Tech Talk: supply chain hardware hacking

This is a Bulletproof Tech Talk article: original research from our penetration testing team covering issues, news, and tech that interests them. It’s more technical and in-depth that our usual blog content, but no less interesting.

Some readers may remember an article published by Bloomberg entitled "The Big Hack: How China used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies". The article alleges third-party Chinese circuit board manufacturers were secretly embedding tiny "spy chips" into server mainboards in order to get their hands on sensitive information – and had been doing so for years. The alleged devices were smaller than a grain of rice and would go un-noticed among the densely packed components that go into making a server mainboard.

This was met with some scepticism among certain circles of the tech community and the received wisdom of the time was that the spy chips reportedly only had six connections to the outside world and were of such a size that it would be practically impossible to embed sufficient memory and processing power into the device to make it do what it was alleged to do. They cast doubt on the spy chips’ ability to intercept and modify data flowing throughout the system via "buses" which, incidentally, consist of many more connections than the tiny six-pin chip would be able to use. Both Bloomberg and the hardware manufacturers in question went very silent, or strenuously denied, the story soon after.

However. As a penetration tester, I’m always one to challenge the received wisdom, this got me thinking of ways that such a feat could be accomplished with such a small and simple device. Maybe these spy chips weren’t so far-fetched afterall. So I grabbed an old server and got thinking....

Introducing the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC)

As mentioned in the original article, most servers possess a BMC, or Baseboard Management Controller, that’s used for monitoring hardware parameters such as temperature, cooling fan status and otherwise remotely managing the server. This device, often a SoC, or System-on-Chip, runs entirely independently from the main CPUs in the server. The BMS has its own operating system, memory, storage, and network separate from the main server. It’s also powered by its own always-on power supply, and hence is always available whether the server is powered up or not.

In a minimal configuration, the BMC may be accessed over the network using protocols such as IPMI, however, more advanced management controllers also have web interfaces which have more advanced features such as mounting virtual media. One interface that is usually not exposed to the user is the BMC serial port which is used at the factory for pre-configuring and diagnosing it before being shipped to customers.

Due to this interface not being easily accessible, it is often unsecured. This is called ‘security by obscurity’, and is almost always a bad idea. When connected to this serial interface, it could provide a privileged shell with no authentication required. For the purposes of this research, I got my hands on a retired Dell PowerEdge R210 server. The below image is of the unpopulated PCB pads connecting to the BMCs serial port on this particular machine.

Because of these security oversights, I reasoned that this may be a possible vector of attack, considering the following facts:

• Command line access may require no credentials
• Command line user may be privileged
• BMC may have outbound Internet access (at least temporarily at some time), allowing a reverse shell to be established
• BMC may have access to management network traffic, permitting certain attack vectors
• BMC immediately boots once power is applied and is always on regardless of whether the server itself is awake
• Interface to BMC serial port can be as few as two wires, meaning a chip with a small footprint can be used
• Serial interfaces are very simple to communicate with, needing no fast or complex hardware, and could be used to deliver a small initial payload
• BMC runs Linux, and so may have a number of tools already installed that could be used along with a payload

Finding a way in: choosing a microcontroller

The last of the three facts above led me to find some possible devices that would be fit for our purpose. As it was only a serial interface, they wouldn't need to be particularly fast, or have a large number of pins (hence, only needing a small footprint device) and with a small payload, wouldn't need a huge amount of memory to store it. With this in mind, after some research, the following devices were considered:

• Microchip ATTiny10
• Microchip PIC10F222
• Padauk PMS150C
• NXP LPC1102

These chips are tiny – a maximum of 2mm x 2mm, and have between 6 and 16 pins. Pencil tip for scale.

As you might imagine from such small devices, each one had certain limitations. And after putting the devices through their paces and comparing them to my list of requirements, I chose the tiny ATTiny10. Despite its size, this little chip has some reasonably good specifications:

• 1024 words of flash memory
• 32 bytes of RAM (You read that right - thirty-two whole bytes!)
• Up to 8MHz internal clock frequency