okay over to Pierre
one two okay so hi everyone uh thanks
for attending I guess I'm Pierre
um this is my first time both in
activity and in Hungary I have worked
for eight years uh within the French
national cyber security agency and the
French Ministry of Defense I also spent
two years as a sizer for international
company and now I'm working as a cyber
security researcher within Kaspersky is
great
I'm a full-time remote worker from my
hometown in rural France as you may earn
from my accent during this difficult
pandemic and War times I found myself a
new patient to relax and
suing and I believe you'll have a fun
time while I'm sharing it with you
I'm really sure we'll have a lot of fun
as can be seen in this picture where by
the way the guy is suing on a machine
which is literally called the cowboy
sewing machine
uh of course I'm kidding I'll talk about
ViaSat and specifically tell you the
story of the work we did on the event
they faced eight months ago now that
they called a cyber event in their own
terms
on the 24th of February the day that the
Kremlin is announcing the invasion of
Ukraine everything suddenly starts to
get a bit wild for all users at which
internet through the wires that owned Ka
sat satellites connection
KSAT users and access providers
massively reports lots of internet
connection until they discover it is
actually their access modems that seem
totally dead on the displayed capture
from a specialized Forum in March a user
accesses its modern firmware might be
co-opted from the states of the LED
lights in the modem various public
sources including major Medias will
report tens of thousands of users as
affected including the modems that were
used by enercon German energy provider
they use such model to provide access to
their wine turbines control system guess
it's starting to get quite a big of a
siber event now
but is this the result of a sabotage or
an accident why would someone or
somebody disrupt the case at service on
the exact day Russia is starting to
invade Ukraine he is the answer Eden in
the question many questions that
everybody asked or not actually but well
they have been mostly left unanswered
because you know a secret investigation
first and there's a war to deal with so
priorities let's try to get part of
those answers first from the Ukrainian
government website which lists all their
requests for proposals also known as
call for bids well we can discover that
the Ukrainian military Security Services
and a whole lot of government bodies
actually are actually relying on ksr
Internet services a lot we can find a
ton of requests for proposal mentioning
the purchase or the operation of KSAT
modems between 2016 and 2021 well at
least we could before the incident the
displayed screenshot actually come from
an archived version of the call for
proposal website here is what you can
find now
uh so you might not be able to read it
let me translate it for you this page
has been temporarily censored to in the
Russian spice and that might have been a
clue already but then if you looked for
something more explicit then European
Union came to the rescue on May 10
directly appointing at Russia
then how did that happen right from the
start in early March a lot of more or
less off-the-wall theories emerged
including some which considered
satellites battles and hijacking space
force style at the very edge of a Star
Wars Episode well we'll leave it with
Disney to think about how they would
like to produce such an episode but
luckily the first wires that statement
reported by rotors on March 12th came to
the rescue March 12 17 days after the
incident while the responsive
communication viasad stated that occurs
got in a management Network
which enabled modem control
that's all
on March 14 I just came back from
vacation and I'm pretty sure there's no
turning back from such effects and I
discovered this news
I thought it deserved a bit of
Investigation so that I also started to
work on it to come up with my own Star
Wars theories
so what's a management Network in via's
attempts according to a ViaSat modems
data sheets as they could be found on a
publicly available website that are
aimed at Via technicians It could only
be either tier 69 or SNMP you probably
know about SNMP a simple Network
management protocol as for cr69 if you
don't it is also called customer premise
equipment one management protocol so
it's an HTTP soap based protocol usually
aimed at remote controlling supervising
and updating modems
by the way we can find that via sat
selected the German provider axiros as a
provider for their ts-69 infrastructure
starting in 2013. we can guess our girls
might have reached a tier 69 control
server also known as an ACS and ASO
could deploy a malicious update to
ViaSat modems and it turns out the ACs
system for axiros called access was for
instance vulnerable to lock for Shell so
that's not totally unrealistic if we dig
a bit more we can find some buyers that
provided firmware's designed for one of
their systems that they called Community
internet so the system is aimed at
providing internet and satellite-based
internet access to isolated communities
analyzing those firmware's enough enable
confirming ViaSat indeed relies on ts-69
for at least some of their devices
what's more tier 69
the tr69 management networks is Rich
through a fortunate compliance ipsec VPN
rather than directly exposed to the
Internet so then aqueous would have
needed to pass the VPN boundary to get
in the management Network sure there's a
lot of now well-known critical
vulnerabilities on most commercial
off-the-shelf VPN gateways but
secrets that are required to connect to
the VPN management Network are of course
stored clear text in those firmware I
just found on the internet so I needed a
few hours from the end of my vacation to
these findings including the VPN access
so I figure it would not have been hard
at all for a state actor to get in a
so-called management networks four days
later on March 18 a source points us at
an executable binary that has been
submitted to a public online
multi-scanner service from an IP address
in Italy Mark that for later
a few reverse engineering hours later my
colleagues and I determined the
executable binary is a wiper compiled
for the mips architecture aimed at
erasing files and Flash memories in the
Linux platform the white perform flow is
very simple code starts by printing a
lookout message to the console delete
files on the file system by overwriting
the first bytes and erase existing
storage memories and write new data over
them
the wiper used the content of a
pre-filled buffer to override data this
buffer is stuffed with bytes from
integer values that are decremented in a
loop as a result the contents of a white
memory which is erased by this wiper is
filled with such pattern and is very
specific
the wiper pay close attention to flash
memory erasing because it tries to use
driver provided and Hardware backed
erase function but then on top of that
he overwrites the content of the memory
on March 18 we had a plausible interest
in paths a realistic operation overview
and a man issue swiper which could be
the main cause of the modem troubled
that we by the way dubbed Cosmic wiper
considering an already negative opinion
from several organizations against
Kaspersky back then as well as in most
of all some confidentiality requirement
from the source that pointed us to the
wiper we did not write or talk about
these findings at all
whatever on March 30 uh 12 days after
our findings and one month after the
event via set finally published an
official statement on their own website
via set confirms hackers get in a
management network but also explained
they did so by bypassing a fortunate VPN
which match our findings ViaSat also
tells remote control capabilities have
been leveraged by a girls to deploy
destructive tools on Modern which also
match our findings and um by the way VIA
soft blames skylogic one of their
operating partner in Italia which may
match the Italian origin of the wiper
submission on a multiscanner service one
day later on the 31 a U.S cyber security
company will publicly describe Cosmic
wiper under the name acid rain
anyway before such public statements and
details even if we are the good of a
view of the incident and some strong
hypothesis we wanted to check real
modems like those which were wiped and
in order to confirm they used dr69 or
that Cosmic wiper worked on such
platforms and tried to learn a bit more
of course to do so we needed real
devices production firmware's
and we just did not found any of them
um they are not publicly distributed
most likely nobody tried to get such a
device and firmware as before the
incident except maybe for the attackers
and the war story was under intelligence
SMC investigation vaccine
so we needed to get or end on some real
devices and try to extract the firmware
out of it
as often when we need to get around on
some specific devices it all starts in
the darkest of the dark web
Craigslist
well I went to a French equal but still
a bit of shopping later I get one of
those working ksr modems and well now
I'll try to make spit in a firmware
first we had a quick look at the user
exposed Network Services and noted the
vulnerability scope is quite limited
only HTTP and DHCP services are Exposed
on the land by default and are based on
a lightweight software of no
non-vulnerability or HTTP service also
did not accept any direct user input we
then quickly jumped to The Next Step
also admittedly because we wanted to
which is steering the device apart
so you might see there's an fpga and a
bridge type chip first is aimed at
demodulating the signal from the
supposedly attached antenna second is
likely orchestrating communication
between the CPU and the other chips
then comes mips 64 CPU which already
confirms the cosmic wiper would match
the modem architecture
then almost wanted chip the one which
probably stores the firmware we are
looking for a flash memory of Android
max only persistent and permanently
attached to wage in the device
last but not least prepared pins that
are just waiting us to show them some
love
we can expect copying a flash memory
content in its own bed using protocols
such as SPI motherboard JTAG or any
system that can access it and that is
exposed through communication interface
on the device starting by the operating
system itself exploring starts with the
the multi the most obvious tool I have
I'm a mere Enthusiast so a multitester
for some continuity testing a
multi-purpose Hardware diagnostic
interface in that case a buspirat and
cables there are no SPI on the flash so
that's a dead end some urit pins a
Serial interface in other words can
quickly be spotted on the device using
content continuity testing from the CPU
surrounding to the prepared pin on the
motherboards thanks to the CPU data
sheet that is available on the internet
as for JTAG we still have 15
unidentified pins on the motherboard
which don't match any known JTAG
standard that some specialized device
can brute force her JTAG pinning it's
rather expensive and coming from a rural
area where every cent is a lot I prefer
the cheaper alternative which relies on
gpio pins from a Raspberry Pi and an
open source software which is called
gojtagenum unfortunately gtag layout
could not be identified and I'll test I
learned later that the JTAG is actually
not connected and not prepared on this
board as an exploration summary we could
only identify a Serial interface and can
only continue from there
and here is what the cellular interface
is going to show us if we connect any
terminal to it
a few boot logs bootlock lines from a
likely bootloader early stage and that's
all no way to interrupt the boot process
no way to feed the terminal with any
input actually the input is just not
accepted
so at this point it also seems like it
is a dead end then we can switch to a
more drastic approach to try dumping the
flash namely unsoldering the memory feed
it to an expensive programmer and read
all its bytes but the chip could be
broken during and soldering and being
able to put the chip back on the board
is in no way guaranteed notably because
I'm not that composed and assertively
not experienced to do such
also I didn't want to
so at this point just like a police
officer during an investigation I have a
Moment of clarity maybe if I eat hard
enough on the motherboard with an EV
object of course he will finally confess
to something
of course I'm kidding yet we could see
from the terminal messages earlier that
the modem is likely leveraging a
bootloader what if we could trouble such
a bootloader when it checks for Ram for
instance or anything else maybe we can
trigger additional useful messages at
least but how to
remember when I tried to trick you into
thinking this would be a suing Workshop
I did not
uh here is what I literally stumbled
upon at this point a portable sewing kit
left over from my girlfriend on the
table I was walking on
turns out sewing needles might be the
most powerful Hardware diagnostic tool
ever pick one start suing that
motherboard in concrete terms I just
tried to connect some chip pins with my
needle while the device is running and
triggers some short circuits expecting
fun things to happen
let it be known that still considered
science first I tried to randomly Stitch
Ram chip pins to make the ram else check
fail it only made the power on fail and
and nothing interesting happened
then I uh switched to suing the flash
tip because it's where we want to go
anyway and the OS image is likely stored
in such ship where One does not simply
mess with such ship you don't want to
accidentally trigger a memory clear pin
from the chip so you want to carefully
look at the data sheet from the chip
which was also available on the internet
and I tried at two locations on pin that
are used to define addresses bytes in
the memory while it is read or written
to and I expected to prevent the
bootloader from being able to load the
operating system and it worked so well
actually bootloader attempts to load the
OS image from the Stitch flash memory
twice fails twice and goes straight to
the recovery position waiting for the
911. in concrete terms it opens an
interactive shell in the bootloader
which is made available on the serial
interface
so browsing this new power we can find
the bootloader is actually a variant of
u-boot and apparently very common one in
embedded devices the bootloader can
access the flash memory because it's
well debuted OS image is namely a Linux
one the bootloader shell is correctly
I'm a securely limited by the
manufacturer and a very few commands are
available but it is possible to read and
display bytes from an arbitrary map with
memory Zone which is enough to fully
dump the flash memory
um were actually sort of because
additional scripting is required to
build a memory image from packs of
x-string data that are displayed on the
terminal and it took four hours to read
all the memory from the low bandwidth
serial interface
flash memory content is not encrypted
and the Linux system image can be
extracted from it we can then explore
the modem file system offline
starting to to dig in the Linux file
system we can quickly find some more
room first we can set a bootloader
Interruption delay so we can get back to
the bootloader by typing any K during
the boot without any sewing
then we can enable Linux boot blocks on
the serial terminal so we can get
interesting additional information about
the memory layout while the system is
booting last but not least digging a bit
deeper and using the offline image we
already have it turns out some magic
flags from the bootloader are actually
leverage as a configuration file in the
final Linux system so this means by
enabling feature or setting Flags in the
bootloader environment we can change the
behavior of the final Linux system
to make that a bit more concrete as an
arbitrary example simply setting a
bootloader flag to an arbitrary value
will enable
telnet access on the land side with root
privileges so now we can start directly
exploring the live system while it is
running
with the root privilege
and I guess that will be all for today
at the last described modem access
enabled of course further exploration on
a way larger scale for instance
proprietary binary analysis and firmware
deployment system analysis but let's get
realistic now even with such an access
such hypothesis in in such backed option
that we explored another thing just
can't be discovered or even confirmed
without access to proprietary data and
logs from the network side of such
systems which of course we don't have we
still have a lot to find and confirm
about the historicals we only have all
perspective from this analysis and I
hope we will but meanwhile try to
demonstrate how dedicated we can be
together knowledge on a presumably
complex Cyber attack scenario in a short
time and how much I can be to explore in
such a case
thank you again for your attention
yeah
but I will be happy to answer questions
we will have time for uh one or two
questions while we set up uh
some kit for the next presentation does
anybody have a question at this time
up here
okay it appears not then
this time Pierre thank you very much
[Applause]