Finally, an application for a Smart Meter
After that, it's pretty simple, because all the attacker needs is to decide where to put the receiver current clamp:
There is already a government mandated one - it is called Smart Meter.
If you want your computer to be really secure, disconnect its power cable. So says Mordechai Guri and his team of side-channel sleuths at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The crew have penned a paper titled PowerHammer: Exfiltrating Data from Air-Gapped Computers through Power Lines that explains how attackers could …
>There is already a government mandated one - it is called Smart Meter.
I was feeling happy and calm until I read your comment on a subject that makes my blood boil, £20bn what a TWOFTAM, wankers. Now to go and listen to some whale music or something to bring my anger levels back down again.
There's something soothing about the sound of the power lines.
Maybe it's the way the sound hums to me, like a loving parent to a sleepless baby.
Or perhaps it's the way they almost seem to whisper "It's okay. All is well. The freezer is not defrosting. The milk is not turning in the fridge. The lights haven't gone out in a citywide blackout and cannibal thugs are not coming for you in your bed in an orgy of destruction and bloodletting - not tonight at any rate. Tomorrow night, we can't make any promises about tomorrow night but, tonight at least, sleep easy - you might need all your energy tomorrow night so you should probably try to be well rested (just in case)."
I find it comforting.
That's quite ok, would you like to buy some of my consumption-randomizing desktop UPSes? They also have embedded AI that starts beeping like crazy as soon as it detects suspicious patterns in the consumption of the attached load! The AIs even share their experience securely, via blockchain...!
I expect a proper(inline) UPS would stop it.
Not really - if your PC goes from 30-40W (usual x86 desktop idle) to 120W that will show up on the other side of the UPS. It is current which is being pulse modulated here, not voltage.
The only thing which a normal UPS may do in this scenario is to decrease the effective bit rate a little bit.
You need a rather special power supply to defend against this - one with a constant current draw which discards all "unused" power by heating the air, water, charging - whatever. Normal UPSes do not do that.
Just rectify the mains (inside the room, obvs..) onto a DC supply, put a soddin' great capacitor on it, then run an inverter off the stabilised DC. You might manage to exfiltrate at 1bit/hour off that arrangement :-)
In fact, a 12V car battery float charged feeding a cheapo 300W inverter from Maplins (oh, hang on) would do the job nicely.
But if an attacker has uncontrolled access to your building riser, you've got plenty of other things to worry about, too.
"[...]run an inverter off the stabilised DC [...]"
Who needs an inverter anyway?
Once upon a time, when telco gear in phone exchanges (?) ran off rather large 48V DC batteries and sometimes a generator backing them up, some of the equipment manufacturers had 48VDC (rather than mains) powered variants of some of their computery kit, with the only difference being the input power conversion (what's in a switched mode power supply anyway?).
Does that kind of thing still exist?
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"Place [the stickers] in the directed patter (instructions provided or can be cust fitted by out team of trained warocks) to blck all malevonant eminations from your PC*"
Are you sure your 'Rainbow electret foil' isn't interfering slightly with your wireless keyboard/mouse ;) ?
If I understand this properly, in order for this to be effective, the malware would have to be installed on the target machine or machines and it the attacker would have to have physical access to the facility power lines and the machines should not be on battery backup and definitely not on multiple battery backup systems (a scenario not uncommon in high value targets). This sounds like something a nation state actor would use as a last resort as there are plenty of easier ways to get the job done.
"You need a rather special power supply to defend against this"
A 'proper(inline) UPS' was specified. With a double-conversion UPS, the line power draw measurement is showing the current drawn by the UPS's (asynchronous) battery charging circuitry. I suppose that it shows that there was an increased power draw by the attached equipment sometime in the past several minutes. Not a very useful or accurate metric, easily thwarted by disabling sleep mode.
The problem here is the old evil maid.
An electrician or cleaning person will have access enough to install data exfiltration equipment.
the next thing you need is the "classic" "lost" usb stick. And there you go.. as air gapped pcs will get usb sticks connected to them, almost for sure.
"if they think that's good I've managed to get the led under my mouse to transmit data. I'm still trying to work out the details on how to receive the data but at least I'm half way there."
Has the 'paper' already been published on how to use the hard drive activity light for a similar purpose ?
Or is this whole subculture coverage here and elsewhere just completely and utterly TITSUP .....
Totally irrelevant theatre-style security, u prats.
Meanwhile,
How are those anti-AMD types (TCS?) doing this week with their RyzenFall and such stuff? Maybe I missed something?
What about the Intel Management Engine exploits which Charlie Demerjian finally got into the media after years of trying ?
Etc.
Has the 'paper' already been published on how to use the hard drive activity light for a similar purpose ?
Totally irrelevant theatre-style security, u prats.
It is an axiom of risk management to put serious effort into defending against highly likely scenarios rather than highly unlikely ones.
Exfiltrating data is usually pretty easy if someone has access to the machine, and getting access to the machine is supposed to be the hard part. If they have access to the machine then there is really not much you can do to protect your data apart from close the stable door when you find out, if they don't have access to the machine then all these side channels are completely irrelevant.
"I remember reading an article about this a few years ago, and some pc/mobo manufacturers alleviated this by randomising the flashing when the HDD was being used."
Dell took it a step further in all their Ultrabooks---they removed all of the useful indicators from the machine. You have a generic white LED that is on when the laptop is powered up. No charge indicator, HDD activity, wireless, or any other lights except for Caps Lock. It's actually really annoying having no idea what's going on, especially when Windows updates appear to be stuck.
"It's actually really annoying having no idea what's going on"
But didn't a wise person once say, back in the ancient history of computing, that only one warning/error light was needed, and the rest would be obvious by analysing the other symptoms?
That's very badly paraphrased, but my search engine optimisation is failing me today.
Windows updates being stuck is surely normal operation anyway?
> Totally irrelevant theatre-style security, u prats.
See, I prefer to look at this another way.
There will always be those (whether it's management, customers or someone else) who will insist that it's possible to be 100% secure, and that you absolutely must be. That normally results in a near-unusable service/product because of all the crud that's been added to it to cover edge-cases. Worse, sometimes you find out a customer has been sold an SLA based on the idea you're 100% secure against all vectors.
This and other research like it is just another example you can give for why that could never be possible, and more importantly (from a business standpoint) should never be claimed nor promised.
A few people above have suggested possible solutions for this issue, so what you'd then do (having confirmed they should work) is go and work out the price of implementing - almost certainly so high that those demanding 100% security will refuse to pay the cost.
It doesn't apply to every bit of research done, but it's still useful to have. Plus, obscure things like this (once disclosed) sometimes provide inspiration for someone to find a related approach that's much more practical in the real world. Plus, frankly, some of it is really fucking interesting to work on and tinker with even if there's no direct tangible real-world application to the vector.
"Not again... Well, if they think that's good I've managed to get the led under my mouse to transmit data. I'm still trying to work out the details on how to receive the data but at least I'm half way there."
Balls - that's what you need to prevent those pesky leds talking to strangers.
OTOH, small efficient motor inside a wireless balled mouse, and could be told to drive your data right out of your office. D'oh.
Q patent for intelligent mouse with gps in 3 2 1...
I've been in more than a few buildings where the server rooms are heavily secured, but the plant is not (it's just machinery etc, etc....). So access to the plant is undoubtedly a lot easier a good %age of the time.
You do need to get the malware onto your target computer somehow, but that can potentially be done remotely via social engineering or chaining exploits to get RCE.
When you're talking about this level of sophistication, it's not unreasonable to think that your victim's network might already have various systems in place trying to detect (and block/report) the more traditional methods of exfiltration. It might be an inconvenient approach (with plenty of issues), but it is potentially a way around those.
I've certainly worked in places where this research will have been noted and they'll be watching for any developments and discussing whether there are any *easy* mitigations they can put in place (like better securing the plant rooms). Most of those tend to have strong physical security around the site, but the assumption is always that that could be overcome and so should be treated (to some extent) as not being there
Getting a little James bond here, but could you not design the reader so it fits in a band clamped around the power cable? Most users, even assuming they noticed it, would probably assume that it's the same sort of thing as the ferrite core on display cables. In my experience, most people seem to assume that is some sort of handle to pull out the cable. Even assuming they notice it, they will probably think it needs to be there.
These clamps could be fitted by (say) the cleaner in the morning, and taken away by the same cleaner a few days later. Design it right, and the device could be installed or removed in a few seconds, and a doubt anyone would question a cleaner hanging round a computer for a few seconds.
Which could then be "Exfiltrating Data from Air-Gapped Computers through Power Lines..."
1) If it's "Air-Gapped", then how does the malware get in?
2) If the malware can get in, then perhaps that route works in both directions?
Those concerned should conduct a physical survey I supposed.
And review how malware could get in in the first place...
Infiltration is a separate risk from ex-filtration and so often treated separately.
In order to secure your data, it's usual to assume that miscreants already have access to the devices but have no easy way of getting the data out of the environment, so you limit the opportunities and closely monitor the ones you can't shut down completely (because they are needed for some reason).
To be honest, it would make more sense to infiltrate the system with a spy with an eidetic memory.
Unless you have chosen the most convoluted way possible to steal Aunt Mary's chocolate cookies recipe, computers tend to be connected to the same grid in bunches. How do you separate the power consumption pattern of a single CPU among a dozen computers in an office? The noise level is just too high, even if you filter everything out (HDs and fans kicking in, LEDs going on and off and all that) but CPUs.
At this point I have a more likely data exfiltration warning: Sleep talking! What happens if some employee talks in his sleep, bad guys are recording him, and he starts blabbering something confidential in his sleep? Danger! Danger!