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AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment Red Balloon Security, 2014 aesop.redballoonsecurity.com
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
Red Balloon Security, 2014
aesop.redballoonsecurity.com
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
Printers, routers, IP Phones, PLC’s, smart appliances, and security systems are increasingly connected and available for exploitation. There are a vast number of unsecured embedded systems on the internet and within enterprises that are trivially vulnerable to exploitation with little to no effort. In this networked world, embedded system insecurity poses a grave threat that allows attackers to bypass firewalls and standard security practices with relative ease. Worse yet, these attacks can occur without the knowledge of defenders. Project AESOP is the world’s first coordinated effort to capture and analyze real-world attacks against enterprise embedded devices.
Executive SummaryThe Post-Post-PC Security Threat
Red Balloon Security presents AESOP, The Advanced Embedded System Sec Ops. By placing a specially instrumented embedded device into oper-ational networks and offices, AESOP can inform defenders of an attack surface that is now available to advanced stealthy attackers. To raise awareness of the threat environment organizations face, Red Balloon Security will invite select government and commercial enterprises to participate in Project AESOP at no cost.
Red Balloon Security has developed a new host-based embedded system defense called Symbiote that injects intrusion detection functionality within the firmware of any embedded device and that senses the unauthorized modification of that firmware. The technology is deployed as a sensor to detect attacks in sub-second time. AESOP-deployed sensors will demon-strate the highest levels of protection that can be achieved in a wide range of embedded system device types. AESOP sensors have no negative impact on the device functionality and operations.
After many years of R&D sponsored by DHS and other government agencies, several AESOP sensors are available to defend and alert on attacks targeting the most important and weakly-protected uncharted area of modern office and network systems. The Symbiote technology injected into AESOP sensors will operate with 100% detection accuracy and no false positives. To date, no one has been able to accomplish this level of protection against malcode injection into printers, routers and IP phones. Red Balloon Security is among the first to be able to do so providing a solution to a critical vulnerability of embedded devices.
AESOP: An Early Attack Warning System for Embedded Devices
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
Just a few short years ago, a report of an attack against common office printers went viral. The news stories sensationalized malware burning printers1 but the really important message was almost entirely missed. The printer did not burn, it became a valuable staging point to bypass corporate firewalls and security protection via the simple act of printing a malicious pdf.
However, printers are just one entry point. Other embedded devices like common office VoIP phones were hacked and injected with malware that turned them into silent listening posts.2 Cisco routers have been the subject of hacker curiosity for years,3 leaving a consistent stream of CVE’s in their wake.
Embedded Threat Environment
Reports of hacked embedded devices have skyrocketed in recent years. There are several important reasons. They are easy to break. None have host-based security protection, except for perhaps password protection on device configuration, if properly used. And, they are useful to break. Embedded devices are everywhere, often in the most highly sensitive loca-tions, giving attackers the means of peering into any target environment of interest to them.
Most single-purpose devices compete on the basis of form and function, pages per minute, number of concurrent calls, packets switched per second, and so on. The market hasn’t demanded security, until now.
Perhaps the most important consequence of these reported hacks is to inform and alert everyone of a looming threat. Embedded devices are everywhere: the board room, living room, even your kitchen.
1 http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/11/29/9076395-exclusive-millions-of-printers-open-to-devastating-hack-attack-researchers-say?lite
2 http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/04/16328998-popular-of-fice-phones-vulnerable-to-eavesdropping-hack-researchers-say?lite&ocid=msnhp&-pos=11
3 http://www.darkreading.com/security/news/212700896
The pace of reports of hacked embedded devices has quickened in recent years.... They are easy to break. And they are useful to break.
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
Embedded Threat By the Numbers
A recent month-long, wide-area scan of the internet found a huge number of trivially vulnerable embedded devices.4 The scan revealed many dif-ferent types of vulnerable embedded devices world-wide and in homes, enterprises, utilities, and anywhere accessible over the internet. Of the 5.6 million devices probed, roughly 1.4 million, or about 20% of the routers, printers, webcams, TV set-top boxes, and many more different products, were found unsecured. Many were easily accessible using industry standard passwords. In fact, one anonymous security researcher openly reported that they had developed an embedded worm that spread to hundreds of thousands of routers unbeknownst to anyone until he revealed his results. The map of ‘owned’ routers encircled the globe.5
4 Ang Cui, Salvatore J. Stolfo; “A Quantitative Analysis of the Insecurity of Embedded Network Devices: Results of a Wide-Area Scan;” Proccedings of Annual Computer Se-curity Applications Conference (ACSAC) [BEST PAPER AWARD]; Best Paper Award; 2010/12/15.
5 http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html
Of the 5.6 million devices probed, roughly 1.4 million, or about 20% of the routers, printers, webcams, TV set-top boxes, and more were found unsecured.
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
6 http://cve.mitre.org/data/refs/refmap/source-CISCO.html
7 http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=HP+Printers&search_type=all&cves=on
Even though vendors issue patches, embedded devices are rarely updated. A repeated scan of the internet over months has revealed that only about 7% of the vulnerable devices are ever updated.
Only 7% of vulnerable devices are ever updated.
Over 14 CVE entries for Cisco IP Phones and management software have been reported since 2011.6 HP Printer vulnerabilities number over seven since 2011.7 Cisco reported 16 CVE entries over the last three years. CVE entries identify exploitable vulnerabilities in many of the control and management systems that directly access and manipulate the configurations and firmware updates of the target embedded devices.
The CVE database reveals hundreds of known velnerabilities in printers, IP phones, routers, and in their management software.
These publicly disclosed vulnerabilities provide a roadmap for sophis-ticated adversaries to stealthily attack and infect millions of unpatched routers, printers and IP Phones. What are the consequences of these vulnerabilities? Phones can be tapped, printers may reveal sensitive data, and routers may snoop on network traffic, all without the knowledge of the owners.
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
The AttackRed Balloon Security presented example of polyspecies malware on embedded systems at Black Hat USA 2013 and DEF CON 21. The proof-of-concept attack demonstrated one type of embedded device being used to attack another. The rootkits implanted on the devices spoke a common command and control protocol, which allowed us to interact with all the devices using a common interface.
The attack begins by emailing a document, such as a resume, to someone on a private network. Such a resume might contain, in addition to work history and references, a remote firmware update payload which instructsthe printer to update its firmware after printing the document (CVE-2011-4161). See “Print Me If You Dare” from 28C38 which details this attack. We now have a foothold in the previously private network.
8 http://www.redballoonsecurity.com/pdf/print-me-if-you-dare-2011.pdf
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
In our malicious remote firmware update, we included a packet-scrubbingrootkit so that we can send packets containing commands to the printer.We also included the ability for the printer to build a reverse commandand control tunnel through the corporate firewall to the attacker, overwhich they can send the command and control packets.
With the tunnel build, we can now perform reconnaissance to learn whatother devices exist on the network. We instruct the printer to synscanthe network. We exfiltrate the device IP, port and MAC information.
If we know that the Cisco phone is running ssh, we can take advantage ofthe feature of it asking its TFTP server for an authorized_keys fileupon every login. We instruct the printer to ARP cache poison the phoneso that it requests the file from the printer, and we send our authorized_keys file to the phone.
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
Once we login to ssh with our key, we login to the phone’s terminal with un-changeable default credentials. The phone contains utilties to TFTP files to it as well as utilities to modify its MTD storage.
We upload a small file to the phone that contains a partition we write to a used MTD. Mounting the partition gives us access to the filesystem within that contains a setuid root shell program. Running this starts a rootshell. This attack (CVE-2013-6685) was presented at Black Hat USA 2013 and DEF CON 21. A syscall attack against the Cisco 7900 series (CVE-2012-5445) was demonstrated at 29C3 (“Hacking Cisco Phones”).9
With rootkits in all the devices, forming a command and control infrastructure, we can act on the devices in a device-agnostic way. By exfilitrating memory fingerprints, we can use these as keys into a precomputed firmware database to lookup information on any given device.
We can read and write memory, which we demonstrated by defacing theoutput of the ‘show version’ command on both Cisco 1841 and 2841routers. We also changed part of the enable mode authentication code togrant us privileged access without providing the correct secret.
9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3zUOZcewtA
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
Consequences
Device agnostic rootkits provide an adversary a device agnostic commandand control protocol. Using a common protocol, an attacker can read andwrite device memory and exfilrate device firmware metadata. This metadata can be used identify precise firmware versions for which additional malware can be tailored.
An attacker can also exfiltrate device-specific data. This includes voice and general microphone data from phones, video data from cameras, documents from printers and sensor data in home automation devices
Infected devices can also be used to attack or infect other devices. As shown in the attack, this can be between heterogeneous devices.
And once infected, these devices can provide a stealthy, persistent foothold in a network.
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
AESOP DefenseSummary
The core security innovation behind AESOP is its unique Symbiote host defense, the first of its kind. Symbiotes inject anti-virus and intrusion detection functionality directly into any embedded device, no matter what operating system it uses. Symbiote-protected devices have been measured to alert on attempted malicious implants in sub-second time.
The AESOP appliance manages and reports alerts from Symbiote-protected devices and provides a unified monitoring, alerting and forensic analysis function. Devices that report an attack also reveal the details of the attack, including identification of the vulnerability and the reporting of the malicious code exploiting that vulnerability.
TechnologyAESOP’s defensive capability is based upon the Symbiote technology, the product of years of R&D sponsored by the DHS and other government agencies.
Inspired by some of the most fundamental principles in biology on how life protects itself, a Symbiote coexists with its host affording that host protection. The Symbiote is a small piece of software embedded in the binary code of an embedded device that continuously monitors the host’s operation. The host binary code continues to operate with its full function and features, but periodically control is passed to the Symbiote to ensure the device has not been attacked in any way.
Modern security principles of moving target defense are a key design principle of Symbiote protection, they are inserted into a host in random locations making each protected firmware image distinct from all others. Embedded worms are impossible since each Symbiote-protected device is no longer subject to the common vulnerabilities that are routinely exploited in mono-culture devices with a single attack vector. Symbiotes represent one of the first self-defending defenses, as a number of Symbiotes are injected to ensure no other is directly disabled.
Symbiotes inject anti-virus and intrusion detection functionality directly into any embedded device, no matter what operating system it uses.
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
Red Balloon Security has improved upon the basic Symbiote protection to reduce the attack surface of embedded device firmware even further in two ways. Autotomic Binary Structure Randomization (ABSR) is an automatic binary program analysis system that removes unnecessary and unused code from firmware, while randomizing the remaining code’s structure and location. Each instance of an ABSR/Symbiote-protected device confounds and confuses even the most sophisticated attacker who has little choice but to fashion exploits for other unprotected devices.
Device firmware is often propertiary and never disclosed to third parties. Updating and modifying device firmware is difficult if not entirely impossible. Red Balloon Security has developed a system called the Firmware Reverse Analysis Konsole (FRAK) that automatically modifies binary code and inserts Sybmiote defense in situ providing unprecedented new protection against attacks that can no longer be stopped using existing security technologies. FRAK automates the update of secure device firmware and operates within the existing vendor supplied update process.
Target DevicesSymbiote defenses have been implemented in a variety of different types of devices and models. The FRAK automation ensures that any manufacturer’s device can benefit from Symbiote protection.
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
The AESOP pilot program includes a detailed design phase between the partner and Red Balloon to select the specific endpoint device of interest to the partner. The AESOP appliance manages any Symbiote alert stream emanating from any protected device.
For example, an AESOP installation of a Symbiote-protected router continuously monitors stealthy attacks targeting routers. Below is a typical deployment of the AESOP sensors and monitoring station on an external network. Notice that the Symbiote-protected router serves as the attack sensor and does not participate in the operational routing infrastructure, but is instead a separate processor analyzing network taps. Deployment is simple, safe, and will not impact network operations.
Deployment
In a more general office environment, AESOP may monitor a number of Symbiote protected devices as depicted in the following figure. Note the AESOP appliance can seamlessly integrate with any existing monitoring infrastructure deployed in the partner’s network.
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
AESOP Pilot ProgramFramework for Participation
Red Balloon Security invites interested organizations to participate in the AESOP Pilot at no cost to the partner.
Participation will be kept confidential, and all sensitive information acquired during the pilot will be subject to mutual non-disclosure agreement. Red Balloon Security will gather attack reports from the Symbiote-protected devices supplied to the organization by Red Balloon, and share any findings in a confidential manner.
AESOP is based upon DHS Science and Technology Sponsored research,10
and is now made available to commercial entities as the world’s first coordinated effort to capture and analyze real-world attacks against enterprise embedded devices.
Visit http://aesop.redballoonsecurity.com to apply.
10 The basic research behind AESOP was sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate under Contract No. N6600112C0134 at Columbia University. This work was also supported by Defence Research and Devel-opment Canada (DRDC) pursuant to the Agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of Canada for Cooperation in Science and Technology for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Border Security. This material represents the position of the authors and not necessarily that of DHS or DRDC.
AESOP: Ubiquitous Embedded Security in the Post-Post-PC Threat Environment
Red Balloon Security is devoted to developing products and services that are based upon the Software Symbiote technology invented in the Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) Laboratory at Columbia University (www.cs.columbia.edu/ids). Co-founded by Ang Cui and Salvatore Stolfo, the company has developed FRAK under the sponsorship of the US government. FRAK is a system that provides the core capability to automatically unpack, modify and repack embedded system firmware to install Symbiote defenses. The Symbiote technology, exclusively licensed by Columbia University to Red Balloon Security, provides for the first time, effective host defenses for embedded systems. For more information, visit www.redballoonsecurity.com.
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