alt Hacker NewsIt's fascinating - how does one defend against an attacker or red-team who controls the CPU voltage rails with enough precision to bypass any instruction one writes? It's an entirely new class of vulnerability, as far as I can tell.
This talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBXKhrHi2eY indicates that others have had success doing this on Intel microcode as well - only in the past few months. Going to be some really exciting exploits coming out here!
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It's not new - fault injection as a vulnerability class has existed since the beginning of computing, as a security bypass mechanism (clock glitching) since at least the 1990s, and crowbar voltage glitching like this has been widespread since at least the early 2000s. It's extraordinarily hard to defend against but mitigations are also improving rapidly; for example this attack only works on early Xbox One revisions where more advanced glitch protection wasn't enabled (although the author speculates that since the glitch protection can be disabled via software / a fuse state, one could glitch out the glitch protection).
Just so you know, hardware hackers have been doing this for 20+ years. Hacking satellite TV (google smart card glitching) was done the same way.
Its more that its really hard to do security when the attacker has unlimited physical access.
> It's an entirely new class of vulnerability, as far as I can tell.
It is know as voltage glitching. If you're interested our research group applies to Intel CPUs. https://download.vusec.net/papers/microspark_uasc26.pdf
The microcontrollers I worked on 15 years ago had low voltage detection:
You can't. Console makers have these locked-down little systems with all the security they can economically justify... embedded in an arbitrarily-hostile environment created by people who have no need to economically justify anything. It's completely asymmetrical and the individual hackers hold most of the cards. There's no "this exploit is too bizarre" for people whose hobby is breaking consoles, and if even one of those bizarre exploits wins it's game over.
And if you predict the next dozen bizarre things someone might try, you both miss the thirteenth thing that's going to work and you make a console so over-engineered Sony can kick your ass just by mentioning the purchase price of their next console. ("$299", the number that echoed across E3.)
Basically if someone has physical access to device, its game over.
You can do things like efuses that basically brick devices if something gets accessed, but that becomes a matter of whether the attacker falls for the trap.
Voltage glitching is an old technique. Here's a paper about it from 2 decades ago https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1708651 but it is at least another decade older as an attack vector.
Defend against it one way by voltage monitoring or physical intrusion detection, and another way by droop and such detection and countermeasures on the device. Both probably just increase the cost of hacking it by some orders of magnitude, but that may be enough.
not a new vulnerability class.
Extremely impressive feat nonetheless!
> how does one defend against an attacker or red-team who controls the CPU voltage rails
The xbox does have defences against this, the talk explicitly mentions rail monitoring defences intended to detect that kind of attack. It had a lot of them, and he had to build around them. The exploit succeeds because he found two glitch points that bypassed the timing randomisation and containment model.