthy hours of slow-motion analysis of the video.<ref name="Balz2">[[#Balz1|Balzarotti, 2008, p.2]]</ref> The attacker might install a surveillance device in the room of the victim, might take control of an existing camera by exploiting a vulnerability in the
Balzarotti's analysis is divided into two main phases (figure below).
Line 107 ⟶ 104:
==== Acoustic emanations ====
With acoustic emanations, an attack that recovers what a dot-matrix printer processing English text is printing is possible. It is based on a record of the sound the printer makes, if the microphone is close enough to it. This attack recovers up to 72% of printed words, and up to 95% if knowledge about the text are done, with a microphone at a distance of 10 cm from the printer.<ref name="[
After an upfront training phase ("a" in the picture below), the attack ("b" in the picture below) is fully automated and uses a combination of machine learning, audio processing, and speech recognition techniques, including spectrum features, Hidden Markov Models and linear classification.<ref name="[
A training phase was conducted where words from a dictionary are printed and characteristic sound features of these words are extracted and stored in a database. The trained characteristic features was used to recognize the printed English text.<ref name="[Back2]"/> But, this task is not trivial. Major challenges include :
Line 126 ⟶ 123:
[[Secure Shell|SSH]] is designed to provide a secure channel between two hosts. Despite the encryption and authentication mechanisms it uses, SSH has weaknesses. In interactive mode, every individual keystroke that a user types is sent to the remote machine in a separate IP packet immediately after the key is pressed, which leaks the inter-keystroke timing information of users’ typing. Below, the picture represents the command ''su'' processed through a SSH connection.
[[File:Ssh timingattack.png|500px|thumb|center
A very simple statistical techniques suffice to reveal sensitive information such as the length of users’ passwords or even root passwords. By using advanced statistical techniques on timing information collected from the network, the eavesdropper can learn significant information about what users type in SSH sessions.<ref name="[Song1p1]">[[#Song1|Song, 2001, p.1]]</ref> Because the time it takes the operating system to send out the packet after the keypress is in general negligible comparing to the interkeystroke timing, this also enables an eavesdropper to learn the precise interkeystroke timings of users’ typing from the arrival times of packets.<ref name="[Song1p2]">[[#Song1|Song, 2001, p.2]]</ref>
Line 135 ⟶ 132:
Data remanence problems not only affect obvious areas such as RAM and non-volatile memory cells but can also occur in other areas of the device through hot-carrier effects (which change the characteristics of the semiconductors in the device) and various other effects which are examined alongside the more obvious memory-cell remanence problems.<ref name="Gut1">[[#Gut1|Gutmann, 2001, p. 1]]</ref> It is possible to analyse and recover data from these cells and from semiconductor devices in general long after it should (in theory) have vanished.<ref name="Gut2">[[#Gut1|Gutmann, 2001, p. 4]]</ref>
Electromigration, which means to physically move the atom to new locations (to physically alter the device itself) is another type of attack.<ref name="Gut1" /> It involves the relocation of metal atoms due to high current densities, a phenomenon in which atoms are carried along by an
For example, the excavations of voids leads to increased wiring resistance and the growth of whiskers leads to contact formation and current leakage.<ref name="
[[File:Whisker growth.jpg|thumb|center|969px|alt=|Whisker growth due to electromigration]]
Line 148 ⟶ 145:
Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for several seconds after power is lost, even at room temperature and even if removed from a motherboard.<ref name="Hald1p1">[[#Hald1|Halderman, 2008, p1]]</ref>
Many products do cryptographic and other security-related computations using secret keys or other variables that the
==== Read/Write exploits thanks to FireWire ====
Maximillian Dornseif presented a technique in [[#Dorn1|these slides]], which let him take the control of an Apple computer thanks to an iPod. The attacks needed a first generic phase where the iPod software was modified so that it behaves as master on the FireWire bus. Then the iPod had full read/write access on the Apple Computer when the iPod was plugged into a FireWire port.<ref name="Dorn1">[[#Dorn1|Dornseif, 2004]]</ref> FireWire is used by : audio devices, printers, scanners, cameras, gps, etc. Generally, a device connected by FireWire has full access (read/write). Indeed, OHCI Standard (FireWire standard) reads :
{{cquote|Physical requests, including physical read, physical write and lock requests to some CSR registers (section 5.5), are handled directly by the Host Controller without
|4=OHCI Standard}}
So, any device connected by FireWire can read and write data on the computer memory. For example, a device can :
* Grab the screen contents
* Just search the memory for strings such as login, passwords
* Scan for possible key material
* Search cryptographic keys stored in RAM
* Parse the whole physical memory to understand logical memory layout.
or
* Mess up the memory
* Change screen content
* Change UID/GID of a certain process
* Inject code into a process
* Inject an additional process.
Line 172 ⟶ 169:
==== Cache attack ====
To increase the computational power, processors are generally equipped with a [[CPU cache|cache memory]] which decreases the memory access latency. Below, the figure shows the hierarchy between the processor and the memory. First the processor looks for data in the cache L1, then L2, then in the memory.
[[File:Mem cache.jpg|500px|thumb|center
When the data is not where the processor is looking for, it is called a cache-miss. Below, pictures show how the processor fetch data when there are two cache levels.
Line 188 ⟶ 185:
==== Privilege escalation ====
{{See also|Hardware backdoor}}
A simple and generic processor backdoor can be used by attackers as a means to privilege escalation to get to privileges equivalent to those of any given running operating system.<ref name="Dufl21">[[#Dufl2|Duflot, 2008, p.1]]</ref> Also, a non-privileged process of one of the non-privileged invited ___domain running on top of a virtual machine monitor can get to privileges equivalent to those of the virtual machine monitor.<ref name="Dufl21"/>
Loïc Duflot studied Intel processors in the paper "[[#Dufl2|CPU bugs, CPU backdoors and consequences on security]]"
# activate the backdoor by placing the CPU in the desired state
# inject code and run it in ring 0
# get back to ring 3 in order to return the system to a stable state. Indeed, when code is running in ring 0, system calls do not work : Leaving the system in ring 0 and running a random system call (exit() typically) is likely to crash the system.
The backdoors Loïc Duflot presents are simple as they only modify the behavior of three assembly language instructions and have very simple and
== References ==
{{
== Bibliography ==
=== Acoustic ===
* {{
* {{
* {{
* {{Citation| last1 = Backes | first1 = Michael | last2 = Dürmuth | first2 = Markus | last3 = Gerling | first3 = Sebastian | last4 = Pinkal | first4 = Manfred | last5 = Sporleder | first5 = Caroline | title = Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks on Printers | periodical = Proceedings of the 19th
=== Cache attack ===
* {{
* {{Citation| last1 = Page | first1 = Daniel | title = Partitioned cache architecture as a side-channel defence mechanism | periodical = Cryptology ePrint Archive | url = http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/280.pdf | year = 2005 | ref = Pag1 }}
* {{
=== Chemical ===
* {{Citation | last1 = Gutmann | first1 = Peter | title = Data Remanence in Semiconductor Devices | volume = 10 | pages = 4 | periodical = Proceedings of the 10th
=== Electromagnetic ===
* {{
* {{Citation| last1 = Van Eck | first1 = Wim | last2 = Laborato | first2 = Neher | title = Electromagnetic Radiation from Video Display Units: An Eavesdropping Risk? | volume = 4 | issue = 4 | pages = 269–286 | periodical = Computers & Security | url = http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=7308 | year = 1985 | doi = 10.1016/0167-4048(85)90046-
* {{
* {{Citation| last1 = Vuagnoux | first1 = Martin | last2 = Pasini | first2 = Sylvain | title = Compromising electromagnetic emanations of wired and wireless keyboards | pages = 1–16 | periodical = In Proceedings of the 18th
* {{
=== FireWire ===
* {{Citation| last1 = Dornseif | first1 = Maximillian | title = 0wned by an iPod
* {{Citation | last1 = Dornseif | first1 = Maximillian | title = FireWire all your memory are belong to us
=== Processor bug and backdoors ===
* {{
* {{Citation | last1 = Duflot
* {{Citation | last1 = Waksman | first1 = Adam | title = Tamper Evident Microprocessors
=== Temperature ===
* {{Citation| last1 = Skorobogatov| first1 = Sergei | title = Low temperature data remanence in static RAM | journal = Technical Report - University of Cambridge. Computer Laboratory | publisher = University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory | place = Cambridge, UK| url = http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-536.pdf | year = 2002 | issn = 1476-2986 | ref = Sko1}}
* {{
=== Timing attacks ===
* {{Citation| last1 = Song | first1 = Dawn Xiaodong | last2 = Wagner | first2 = David | last3 = Tian | first3 = Xuqing | title = Timing analysis of keystrokes and timing attacks on SSH | volume = 10 | pages = 337–352 | place = Washington, D.C., USA | periodical = Proceedings of the 10th
* {{
* {{Citation| last1 = Brumley | first1 = David | last2 = Boneh | first2 = Dan | title = Remote timing attacks are practical | volume = 12 | issue = 5 | pages = 701 | periodical = Proceedings of the 12th
=== Other ===
* {{
* {{Citation| language = fr | last1 = Duflot | first1 = Loïc | title = Contribution à la sécurité des systèmes
{{Computer science}}
[[Category:Computer security]]
|