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HDD Firmware Hacking

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Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#31

Post by edrobap »

ornornor wrote: post #22
Modified3019 wrote: post #9

Related, someone decompiled Samsung’s 840 EVO ssd firmware, before Samsung later started encrypting it: http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/ssd/TheMissingManual.pdf Came across it looking how to deal with multiple different samsung drives caught in bad states due to shitty firmware. My original salty post warning about vendor branded Samsung drives on eBay is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37165189

Samsung has lost any credibility they had as a competent manufacturer years ago. Their other products are beyond junk (fridges, washing machines…), their customer service is abysmal (they managed to “repair” my mp3 player and smartphone by returning it even more broken than they got it, and I’ve seen how the company works from the inside when they bought a startup I was working at. I know many people with Samsung fri…

[dead]

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#32

Post by fuzzfactor »

For anybody involved with research of any nature, you don't need to be interested in HDDs or SSDs or even hacking hardware or software of any kind.

This says a lot right here:

>One of my initial ideas was to modify the HDD firmware to introduce a delay of a few hundred milliseconds when a specific sector is read from the drive, which would give enough time for the exploit to trigger successfully.

>As it would later turn out I found other ways to dial in my race condition attack and ended up not needing to modify the HDD firmware at all.

The result is a remarkable paper documenting outstanding milestones that is outstanding on its own, and was completely unintentional to begin with, and with subject matter that was also unintentional if not a completely unrelated subject than the direction that the initial ambition was leading toward.

If your research leaders or techniques don't allow for excursions like this, you'd probably be better off getting some.

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#33

Post by fuzzfactor »

system7rocks wrote: post #21

One of my favorite things to do is update the firmware of devices. I know it is often ill-advised because if it is working fine, why risk something going wrong? But it’s kind of fun to imagine gaining tiny speed increments with optimizations. I like to do it on Fridays - Firmware Fridays - vacuum cleaners, hard drives, motherboards, ip cameras, Apple IIGS expansion cards, Bluetooth scales, and on and on.

>I know it is often ill-advised because if it is working fine, why risk something going wrong?

Well, if you want more mayhem than was expected . . .

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#34

Post by busterarm »

justinclift wrote: post #28
red_balloon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the (unaffiliated) shout out! No comment on the drive recovery idea... The fundamentals in the article are all relevant to the hard drive challenge, though the actual multi-step solution to our CTF is rather different. If hacking hard drives sounds intriguing to you, we're hiring reverse engineers and security researchers! See our whoishiring posts and careers page for details: - https://news.ycombinator.c…

As a data point for anyone curious, they're US based ("Midtown West in New York City") and their careers page mentions the roles are all in-office ones. Ah well. ;)

They opened/are-opening a northern virginia office, according to their HN posts.

But yeah, as much as I would love to work with them, I have zero desire to ever move out of the southeastern US and especially back to NY. The nature of what they do does kind of require in-office work though.

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#35

Post by justinclift »

busterarm wrote: post #34
justinclift wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a data point for anyone curious, they're US based ("Midtown West in New York City") and their careers page mentions the roles are all in-office ones. Ah well. ;)

They opened/are-opening a northern virginia office, according to their HN posts. But yeah, as much as I would love to work with them, I have zero desire to ever move out of the southeastern US and especially back to NY. The nature of what they do does kind of require in-office work though.

Heh, I'm not even in the US. ;)

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#36

Post by UltraSane »

ornornor wrote: post #22
Modified3019 wrote: post #9

Related, someone decompiled Samsung’s 840 EVO ssd firmware, before Samsung later started encrypting it: http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/ssd/TheMissingManual.pdf Came across it looking how to deal with multiple different samsung drives caught in bad states due to shitty firmware. My original salty post warning about vendor branded Samsung drives on eBay is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37165189

Samsung has lost any credibility they had as a competent manufacturer years ago. Their other products are beyond junk (fridges, washing machines…), their customer service is abysmal (they managed to “repair” my mp3 player and smartphone by returning it even more broken than they got it, and I’ve seen how the company works from the inside when they bought a startup I was working at. I know many people with Samsung fri…

The Galaxy smartphones are still some of the best.

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#37

Post by superxpro12 »

turpentine wrote: post #15

The obfuscation hardware vendors do is so trivial, why do they even bother? One of the current vendor provided consumer SSD firmware update utilities for Linux as a live-usb decrypts the firmware and writes it out to disk decrypted before uploading it, so simply using seccomp to fail a rmdir syscall nets you the decrypted version without having to reverse engineer any of the updater/decryption code. I deleted my own…

Mostly so they can check the box of "we implemented readback protection" and move on to more important aspects of the job.

The goal is not to produce cryptographically secure code, its to make it annoying enough so most people dont bother.

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#39

Post by superxpro12 »

red_balloon wrote: post #5
morpheuskafka wrote: post #3

This article might be handy for someone interviewing at that firm (Red Balloon) that sends you a "weird" hard drive as the interview CTF? I still have it sitting around but it arrived around finals season so I never really looked at it, but since they bothered to send a whole drive and SATA-USB adapter, it obviously must have something to do with the drive itself. If someone had a ton of money, it would be funny to j…

Appreciate the (unaffiliated) shout out! No comment on the drive recovery idea... The fundamentals in the article are all relevant to the hard drive challenge, though the actual multi-step solution to our CTF is rather different. If hacking hard drives sounds intriguing to you, we're hiring reverse engineers and security researchers! See our whoishiring posts and careers page for details: - https://news.ycombinator.c…

Lol the careers page is itself a candidate screener. Love it.

Re: HDD Firmware Hacking

#40

Post by stronglikedan »

turpentine wrote: post #15

The obfuscation hardware vendors do is so trivial, why do they even bother? One of the current vendor provided consumer SSD firmware update utilities for Linux as a live-usb decrypts the firmware and writes it out to disk decrypted before uploading it, so simply using seccomp to fail a rmdir syscall nets you the decrypted version without having to reverse engineer any of the updater/decryption code. I deleted my own…

> The obfuscation hardware vendors do is so trivial, why do they even bother?

The lock on your front door is so trivial to bypass, yet deters the vast majority of people from entering your house without your permission.

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