This presentation will demonstrate that permanent backdooring of hardware is practical. We have built a generic proof of concept malware for the intel architecture, Rakshasa, capable of infecting more than a hundred of different motherboards. The first net effect of Rakshasa is to disable NX permanently and remove SMM related fixes from the BIOS, resulting in permanent lowering of the security of the backdoored computer, even after complete earasing of hard disks and reinstallation of a new operating system. We shall also demonstrate that preexisting work on MBR subvertions such as bootkiting and preboot authentication software bruteforce can be embedded in Rakshasa with little effort. More over, Rakshasa is built on top of free software, including the Coreboot project, meaning that most of its source code is already public. This presentation will take a deep dive into Coreboot and hardware components such as the BIOS, CMOS and PIC embedded on the motherboard, before detailing the inner workings of Rakshasa and demo its capabilities. It is hoped to raise awareness of the security community regarding the dangers associated with non open source firmwares shipped with any computer and question their integrity. This shall also result in upgrading the best practices for forensics and post intrusion analysis by including the afore mentioned firmwares as part of their scope of work.
Jonathan Brossard is a security research engineer. Born in France, he's been living in Brazil and India, before currently working in Australia. With about 15 years of practice of assembly, he is specialised in low level security, from raw sockets to cryptography and memory corruption bugs. He is currently working as CEO and security consultant at the Toucan System security company. His clients count some of the biggest Defense and Financial Institutions worldwide. Jonathan is also the co-organiser of the Hackito Ergo Sum conference (HES) in France. Twitter: @endrazine Facebook: toucansystem