In a paper titled “Designing and implementing malicious hardware”:http://www.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full_papers/king/king_html/ a team from University of Illinios Urbana (Samuel T. King, Joseph Tucek, Anthony Cozzie, Chris Grier, Weihang Jiang, and Yuanyuan Zhou) delved into the possiblity of malicious curcuits being used to circumvent current anti-virus protocols:
bq. Hidden malicious circuits provide an attacker with a stealthy attack vector. As they occupy a layer below the entire software stack, malicious circuits can bypass traditional defensive techniques.
King and his team designed and implemented malicious circuitry using a processor called a “field programmable gate array”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_programmable_gate_array (FPGA). Connecting the FPGA to an external computer enabled the team to steal data from machines without software vulnerabilities. At the “Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats”:http://www.usenix.org/event/leet08/cfp/ conference in San Francisco last month, King said this is not a threat that can be executed on the weekends, as it requires contact with hardware during the manufacturing phase, yet the reward is immense.
Symantec raised concerns over the manufacturing process in a “report issued”:http://www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=threatreport earlier this year. “The longer the manufacturing supply chain during this process, the greater the opportunity for malicious code to be embedded in the devices directly.” Similar exploits have occured already: virus infected “digital picture frames”:http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006369.html, “thumb drives”:http://ahtim.com/warning-hp-sends-virus-infected-usb-thumb-drive/, and “counterfeit hardware”:http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1874/made-in-china-security-risk/.
“New Scientist”:http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19826546.000-malicious-hardware-may-be-next-hacker-tool.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news5_head_mg19826546.000 quotes Simha Sethumadhavan who believes the increasing complexity of both chips and their design processes increase opportunities for hackers to infiltrate undetected.
