Hackers reverse-engineer NSA's leaked bugging devices

[Fish]

You can gain access to some data when you have direct access to the computer? No way!

This is pretty dumb. This isn't "Hacking" in the slightest. All of these things are very well known and have been possible for decades. Hell, you can view the output of a computer monitor a short distance away without ever touching a single thing. This and much more is possible with access to the machine, and it's not any NSA secret. And if you have direct access to a computer in the first place, there are much much better ways to get what you want from that computer without using goofy-named hypothetical tinker toys attached to the cabling.

It works by attaching its bug to an exposed portion of a computer's wiring system – called the I2C bus – on the back of the machine. "This means you can attack somebody's PC without even opening it up," says Ossmann.

Yeah...... these idiots have no clue what they're talking about. I've constructed I2C boards that can read computer sensor information in various ways. It's moronic to say an I2C bus could hack a PC, unless you consider getting the current fan speed of the CPU fan as "Hacking".

This is pointless fear mongering.

[beach tribe]

Originally Posted by Fish

You can gain access to some data when you have direct access to the computer? No way!

This is pretty dumb. This isn't "Hacking" in the slightest. All of these things are very well known and have been possible for decades. Hell, you can view the output of a computer monitor a short distance away without ever touching a single thing. This and much more is possible with access to the machine, and it's not any NSA secret. And if you have direct access to a computer in the first place, there are much much better ways to get what you want from that computer without using goofy-named hypothetical tinker toys attached to the cabling.



Yeah...... these idiots have no clue what they're talking about. I've constructed I2C boards that can read computer sensor information in various ways. It's moronic to say an I2C bus could hack a PC, unless you consider getting the current fan speed of the CPU fan as "Hacking".

This is pointless fear mongering.

Absolutely this.
There is not a single example of hacking in that article, nor anything that was developed as a result of the NSA.

[planetdoc]

Originally Posted by Fish

And if you have direct access to a computer in the first place, there are much much better ways to get what you want from that computer without using goofy-named hypothetical tinker toys attached to the cabling.

Thats the difference between monitoring/keylogging vs getting what is already in the machine (what is typed and seen might not be in there).

Originally Posted by Fish

Yeah...... these idiots have no clue what they're talking about. I've constructed I2C boards that can read computer sensor information in various ways. It's moronic to say an I2C bus could hack a PC, unless you consider getting the current fan speed of the CPU fan as "Hacking".

It sounds like they say that i2c is a path that malware can travel from their bug to execution (either gpu or something else). The bugs described are about monitoring/keylogging from hardware without modifying the software environment.

Originally Posted by anon

Display connectors use i2c for the EDID information. VGA, DVI, and maybe HDMI have an i2c interface in them. According to the article their "bug" attaches to the i2c. The i2c bus is likely not isolated from everything else. VGA i2c bus likely originates in the GPU display controller. That doesn't mean NSA backdoor software can't open a side interface on it.

You can use i2c-tools on Linux to poke around your system's i2c busses if you're trying to find out more. I'm fairly certain RAM also uses i2c, each RAM module has a little i2c EEPROM on it that stores timing and configuration data for the module and those busses are accessible with i2c-tools as well

One fairly prominent use is with serial presence detect in DDR SDRAM, which allows the reading of an EEPROM on the DIMM containing the necessary information to set up the memory controller to access the RAM. I.e., this is done by the processor before it can use its RAM.

In fact, I would go so far as to say this is the perfect exemplar of the niche I2C inhabits.

I2C will be used in multiple separate buses; one or two are routed through external connectors.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by planetdoc

Thats the difference between monitoring/keylogging vs getting what is already in the machine (what is typed and seen might not be in there).



It sounds like they say that i2c is a path that malware can travel from their bug to execution (either gpu or something else). The bugs described are about monitoring/keylogging from hardware without modifying the software environment.

No, there is absolutely no way malware could infect a computer through I2C. I2C lets you probe known outputs from the rest of the bus. Meaning that another piece of hardware has to be hard wired to output wanted information to a specific pin. It can only access info that other hardware natively shares. It's incredibly limited in both speed and available bits to work with. It doesn't have the capability to do much else, especially anything software or OS related.

Yes, most of the bugs described are about monitoring a computer which relies on access to the machine. It's pointless and has nothing to do with the NSA.

[planetdoc]

Originally Posted by Fish

No, there is absolutely no way malware could infect a computer through I2C.

lets revisit this after the release their findings at Defcon. Either it can be done as they claim or it cant.