Researchers have found a new way to defeat the boot verification process for some Intel-based systems, but the technique can also impact other platforms and can be used to compromise machines in a stealthy and persistent way.
Researchers Peter Bosch and Trammell Hudson presented a time-of-check, time-of-use (TOCTOU) attack against the Boot Guard feature of Intel’s reference Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) implementation at the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam this week.
Boot Guard is a technology that was added in Intel Core 4th generation microarchitecture — also known as Haswell — and is meant to provide assurance that the low-level firmware (UEFI) has not been maliciously modified. It does this by checking that the loaded firmware modules are digitally signed with trusted keys that belong to Intel or the PC manufacturer every time the computer starts.
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While the attack requires opening the laptop case to attach clip-on connectors to the chip, there are ways to make it permanent, such as replacing the SPI chip with a rogue one that emulates the UEFI and also serves malicious code. In fact, Hudson has already designed such an emulator chip that has the same dimensions as a real SPI flash chip and could easily pass as one upon visual inspection if some plastic coating is added to it.
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The Intel Boot Guard and Secure Boot features were created to prevent attackers from injecting malware into the UEFI or other components loaded during the booting process such as the OS bootloader or the kernel. Such malware programs have existed for a long time and are called boot rootkits, or bootkits, and attackers have used them because they are very persistent and hard to remove. That’s because they re-infect the operating system after every reboot before any antivirus program has a chance to start and detect them.
In its chip-swapping variant, Hudson’s and Bosch’s attack acts like a persistent hardware-based bootkit. It can be used to steal disk encryption passwords and other sensitive information from the system and it’s very hard to detect without opening the device and closely inspecting its motherboard.
Even though such physical attacks require a targeted approach and will never be a widespread threat, they can pose a serious risk to businesses and users who have access to valuable information.
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The problem is that distributing UEFI patches has never been an easy process. Intel shares its UEFI kit with UEFI/BIOS vendors who have contracts with various PC manufacturers. Those OEMs then make their own firmware customizations before they ship it inside their products. This means that any subsequent fixes require collaboration and coordination from all involved parties, not to mention end users who need to actually care enough to install those UEFI updates.
The patches for the critical Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that affected Intel CPUs also required UEFI updates and it took months for some PC vendors to release them for their affected products. Many models never received the patches in the form of UEFI updates because their manufacturers no longer supported them.
The two researchers plan to release their proof-of-concept code in the following months as part of a tool called SPISpy that they hope will help other researchers and interested parties to check if their own machines are vulnerable and to investigate similar issues on other platforms.
“I would really like to see the industry move towards opening the source to their firmware, to make it more easy to verify its correctness and security,” says Bosch.
Source: New Intel firmware boot verification bypass enables low-level backdoors | CSO Online
Robin Edgar
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