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Jimmy Shah

Jimmy Shah
Jimmy Shah is a Mobile Security Researcher specializing in analysis of mobile/embedded threats on existing ...

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McAfee Labs :

27th Chaos Communications Congress: Mobile Security and More

Thursday, December 30, 2010 at 10:46am by Jimmy Shah
Jimmy Shah

The 27th Chaos Communications Congress (27C3), a computer security conference held in Berlin, has offered several good mobile and embedded security talks in the past few days. SMS-based vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities in mobile phone radios, and laptop rootkits that infect peripheral chips instead of the main CPU were among some of the new research presented.

Day 1
On Monday Collin Mulliner and Nico Golde discussed their research on attacking non-smart-feature phones with SMS messages. This was an expansion of Mulliner’s earlier SMS fuzzing work on smartphones. The duo used their own local private GSM network to help in injecting maliciously crafted SMS messages to their collection of feature phones.  (They concentrated on feature phones because they make up nearly 84 percent of the total number of mobile phones sold worldwide.) The firmware on feature phones is infrequently or rarely updated by manufacturers and mobile carriers, so Mulliner and Golde said that they leave users open to bugs–those they’ve found as well as those that have yet to be discovered.

Collin Mulliner and Nico Golde demonstrate maliciously crafted SMS message attacks against a collection of feature phones.

This was followed by a talk by Ilja van Sprundel on attacking smartphones. He went over a number of attacks and even covered some of the same ground as Mulliner and Golde with SMS and MMS messaging attacks against smartphones. After explaining a method for reliably identifying the OS version on a mobile phone by sending it an MMS message, van Sprundel spent a bit more time explaining methods of getting code to run on iPhones.

Ilja van Sprundel describes how to reliably identify mobile phone OS versions using a maliciously crafted MMS message and a web server.

Day 2
Tuesday brought research by Ralf-Philipp Weinmann on the Baseband chips in smartphones. Unlike simpler feature phones, smartphones use two separate processors. One is the application processor, which runs the OS and programs, and the other is the Baseband processor, which controls the radio that communicates with the mobile-phone network. Most work on smartphone exploits has targeted the application processor and the OS, Weinmann’s research involved going after the Baseband processor and code that handles incoming network traffic.

He found vulnerabilities in both the Qualcomm (found in HTC phones) and Infineon (Apple iPhones) chips. Although the bugs were reported and fixed by the manufacturers, Weinmann said users could still be at risk if they don’t keep up with firmware updates. Users who have unlocked their iPhones and have not yet updated to iOS 4.2.1 are still vulnerable to a buffer overflow.

Attacks against the Baseband processor can also affect the application processor on phones that share memory between the two. This would allow an attacker to hack the radio protocol stack on the Baseband and compromise the entire device without needing to go after the Smartphone OS. Weinmann reported bugs to a manufacturer and discovered after the fact that the company used this slightly less secure memory layout.

Ralf-Philipp Weinmann explains the process he used to discover vulnerabilities in the code running on Baseband processors.

Later in the day Weinmann continued with his research on infecting embedded controllers with backdoors. Embedded controllers in laptops are basically larger versions of old keyboard controllers, now responsible for handling more peripherals than just the keyboard. His test device was a ThinkPad X60 with a Renases controller. Weinmann mentioned that both the BIOS and embedded controller can be updated over a LAN, but his suggested attack takes about two minutes to perform for someone with physical access to your laptop.

Because the embedded controller is in charge of the keyboard, the attack involves monitoring keystrokes and eventually exfiltrating that data. He also used the wire that connects the ThinkLight to the embedded controller as an antenna to broadcast (up to 50 meters in a building with thin walls) the recorded keystrokes to the attacker. The Renases controller is also connected to the camera in the laptop, leading to Weinmann’s suggesting that an attacker could get a much better picture of the victim.

The conference continues
The Chaos Communications Congress is an annual event that ends the year with a lot of good research and food for thought. 27C3 ends this Thursday, but the talks I’ve cited, or any others you might be interested in, will be available online soon.

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