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To be fair, drilling a 3 inch hole in a modern ATM is no easy task. We are talking about high-grade steel, a layer of fiberglass, etc. Hence "portable power drill" is a bit misleading.
I'm not terribly shocked. Most communication happens either at serial, SPI, or i2c busses. If it's cars, CAN. And if you can plug in a wire somewhere, you can damage or pwn it. Most things don't have security, other than software security and physical locks. And even when there is other types of security, like cryptokeys and such, physical wires can usually bypass even those. If they wanted something that was secure,…
>Computer security experts have long warned that no computer should be considered secure if an attacker takes physical control of it. I think the lack of physical security is more surprising than the lack of electronic security. A three-inch hole is pretty big, all things considered. I have to imagine that ATMs are designed to resist drilling three inch holes through to the money or the dispenser mechanism. Why isn't…
It was cheaper not to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe some of them are. Ive also found some that are crap. I have a tendency to pull on things like ATM covers, credit card slots, and the like. And that's because we have lots of skimmers that are found at local gas stations and places around here (big college presence). So far, I've found an opened gasoline pump door. I called attendant and went to a different pump (attendands didnt have keys for that....) . Ive al…
Where do you live?
We had a "test" card that could be insert on the eprom socket. This small card was almost the same size of the original chip but had a few buttons that allowed us to make the mechanism deliver notes in order to fine tune it.
In a particular ATM design used by major banks in Brazil, this location were accessible by removing a front panel, although you would have to be kind of a contortionist in order to plug it.
Why we can find whole ATMs at junkyards is beyond me: there are many easy to spot flaws. They should grind everything when decommissioning this kind of equipment.
This reminds me of many many years ago some guy in a bimmer forum figured out BMW's iDriver music file formats (BR3/BR4/BR5) were simply DRM'd via XOR.[1] I was able to verify it via a simple script. Kudos to the reverse engineering masters!
[1]: http://www.e90post.com/forums/showthread.php?t=279294#5
>Computer security experts have long warned that no computer should be considered secure if an attacker takes physical control of it. I think the lack of physical security is more surprising than the lack of electronic security. A three-inch hole is pretty big, all things considered. I have to imagine that ATMs are designed to resist drilling three inch holes through to the money or the dispenser mechanism. Why isn't…
I would use a hole saw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_saw), and would think it fairly hard to protect a large enclosure against that. Locally strengthening the enclosure might be enough, but chances are thieves would start drilling around it to remove a larger patch or start employing an endoscope to connect something to the serial port.
Hardware-wise, it probably is easier to glue the connector shut, giving up on using the diagnostic port.
>Computer security experts have long warned that no computer should be considered secure if an attacker takes physical control of it. I think the lack of physical security is more surprising than the lack of electronic security. A three-inch hole is pretty big, all things considered. I have to imagine that ATMs are designed to resist drilling three inch holes through to the money or the dispenser mechanism. Why isn't…
>Why isn't the computer protected to similar degree? It was cheaper not to.
The article claims there is essentially no authentication between disparate modules, only simple XOR encryption. That seems a clear fail.
In my experience, ATM control boards (I was literally at a factory in China for these a few weeks ago) tend to be custom PCBs but there is a move towards genericization. Presumably because their designs tend to date from bygone eras, they do not use software-based approaches in favor of hardware and security through obscurity. Perhaps it is time for a software-oriented modular ATM redesign project with an emphasis on modern internal security? Anyone want to collaborate? Serious question. (I have an existing ATM component factory group potentially on side already.)
Second, to 'notice' the independent activity of any given module, power draw should be easy to detect. Again, the lack of such a feature probably harks back to a bygone-era hardware-oriented design psychology.
To be fair, drilling a 3 inch hole in a modern ATM is no easy task. We are talking about high-grade steel, a layer of fiberglass, etc. Hence "portable power drill" is a bit misleading.
I think you may underestimate the capabilities of a portable drill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyq7xBUhsAo Hell, depending on the gauge you could probably carve out a 3" hole with a dremel tool and a diamond bit in a reasonable amount of time.