Charlie Miller On Hacked Batteries, Cloud Security, And The iPad

Exploiting Hardware Vulnerabilities

Alan: Let’s talk about the battery exploit. How did you even come up with the idea about looking for vulnerabilities in the battery?

Charlie: At Black Hat last year I saw Barnaby Jack's ATM hacking talk and thought the coolest thing about it was how you could explain what he did to someone with no technical know-how. "You see that ATM? I can make it spit out money." I wanted to work on something like that and thought about the risks of battery safety for laptops. I set out to see if a remote attacker could blow up my laptop. I still don't really know the answer to that question, but I do know that 1) attackers can certainly get far into that subsystem and 2) I can't blow up a battery :) It was a fun (but long) project because I don't know that much about hardware, so I had to learn a lot as I went.

Alan: This exploit would be resistant to reformatting, right? The ultimate pre-boot malware.

Charlie: So, one of the things I show you can do is make modifications to the firmware that runs on the main chip on the smart battery. You can make it do whatever you want because Apple used default passwords on the chips (made by Texas Instruments). Code you put there would survive reinstallation of the OS, new hard drives, new motherboards, and so on. However, the code cannot directly affect the OS or hard drive, so in order for it to be malware, it would have to attack the OS through some kind of vulnerability in the way the OS handles messages from the battery. Now, I don't know if such a vulnerability exists, but I do know that whoever wrote that code wasn't thinking that the battery would be sending malicious data, so I wouldn't be surprised to find one!

Alan: What about systems implementing trusted boot and things like Intel Trusted Execution Technology? Could that have prevented this attack?

Charlie: No, that wouldn't help. The boot process would all be fine and dandy and after the OS was up and running, the battery would attack it (if such a vulnerability exists) and then inject code.

Alan: When you or any other security researcher discovers system vulnerabilities like this, it’s natural for people to assume that this is the "first discovery" of the problem. Indeed, often times it is only days after a vulnerability is reported that attacks show up based upon the newly-published vulnerability. But we know the bad guys are talented. The bad guys may actually have more money behind them. As the stakes get higher, when do we begin to assume that the bad guys have beat us to discovery and that any vulnerability that is reported is already actively being exploited and we just didn’t know?

Charlie: This is a really interesting question. I'm always worried that other researchers are going to discover the same things I discover before me. In fact, I had a Mac OS X exploit ready to go at Pwn2Own this year and didn't get a chance to use it because someone else beat me to it. Then, a few days later, Apple patched it, so someone else had independently found it (or pwned me and stole!) That was something I liked about the battery research. because I thought nobody would ever think of this wacky idea and I could take my time looking at it. But it turns out that Barnaby Jack (the ATM hacking guy I mentioned earlier) had looked at exactly the same thing and discovered many of the same things I found about a year ago and never told anyone because he didn't catch his laptop on fire. So no matter how clever you are, the odds are that somebody else already knows how to do what you're trying to do. People think I find good stuff, but I'm one guy doing this in the evening for fun with no budget. Compare that to all the money the U.S. government (or China) spends on cyber security. It is hard to imagine they don't know some things we haven't figured out yet.