Hacker News Reader

Honestly, the Supermicro story makes me uneasy. Yes, both accused corporations rebuffed the story. Yes, there was no real evidence or any follow-up to justify the story.

But god damn, the paranoid person inside me can't let it go. It sounds like such an easy thing to do for such an amazing payoff. And of course both accused have a massive incentive to not disclose a vulnerability such as this one. Hell, the higher-ups might not even know about it if the company has gone through efforts to maintain plausible deniability in scenarios like this.

I think the fact that fake components regularly make their way into the supply chain should be more of a concern than the supermicro story.

So, supply chain security is poor, and getting backdoored parts into the supply chain is a realistic possibility. Bunnie has a good recent talk on this.

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5519

The question in my mind, is is it worth the risk of detection. Particularly when other methods are less traceable, more easily deniable.

You don't even need fake chips. Many servers come with out of band remote management. Some of them even hijack the built-in Ethernet port. Even many Intel CPUs have it built in. You can get by with just a software hack. Bundling a reverse telnet or similar would likely be trivial if you had access to the manufacturer.

bunnie himself says near the end of the presentation that he believes that something happened with supermicro but that the details were deliberately obfuscated by the usgov sources for the story

Well what bunnie says in that talk is that something may well have happened but it doesn’t pass Occam’s razor as presented in the Bloomberg article.

Specifically he says that adding an IC to the board doesn’t make sense. And that embedding something in an existing package/device is possible.

This is very different to what is described in the article being discussed here, and much more complex.

The Bloomberg article seems largely inaccurate in any case. I don’t think it’s worth using as a motivation for any security work.

Yeah Occam's razor says your efforts would be much better spent on flashing custom firmware than a retrofit. That or a deliberate backdoor built into the chip from the ground up.

Or something like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_eSAF_qT_FY

But a nearly magic rice-grain part with a microcontroller and networking?? You could make a fortune in IOT with something that capable.

Did you see the post recently about System 76's laptops that will soon have open source hardware drivers?

Talking about fake items, fake items surely could have fake drivers, but even legitimate items could introduce fake (as in "unofficial") drivers. I think people are maybe naturally more paranoid of something that is "an intrusion". I think the unreasonable human element is when you perceive an intrusion that was not. As in: "They have hacked me look, my screen is blue!"

What makes me doubt the story is that these boards should be all over the place. If you did sneak parts into the supply chain, you’d have no control over where they went, so there should be dozens, perhaps hundreds of companies, government bodies, etc with these things.

Given this, we have to believe that Apple, Amazon etc lied about this, knowing that there would be massive amounts of physical evidence easily available to rivals and security researchers, any of which could prove they were lying at any moment. Why on earth would they take such an insane and unnecessary risk?

Why would Amazon have incentive to deny the story if it were true? According to Bloomberg, the issue was discovered at an acquisition while they were doing due diligence, not in their own servers. If it were true, they should be screaming to anyone who would listen about how they're so serious about security that they go to these depths to find threats, and how you can't trust anyone who doesn't.

Unless a National Security Letter compelled them to remain silent...

I think the biggest problem with hardware implants is that you loose plausible deniability with it. For a state actor that seems a big risk. Especially China would have to lose big time as no one would trust their electronics any longer. You can have almost the same gain with a software implant. It's easier to pull off and you get plausible deniability as a bonus.

>It sounds like such an easy thing to do for such an amazing payoff.

I don't understand how spending tens of millions on making a custom chip design so that you can replace a resistor as a backdoor is an easy thing to do. Most surface mount components have standard form factors. You can just replace entire chips and it is also very easy to simply add a back door to the firmware but a rice grain sized backdoor chip? Come on. That's just some journalist's method of making a lot of money through ad revenue.

X-ray inspection is usually only looking for solder bridges and voids. You aren't really looking at dies unless you have a really good x-ray and actually are concerned about the integrity of the chip. Counterfeit parts end up in designs all the time. They could be knockoff versions that still work or just random parts relabeled. Even these are really only x-rayed as a last resort.

I use very good PCB inspection xrays and ct scanners, and it is critical to use energy levels which do not resolve the silicon, e.g. are not absorbed by the die. Otherwise, it is frustratingly easy to give the part a total ionizing dose which breaks it. I wouldn't want to use an xray to do more than verify the die is the same shape and has the same wirebond layout.

> I’m not even sure where the $200 comes from.

"With only a $150 hot-air soldering tool, a $40 microscope, and some $2 chips ordered online, Elkins was able to alter a Cisco firewall in a way that he says most IT admins likely wouldn't notice, yet would give a remote attacker deep control."

(I don't agree that $200 is realistic, but TFA does at least justify the number)

You can do this with a 30USD soldering iron by eye. None of the other equipment is essential.

That is like saying <insert app here> only cost $99 to develop (cost of apple dev account). Or suxnet cost $2.50 (the cost of a cheap 2gb USB pen drive)

It ignore the labour, high level engineering and resources needed to execute a supply chain attack like this.

Right, so I’m not sure what the purpose of the cost estimate is. To show you don’t need expensive tools? If that’s the case, then 200USD is massive over-estimate. You only need a soldering iron, and the parts.

If you’re looking at the time costs, as I’d estimate this would take maybe a day or two. The time/human resource cost isn’t that right either.

But.. I’m just not sure what the point of the article is...

Where can I get a soldering microscope for $40?

Alibaba, you can get a digital one that comes with a small screen. They are absolute garbage to work with but will work for one off projects

You can get cheap USB microscopes that would work well enough

> I’m not even sure where the $200 comes from.

The article breaks out the $200, most of it was a $150 hot air soldering iron. The chip used was taking off a $2 board, so yes, the chip was literally pocket change at best.

I found your hack (http://41j.com/blog/2016/09/mirrorswitch/) very interesting. Enough to pop open a dumb switch I had laying around... RTL chipset. Googled the DS in 2 minutes. What do you know... VLANs, port mirroring, IGMP snooping, ACLs and an embedded 8051!

This is exactly how state level actors would and have done this.

The entire article is a guy doing a serial port hello world on a slightly more "advanced" arduino. This, like a good chunk of security research, is designed to generate press first and foremost, but isn't really an educational or useful piece unless you didn't know what a serial port was or that soldering was possible.

I mean, this quote is a pretty stellar example:

"Elkins says with a bit more reverse engineering, it would also be possible to reprogram the firmware of the firewall to make it into a more full-featured foothold for spying on the victim's network, though he didn't go that far in his proof of concept."

With a bit more effort, the researcher could make the chip wireless, very difficult to find, could enable it to reflash the bootloader, and could also include an embedded microphone!

But they didn't. (because that would actually be hard)