Navigating the Cybersecurity Threatscape of Today’s Airports
Everything is ‘Connected’ in Today’s Modern Airports Cybersecurity in global aviation is increasingly dependent on vulnerabilities in Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) systems. The definition of OT systems in this context is defined as hardware and software dedicated to detecting or causing changes in physical processes through direct monitoring and/or control of physical devices such as valves or pumps. OT systems are much less organized and are rarely monitored as closely as conventional IT networks. Airports use several critical OT systems, including baggage handling, airport refueling systems, runway lights,…
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…
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)…
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…
Remote Writing Trailer Air Brakes with RF | Ben Gardiner, NMFTA
Over the course of a few years and a pandemic, we (AIS and NMFTA) tested several tractor-trailers for the security properties of the trailer databus, J2497 aka PLC4TRUCKS. What we discovered was that 1) this traffic could be read remotely with SDRs and active antennas but, more importantly, 2) that valid J2497 traffic could be induced on the trailer databus using SDRs, power amplifiers and simple antennas. In this blog post we will introduce you to some concepts and the discoveries overall – for the full technical details please get…
NFC Relay Attack on Tesla Model Y
Josep Pi Rodriguez, Principal Security Consultant, walks you through the proof-of-concept and technical details of exploitation for the NFC relay attack research on the newest Tesla vehicle, the Model Y. To successfully carry out the attack, IOActive reverse-engineered the NFC protocol Tesla uses between the NFC card and the vehicle, and we then created custom firmware modifications that allowed a Proxmark RDV4.0 device to relay NFC communications over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi using the Proxmark’s BlueShark module. It is known in the vehicle security industry that NFC relay attacks (as well as Radio…
The Battle of Good versus Evil: Regulations and Cybersecurity | Urban Jonson
We all recognize the importance of the DRS Organization Policy within a GCP Org, now we’d like to discuss Cross-Domain Sharing, or XDS as we are calling it. Do you know where your organization’s identities are being used externally? If not, we want to share details on the risks and how SADA can help assess your GCP org.