Introduction Welcome back to our introduction to hardware hacking series! In this post we will be covering embedded MultiMediaCard (eMMC) flash chips and the standard protocol they use. eMMC is a form of managed flash storage typically used in phones, tablets, and many IoT devices because of its low power consumption and high performance. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out our other intro to hardware hacking posts on our blog.
Introduction Welcome back to our series on an introduction to hardware hacking! In this post we will be covering the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) protocol, a commonly used serial bus protocol which allows hardware components to communicate with each other. The goal of this post is to serve as a guide for security researchers and hardware hackers to easily interface with target devices. Many embedded devices use SPI to access persistent data stored on flash memory.
Welcome to an introduction to hardware hacking! This series will discuss the basics of interacting with an embedded device though various hardware interfaces. Our team performs penetration testing on IoT / embedded devices every day, and we’re excited to share some of our knowledge and experiences to help those getting started with hardware security learn the ropes. This is a multi-part series which discusses the fundamental concepts, useful tools, and practical techniques which you can use to approach a basic hardware assessment.
For our first blog post in this series, we will focus on a very common type of debug serial communication protocol that can be used to obtain low-level access to a wide range of devices.
In our previous blog, we described some examples of where binary hashing can help solve problems and compared a number of algorithms for both basic block and graph aware hashing. Today we are releasing a tool, Hashashin, which combines some of these algorithms to allow security researchers to port Binary Ninja annotations from one binary to another.
As security researchers, we often spend a lot of time looking into the internals of libraries in products we are assessing. With this come some common time sinks, such as identifying library versions. While library version identification is relatively straightforward on the surface, other tasks are clearly more challenging – such as applying signatures to stripped binaries, porting defined types across libraries, and similar codebases.
In this post, we continue our series on RF4CE by discussing the mechanisms the protocol uses for security. We encourage you to read the first post for background on the purpose of this post and discussion of security levels and keying techniques. This post will explain how RF4CE devices pair and how payloads are encrypted and protected. Additionally, we’ll explain some of the problems with RF4CE security, and discuss potential remediations.
My team talks a lot about “proactive security” – the concept of baking cybersecurity measures into architecture and design as opposed to responding to vulnerabilities and breaches when they occur. However, I lacked a quantitative answer when recently asked: “how do you convince businesses to start being proactive?”
In the course of security assessments we often come across protocols and communication methods that are not widely known outside of specific industry use. This article is the first in a series of deep dives on one such protocol, RF4CE. In this article, we talk about the background of RF4CE and its use cases, as well as providing an introduction to the basics of RF4CE.
River Loop Security’s team members were invited to provide the opening presentation at DARPA’s 2019 Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI)1 Summit Workshop on “Security: From Chip to Board”. Ryan Speers, Partner at River Loop Security, and Sophia d’Antoine, Program Analysis Lead at River Loop Security, will be presenting “Supply Chain Security at the Hardware Level”. DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office is hosting the 2019 ERI Summit to highlight advances in electronics for semiconductor designers, manufacturers, and a broad electronics user base across industries including automotive, telecommunications, and defense.
River Loop Security taught an interactive seminar at the CREDC Summer Symposium on June 25th, 2019 in St. Charles, IL.1 Ryan Speers, a Partner with the team, provided attendees an introduction to security assessments on IEEE 802.15.4 and other related protocols like ZigBee. River Loop has done numerous such engagements and maintains KillerBee, the most widely used open-source tool for conducting penetration tests and research on these protocols. Attendees at the symposium included utility operators, industry or academic researchers, and government regulators.
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