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Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

blog.quarkslab.com

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Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#31

Post by joshuamorton »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #2

This is an elegant attack that effectively compromises all Titan M chips. They were even able to dump all securely stored private cryptographic keys, which Google acknowledges in the disclosure timeline. Even still though, the award Google initially gave was only $10k USD(!). They finally bumped it to $75k USD after complaint and review, but Google's bug bounty program claims up to $1 Million USD. If fully compromisi…

Quoting a random article from when this was initially announced:

> Google says that if researchers manage to find "a full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence" that also compromises data protected by Titan M, they are willing to pay up to $1 million to the bug hunter who finds it.

So a compromise that doesn't require physical access or root, presumably.

Cue also the inevitable discussion that bug bounties are too low.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#32

Post by Svoka »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #2

This is an elegant attack that effectively compromises all Titan M chips. They were even able to dump all securely stored private cryptographic keys, which Google acknowledges in the disclosure timeline. Even still though, the award Google initially gave was only $10k USD(!). They finally bumped it to $75k USD after complaint and review, but Google's bug bounty program claims up to $1 Million USD. If fully compromisi…

Google bug bounty program is a sham. When I tried to report critical vulnerability in their authentication system, they told it's a 'feature' and threatened to sue if I disclose.

Then fixed it in two and a half years, and wrote an article on how complicated bug they just found and how proud and secure they are with their pentesters.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#34

Post by deepsun »

Svoka wrote: post #32
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #2

This is an elegant attack that effectively compromises all Titan M chips. They were even able to dump all securely stored private cryptographic keys, which Google acknowledges in the disclosure timeline. Even still though, the award Google initially gave was only $10k USD(!). They finally bumped it to $75k USD after complaint and review, but Google's bug bounty program claims up to $1 Million USD. If fully compromisi…

Google bug bounty program is a sham. When I tried to report critical vulnerability in their authentication system, they told it's a 'feature' and threatened to sue if I disclose. Then fixed it in two and a half years, and wrote an article on how complicated bug they just found and how proud and secure they are with their pentesters.

Do you have a link?

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#35

Post by Spivak »

Svoka wrote: post #32
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #2

This is an elegant attack that effectively compromises all Titan M chips. They were even able to dump all securely stored private cryptographic keys, which Google acknowledges in the disclosure timeline. Even still though, the award Google initially gave was only $10k USD(!). They finally bumped it to $75k USD after complaint and review, but Google's bug bounty program claims up to $1 Million USD. If fully compromisi…

Google bug bounty program is a sham. When I tried to report critical vulnerability in their authentication system, they told it's a 'feature' and threatened to sue if I disclose. Then fixed it in two and a half years, and wrote an article on how complicated bug they just found and how proud and secure they are with their pentesters.

You have inadvertently discovered the value of pentesters which is making handling security issues a win for the the management.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#36

Post by teo_zero »

vlovich123 wrote: post #10

The one bit I didn’t understand was how they bypassed W/RX. How did they manage to get the new code to be marked as RX after writing? I thought I read the whole thing. Did I miss that explanation?

AIUI, they didn't inject code, just mangled the stack to hijack the execution flow towards specific code fragments ("gadgets") already in the executable memory.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#37

Post by shadowtamperer »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #18
posnet wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote 0-day onto all google internal infra?

thats literally worth billions, and could be sold to many governments. If thr right people don't buy these zero-days, yhe wrong people will.

No post body was provided.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#38

Post by ZeroCool2u »

medo-bear wrote: post #24
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2022-06-20: Quarkslab sent Google a new exploit that demonstrates code execution on the chip and exfiltration of encryption keys from it. A detailed description of the exploitation technique, the exploit's source code, and a video showing its use to exfiltrate a StrongBox-protected AES key were provided. This sounds close enough to me, but perhaps there's some subtle nuance between device keys and other keys in the…

> perhaps there's some subtle nuance between device keys and other keys in the chip. Thats what im wondering too. particularly this line from mitigations section from the report >> However, we do want to point out an interesting feature that would have made the StrongBox key blob leak impossible. Indeed, an application can create a key that is authentication-bound, specifying setUserAuthenticationRequired(true) when…

Yeah, okay I definitely missed that part. Makes more sense. Still, the bounty seems shockingly low. They probably could've gotten a lot more for it on the open market.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#39

Post by nickzana »

rob_c wrote: post #25

Very cool. I wonder why companies still leave the UART pins accessible. Fine they're on the chip, but just remove the trace and slow down attack evolution is worth the cost of a board revision surely...

Isn't it better to leave them exposed and make it easier for security researchers who genuinely want to test the chip? Someone interested in and capable of developing and using/selling an exploit won't be deterred by needing a special cable to get a UART console, whereas a security researcher might appreciate the simpler access.

So long as it doesn't weaken the actual security model, companies should make their products as easy to analyze as possible imo.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#40

Post by UncleMeat »

tgv wrote: post #19
rurban wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those committee's just lost contact to the real world. Ridiculous

I guess there's someone who orders the marketing department to say "1 million", while telling the operational side "10k", because his bonus rides on it.

That's not how it works. Bug bounties work like this.

Somebody sets up a bounty program and defines a framework for deciding how much to pay out. Security is complicated as hell and you cannot possibly devise a framework that accounts for all possible things so this framework is necessarily brittle. For example, you might reasonably decide that the highest payouts require very minimal attacker capabilities (fully remote unauthenticated attacks being the top payouts). This makes sense since those are the easiest attacks to mount.

So now a bounty comes in. It goes to a triage person or, at best, a small group. They refer to the framework. Your bug doesn't really match any of the categories but it kind of looks like this thing over here so it gets bucketed as such. Maybe there is some discussion. Ultimately, the rules say "max payout requires unauthenticated remote attacks" so the payout ends up lower, even if the attack is exciting. Maybe somebody managing the system takes a note to update the framework and policy moving forward. The community then rages about how this bug is actually a big deal and deserves a lot of reward.

In my experience, the people managing these programs get rewarded based on the amount they pay out going up, not down. But you need a payment framework otherwise each bug is paid out on somebody's whim (and trust me, the security researchers will complain to high heaven if they perceive inconsistency in bounty sizes). So you end up with novel bug structures that aren't handled well by the framework and get treated weirdly.

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