Month: March 2017

Zeus Panda Webinjects: Don’t trust your eyes

In our last blog article Zeus Panda Webinjects: a case study, we described the functionality of current Zeus Panda webinject stages and gave some insight into the corresponding administration panel. As we only scratched the surface of the target specific second webinject attack stage (in the following we reference this as 2nd attack stage), we would like to share more details about this part.

Basically, the 2nd attack stage already includes the complete code needed for the attack. The different code branches are triggered by setting status variables, especially the branch variable already introduced in our previous article on that topic. Last time we also introduced the send() function, which is used to exfiltrate data. send() isn’t entirely unidirectional: the HTTP response of this request includes further code that is evaluated as JavaScript. Thereby the backend is able to set the different status variables to trigger the existing code branches of the 2nd attack stage. Let’s dive into the details of this communication protocol:

Communication protocol and status variables

sequence_zeus_panda
Figure 1: Communication protocol

Figure 1 illustrates the communication protocol between the 2nd attack stage and the backend server. We see the different steps of the communication, the branches triggered, and the website on which the step occurs. Before going into details, the concept behind the communication is the following:

  1. The current attack state is sent from the client to the backend server.
  2. The backend checks for the current attack state and sets the right response parameters to initiate the next attack stage.
  3. The backend response contains variables to notify the 2nd attack stage (client), which attack branch should be executed next.
  4. The 2nd attack stage evaluates the response variables and triggers the next branch.
  5. This procedure is repeated until the final state of the protocol is reached.

Time to branch

Let’s take a detailed look into the different branches now.

Step
Action
1 The SL branch is triggered at the beginning of the attack, when an infected victim accesses the login page of the targeted online banking, inserts the login credentials and clicks on the submit button. (NOTE: The low level Trojan functions need to trigger an the initial webinject (generic loader) on that website and therefore the URL of the online banking website has to be listed in the trojan config file). The submitted login credentials are intercepted, exfiltrated to the backend (see previous blog post), then the 2nd stage code calls the original login function of the banking or payment website. The backend now registers the new victim, identified by the botid. It returns an empty response to the webinject.
2 At this point, the victim has successfully logged in and has been redirected to the account balance overview page. This triggers the 2nd branch: CP. The CP branch is called multiple times during the attack and transmits general status information of the victim to the attacker. The response of the backend contains status flags to trigger the next step of the attack. At this point here, the backend signals to initiate the attack.
3 The attack signal triggers the 3rd step shown in Figure 1: The TL branch. This branch is used to collect details from all available accounts by using the grabber module. Furthermore, a flag is set to indicate a page reload after the response of the send function has been received. The collected data is then exfiltrated again. The botid is used to correlate transmitted data to existing victim entries in the backend and therefore works as unique identifier for the victim. The server response is empty, but the previously set reload flag now triggers the CP branch again.
4 The CP branch now sends the some information to the backend as  described in Step 2. As the backend has stored a different state for the botid already, the response is different now. It signals the 2nd attack stage that the grabber module has finished and the ats module should start now. This module is used to manipulate account details like the account balance or transaction details. Also some status flags are set to trigger the next branch.
5 The GD branch: This branch is used to collect and exfiltrate account details of the victim. As already described in step 3, the reload flag is used to trigger the CP branch again.
6 The CP branch again submits status information, and the backend now triggers the next step of the attack. Besides some status flags, details about the target account and some fake data is provided. The data is used by the CP branch to display a fake overlay with a message and/or images, to trick the victim into starting a transaction. To that end, the fake overlay is used like in a normal phishing attack. We could observe different kinds of messages, which could be categorized into different modi operandi. (see below).

If the victim fell for the scam, the previously provided data is used to pre-fill the transaction form. Naturally, this data contains a target account for the transaction. This account will be controlled by the attacker somehow, i.e., it most likely belongs to a money-mule.

Additionally, the response from the backend contains fake information to be displayed. Depending on the modus operandi, this information is used to display different transaction details to the victim, then the ones used for the transaction in background.
7 Now the victim is redirected to the overview page for a successful transaction. In combination with the current flag state, this page visit triggers the TL branch of the 2nd stage code. The TL branch is used to collect details from the transaction overview page and exfiltrates them to the backend. This indicates a successful transaction to the attacker. The backend response is empty. The webinject transits into the next state, without the need for further communication with the backend.
8 The last triggered branch is called CG. It creates a copy of the complete DOM of the successful transaction overview page and exfiltrates it to the backend. There is no indication that this data is displayed in the admin panel, thus we assume it is transmitted for debug purposes only.

Modi Operandi

In the following we detail two different exemplary modi operandi, which we could observe during our analysis. The real visible appearance is different, as the webinject makes heavy use of the style-sheets provided by the target website. This is a very straight-forward way to properly brand fraudulent content to match the corporate design of target banks or payment providers. We focus on the content shipped to banking customers.

Charity Fraud: SOS-Kinder

SOS_Kinder.png

The victim is asked to donate 1€ to an non-profit organization, in this case for SOS children. This mimics the well know internationally active “SOS-Kinderdorf” organization. The German text is well written and does not contain the obvious indications for phishing that we all love and know from the occasional phishing mail, like contorted grammar and a more than flowery vocabulary. No Google Translate in sight, here. To leverage this scam vector, the webinject makes use of the data provided by the backed in Step 6 as detailed above. Using an overlay, the victim is made believe he/she is transferring 1€, but under the hood the amount is change to a much higher value.

The attackers follow a very classic social engineering approach for our part of the world and appeal to the victims helpfulness: Who doesn’t want to help children in need by spending 1€? We refer to this kind of attack as charity fraud.

Refund Fraud: Finanzpolizei

finanzpolizei_edited

The overlay presents a message to the victim, indicating a transaction has been made to their account. As the victim sees a manipulated version of his account balance, he really believes the transaction has had happen. Furthermore the text indicates a preliminary investigation by the “Finanzpolizei” against the initiator of the transaction. If the victim is not transferring the money back, the text threatens with prosecution by law enforcement for participating in a money laundering scheme.

Finally, all the Google Translate and contextual cluelessness we came to love in the scams out there! Regrettably for the attacker, not all German-speaking countries are actually Germany. (We tried that once, partially, and it was a horrible idea.) An institution called “Finanzpolizei” does indeed exist — but not in Germany. The valid target audience for this scam is thus supposedly to be found in Austria, however, the scam is also actively used in Germany. The German text includes some mistakes and is not as well written as the first modus operandi we have shown above.

In the case at hand, the attackers try to make the victim follow through with a classic refund scam, by threatening legal consequences. As the story works without the need to manipulate the transferred amount under the hood, the fake data needed in the first described modus operandi is not used in this kind of attack. Nevertheless the attack is kind enough to prefill the transaction form with the correct details to ease the transaction for the victim.

Return of the victim

Now let’s assume the victim has been tricked into initiating a transaction by themselves to send their money to the attacker. What happens, if the victim takes a look into his online banking account some time later? As expected, the 2nd attack stage is also prepared for that case: The user is presented the “temporarily unavailable” notification (see Figures 1 and 2 from our previous post) and the login function of the target website is disabled. As long as the status variables are set to the finale state of the described communication protocol, the victim is thus unable to access their account again as long as the backend server is reachable. Even when disabling this blocking functionality, account information like transaction details and total balance are still manipulated. As this manipulations use the originally provided style cheets (CSS) from the target institute, a victim has no way to visibility distinguish between a fake entry and an original one.

Conclusion

Nowadays almost all financial institutes make use of two-factor authentication to protect their users from fraud. The modi operandi used by current banking trojan attacks successfully circumvent this by using social engineering techniques. The victim is tricked into initiating the transaction willingly and happily provides all information needed to confirm the transaction. This is achieved by visible modifications of the website that are indistinguishable from the original website content. The success rate of these attacks is still quite high.

By using a multi-layered attack, it’s also cumbersome for analysts to get an complete insight into the technical details. As soon as the backend server is not available anymore, only the 1st stage of a webinject is accessible on an infected machine. Without the backend server, most of the attack code is not available and therefore some pieces of the puzzle are missing.

These kind of multi-layered attacks have become more and more complex and sophisticated. However, beyond the visual appearance, the code of the original website is modified heavily to make this attacks work and these modifications necessarily leave a footprint. In our fraud detection solutions, we provide our customers with instant visibility into these modification symptoms so they can fare better at protecting their customers’ assets.

Authors: Manuel Körber-Bilgard and Karsten Tellmann

Security for Sale? – On Security Research Funding in Europe

On Wednesday, Feb. 22. 2017, a collective of 20 journalists from eleven countries published their recherches on the European security industry. The article, Security for Sale, published at The Correspondent, mostly seems to revolve around the question of how the funding several players in the field received from Horizon 2020 (H2020) and FP7 framework programmes are put to use for the European people. H2020 is the European Commission’s current funding initiative for research and innovation. Here is the commission’s own explanation.

Simplified, the authors of Security for Sale conclude that the benefit of funding security research for the Europe as a whole is limited, but that the funding works pretty well as hidden subsidies for the industry itself. Their wording is more lenient than mine, but nevertheless I feel that the picture the authors draw is incomplete and I’d like to add another perspective. I can only assume that the data for this article stems from the Secure Societies line of funding, as its core topics are emphasized in the article and some of the articles it links to refer to that – the article does regrettably not contain any straightforward references to its sources. And in my opinion, the Secure Societies line of funding does indeed sometimes yields research results that are scary to everyone who did not answer the question of ‘how do we want to live?’ with ‘I liked the setting depicted in Minority Report quite a bit, but it’s missing the effectiveness of Judge Dredd’.

The authors describe the landscape in the security sector roughly as 1) the big players, where kinetic and digital technology converge, 2) research organizations, 3) universities, and 4) small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Our sector, of Ze Great Cybers, primarily hides in 4) and to some extent increasingly in 1). The article does not explicitly touch the field of information security and neither do many calls in the Secure Societies context, however, most of the projects need to touch the digital domain at some point or other, making it clear that a division of information security and all the other potential flavors of security is merely artificial, given our current state of technology. As the authors observe, this is also reflected by the upcoming funding opportunities:

“similar programs are being set up for cybersecurity and military research”

The EU and some of it’s member states are late to the game and I’m aware that not everybody hacking at computers likes the notion that InfoSec and defense converge. I also dislike the idea and I somehow liked the Internet better when it was still a lot emptier, or as Halvar Flake once put it:

However, I came to enjoy civilization and as most people, I rely on the critical infrastructures that make our societies tick. I’ve been leading incident response assignments in hospitals more than once in the last year and as a human, who may suddenly require the services of a hospital at some point or another, I am very grateful for the effort and dedication my colleagues and the clients’ staff put into resolving the respective incidents. If this means I’m working in defense now, then I still dislike the notion, but I see that the work is necessary and also that we need to think more on the European scale when we want to protect the integrity of our societies. Packets only stop at borders of oppressive societies and that shouldn’t be us.

Now let’s have a look at where the EU’s security research funds go to, according to the article. The authors state

“Companies received by far the most money. That’s not particularly surprising; these same companies were the ones influencing funding policy.”

and illustrate it with the following figure:

funding_distribution_thecorrespondent
Figure 1: Security research funding distribution. Illustration by The Correspondent.

In 2015, I was directly responsible for four H2020 grant applications and consulted on several other applications for nationally or regionally managed funding opportunities. Security in its various flavors is a tiny part of the picture. I’m happy to state that we had an above the average success rate. The illustration in the article struck me as familiar: to me, Figure 1 simply shows a typical distribution of funding within the majority of grant applications I’ve worked on. So it is hardly surprising that the global distribution of funding within technology sector of the programme looks very similar. There is nothing much sinister to that.

Larger corporations do have more opportunities to influence policy, as they can afford the time/resources to lobby. But the main reason for the distribution is salaries on the one hand and grant policy on the other. An engineer working at a large corporation will be more expensive by factor 1.2 to 2.3 than a PhD student, depending on country and the respective corporation. A factor of ~1.9, as in the figure, does not look unreasonable, given that the figure accounts for accumulated costs, not just personnel and that it is more likely that a corporation or a research institute will take the effort of building a demonstrator or pilot installations of a technology, as universities regrettably tend to lack monetization strategies for research results.

Government entities, as the next in line, tend to have very limited personnel resources for research projects and do not have a lot of wiggle room when in comes to contributions.  With a funding scope that aims at technological advances, funding for advisories is often politically limited, and rightly so. As the figures are very much aggregated, I can only assume that the complete sum also contains Coordination and Support Actions (CSAs), which are rather limited funding schemes, financially speaking, that aim at connecting related projects and generally at the systematization of knowledge to avoid arriving at one insight at twice of thrice the funding. This work is sometimes done by entities that could classify as advisories. ‘Other’ can be translated to network and dissemination partners, or dedicated project management (which makes a lot of sense, H2020 projects can be large in terms of the number of partners).

Now let’s not talk militarizing corporations enriching themselves, as the article’s authors suggest, let’s talk research funding effectiveness. I my conversations with the granting side of research funding, it is a constant pain that there is a significant amount of research projects being funded that do not amount to a product. I have seen quite a few projects where I would judge without hesitation that the project was a WoMBaT (i.e., Waste of Money, Brains, and Time) and did primarily serve to compensate for the lack of public funding towards universities.

But that is only a small part of the picture. Another part is that there is a very expensive zone between ‘things you can publish’ and ‘things you can actually use’. Simplifying, technological progress has a tendency to increase complexity. To specify their expectations regarding the results of a funding measure, the European Commission adopted NASA’s Technology Readiness Levels (TRL). In the rather broad field of engineering, we often see the requirement for a validation under lab conditions (TRL 4), to the extent of a working prototype under field conditions (TRL 7), depending on the class of funding action. The funding of a given project often ends at that point.

Using my terminology from above, in the best case you then have something you can publish and/or show off, i.e., an interesting approach that has been shown to be feasible. Between that and monetization are the roughly two to seven years you’ll often need in engineering to go from a prototype to a product. And strictly speaking, research funding ends here, because research ends here. There are almost no publicly funded actions that will allow you to go towards product development, although piloting of a technology in the field can be funded (TRL 9). Nevertheless, either a company is now able to fund the continued development towards a product, or not. This is still a limited view, as I don’t need a new product to monetize research results. It is just as desirable to to improve an existing set of products and services, based on new research results. It is, however, by far not as visible.

Now why more so much funding for the big players? Research grants tends to have a bias towards those applicants, who were able to successfully complete a project, presented impressively in the past and are generally held in good standing. Sounds familiar? Yep,sounds like selecting talks for Black Hat or any other non-academic security conference, where the process is single-blind and the committee needs to judge based only on an abstract, not a full paper with a proper evaluation section and extensive related work. If the data is relatively poor, judgment needs to rely on the applicants reputation and previous work to some extend. And in comparison to a well-backed research paper, grant applications are in their nature always speculative, although very much more detailed than the abstract of a conference submission. If one knew how something was done in the first place, there’d be no need to call it research and there’d be no reason for a grant. The important point is not to fail, if one wants to continue receiving grants (cf. bias, above).

And that still does not fully account for the observation that big players are doing very well in grant applications. A H2020 application is a lot of work, it’s often a hundred pages just for sections 1 to 3, which can easily amount to 100 person days for the coordinator until everything is properly polished. The acceptance rate for Research and Innovation Actions can be as low as 6%. Academic Tier-1 conferences are relaxed in comparison. A small company may simply be unable to compete, economically, i.e., it cannot accept the realistic risk of putting a lot of effort into naught. It’s not as hard in other types of actions, but the risk is still significant and acceptance rates have been getting worse, not better.

“Our investigation reveals that EU security policy emphasizes technology: a high-tech solution is being sought for a societal problem.”

From an outside position I feel that I’m unable to judge the intention and the mindset of the various individuals responsible for the actual wording of the H2020 calls. The persons from this context I’ve met in the past did, however, not leave an impression of exceptional naivety. I genuinely believe that it is in the best interest of European countries and the EU to fund security research, without denying that there may be recipients of funds with a questionable ethical standard. As Europeans, we need to address these issues. I do not want to live in a militarized society and I don’t believe in solving societal problems purely through technology. However, I see a significant amount of opportunities, where usable, efficient technology can enable solutions for societal problems. Given my socialization, I may have a bias towards the security spectrum of research, but that said, I see quite a few things that can and should be done to positively impact the security of our societies. In a changing political climate, Europe needs to step up its security game, also and especially in the digital domain.

And now excuse me, I need to continue that research grant proposal. I’m not doing that for kicks and neither in pure self-interest.

MASScan & the Problems of Static Detection of Microarchitectural attacks

 

Introduction

Microarchitectural attacks have been known for more than a decade now.  The designs behind those architectures are typically optimized for performance, cost and backward compatibility. Therefore it seems unlikely that we will see fixes in CPU architectures which address the root cause for vulnerabilities any time soon. With this in mind, the search for software-based solutions to this problem becomes a priority.

As a contribution to this effort Irazoqui  et al. [1] puplished an interesting paper on static methods to detect microachtitetural attacks which is titled “MASScan: Stopping Microarchitectural Attacks Before Execution”.
The idea is as good as it is naïve. In this blog post I will discuss the reasons behind this position. It should also be noted that the paper in question is an early version and subject to changes.

 

MASScan

The analysis works by flagging code that is rare in real-life applications and often used in an attack context. In this case, ‘attack context’ is defined as code which is either required for an attack to work, or because it improves an attacks’s performance. The list is:

Cache flushing instructions

Clflush, clflushopt
(the authors do not mention this clflushopt, but I have included it for completeness)

Non-temporal instructions

monvnti & movntdq

Timers

Counter threads, performance  counters,  rdtscp, rdtsc  instructions and attempts to set thread affinity to gain core co-location which is important for the accuracy of counter threads.

Fences

lfence, mfence & cpuid

Locking instruction

lock prefix

Algorithmic constructions

Eviction set access code, pointer chasing, jumps in a loop

 

The instructions in question are rarely ever used. With the exception of the lock prefix, all of them are part of the 0x0F escape opcodes. In Zombie’s [5] opcode list (which unfortunately is outdated at the time of writing) 0x0F opcodes represent less than 2% of all opcodes, based on data from 1700 executables. The lock prefix is measured, but is rounded down to 0% in this list. This could serve as an indication that vindicates the author’s notion.

The good part is that solid static analysis is able to effectively spot problems, and highlight them to a human analyst. Further manual analysis can be performed based on those indicators to identify malignant behavior, suspicious cases or to vet out false positives. What makes this approach somewhat challenging is the fact that static analysis is very difficult to do well and impossible to do right, especially when factoring in that attackers try to actively evade static analysis.
The following is to demonstrate what such an evasive action might look like.

 

Microarchitectural & Rice

Rice’s theorem states that all non-trivial semantic properties are undecidable. In short, obfuscation is difficult to deal with. The bad news is that microarchitectural attacks are non-trivial semantic expressions and as such, as per Rice’s theorem, undecidable. In other words: you could achieve the same result in an infinite number of ways, without being able to pinpoint the “right” way. You will never be able to deduce from the semantic output which all syntax representation that cause it.

The example I like to use is this: One could build an interpreter which takes the original program as input. The output of the interpreter would then have the exact same semantics, but a different syntax. Obviously one could then build a new interpreter that processes the first interpreter’s syntax output and so on and so forth. Consequently, we cannot generate a database of syntax representation for a given semantic. The clever reader will already know that microarchitectural attacks do not lend themselves well to emulation or obfuscation for that matter. They often rely on rare syntax elements (rare instructions). Execution time is a very real concern and any obfuscation might change microarchitectural states that are important to the attack. However, this doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

Let’s go through the above list from an attacker’s point of view.

Cache flushing instructions

The clflush instructions can replaced by eviction code as demonstrated by Oren et al. [2] as well as  Gruss et al [3]. This relocates the problem from detecting dangerous instructions to detecting dangerous algorithms. It effectively disqualifies the syntactic element clflush for use as an answer to a semantic question.

Non-temporal instructions & timers

Timers are indeed the Achilles heel of most microarchitectural attacks. The rdtsc(p) instructions are a telltale sign for such an attack. Unfortunately, though, they are used by benign applications as well. Often these instructions are wrapped in API functions, e.g. the QueryPerformanceCounters API on Microsoft Windows. The problem with such API calls is that they can be imported dynamically in any number of ways. This makes a static analysis fairly cumbersome.

Counter Threads

As for counter threads, they too can be implemented in numerous ways. Counting does not have to be monotonic increasing, only deterministically changing. As the CPU’s are superscalar, some instructions can be added to the loop at a very low accuracy penalty. And of course, the loop can be camouflaged.  This not only obscures the actual nature of a function (e.g. a counter thread), it also takes the detection into potential false positive territory. Finally, some attacks (like attacks on KASRL) can be repeated. This allows a low accuracy timer to be used multiple times and then using the law of large numbers to average out the noise.

Fences

Fences are rarely a strict requirement for attacks. They do tend to lower the noise, but an attack could often do without them. For instance, Oren et al. [2] does prime+probe in Javascript without a fence. Flush+Reload works fairly decent without fencing as well. Also, makeshift fences can in some cases be produced by gaming reordering. For instance, filling the reorder buffer with dependent instructions before starting a round of the attack will serve well to fence against already pending loads and stores.

Locking instructions

I’m not aware of any substitution for the lock prefix. In this particular case, we indeed have an indicator that is difficult to replace for an attacker. It should be noted that on Microsoft Windows the Interlocked* API functions use the lock prefix and consequently the same problems arise as with the QueryPerformanceCounter API.

Algorithmic constructions

As far as algorithmic constructions are concerned, those can be varied and obfuscated ad nauseam. Therefore, they make for a poor indicator.
For instance, you could perform eviction using a vector, a tree structure or, in fact, any other data structure. Each of them will generate completely different code. Eviction can be triggered by any instruction that uses memory – therefore, any instruction would achieve this. A very old approach has been memset, which comes at a steep performance penalty for the attacker. However, it would likely suffice for spying on keyboards in Gruss et al. [4] . Call qword ptr [address] can touch two cache lines to load the address and one on the stack, as well as the one or two where the instruction itself lies. That is just an example of how ugly eviction can be made. We could argue with a performance penalty in this case. However, we should bear in mind that optimal eviction strategies not only touch uncached memory, but also memory that is already cached – see Gruss et al. [3]!

It gets worse from there: For row hammer I suggested that we do not need not use eviction. Instead, we could bring the cache coherency policy into play to cause write back into memory, see Fogh [8].  This provides yet another algorithm to detect for protection against row hammer, which of course can be implemented in many different ways.

 

Classic malware obsfuscation – Anti static analysis methods

 

Copy protections and malware has historically used a number of methods to defeat static analysis.

Self-modifying code

I wrote my first executable packer in 1995. Packers go back further than that, though. Once an executable has been packed, the only code that is now available to static analysis in the first stub of the unpacker. Unfortunately, malware authors are aware of this technique and it’s even available for purchase online as part of COTS malware as a service. Also, packers used commercially for copy protection can be used for obfuscation like this.

Malware can of course also decrypt data and save it as an executable on disk or even in memory to avoid static analysis. Techniques such as “Run-PE” are widespread in real world malware.

Another example of self-modifying code is JIT compiling, which is what Javascript does. In fact, I use the keystone assembler JIT style for building microarchitectural attacks fairly often, because it gives me a lot more control than I get from the compiler.

Opening hidden browser windows using malicious java script is entirely possible and Oren et. Al demonstrate that prime+probe runs well in JavaScript. It is worth noting that the browser components can be linked into the malware and subsequently do not need to be present on the victim’s computer.

Such ways of hiding code from analysis is already commonplace and no longer qualifies as sophistication in malware.

Anti-disassembly and code reuse

Static analysis can be performed either based source code or on disassembly. Commercial providers, however, tend not to share their source code for intellectual property reasons. This only leaves disassembly as a method for analysis. Unfortunately, however, the x86 platform has a non-fixed length of opcodes. This results in problems to locate the starting point of an instruction. Historically this has been used as a means to thwart disassembly. A clflush instruction can easily be hidden from disassembly as part of, say, a mov instruction. The extreme version of this is doing code-reuse attacks such as ROP. Obviously a clflush “gadget” does not have to be part of the shipped malware, but could very well be part of the operating system – clflush (In the simplest form) assembles to 3 bytes of which the attacker can influence the third by picking the operand, making it reasonable to find a suitable gadget somewhere in the operating system.

 

A peculiar niche case

We have already seen static analysis thwart these kinds of attacks in one special instance: the NaCl sandbox in Chrome. In there, the code is validated during compiling and run in a sandboxed environment to make sure that none of the above tricks are used. Validation will fail if a clflush instruction is generated. Unfortunately, this is not generally applicable. Never-the-less requiring intermediate language representation (say LLVM) when submitting to a shop may assist the authors intention, but many of the issues mentioned above including Rice’s theorem itself applies to intermediate language representations as well.

 

Conclusion

At this point in time, attackers capable of launching microarchitectural attacks have to be considered ‘advanced’.  We must therefore assume that they have ready access to malware obfuscation technology. This technology can effectively thwart classification using static analysis of executables – this is especially true if the “feature set” is small and malleable. This limited feature set further reduces the cost of applying obfuscation for the attacker. The feature set of MASScan is exactly that: small and mallable. Microarchitectural attacks generally have a bit of leeway for modification to blend in with benign code. Consequently, static analysis is unlikely to give defenders a real edge. Static analysis could be augmented with symbolic or even concolic analysis to improve accuracy. However these methods scale poorly and have issues of their own. Given that it produces a <6% false positive ratio, static analysis seems a dull weapon against microarchitectural attacks. This leaves the dynamic approach which I consider the most promising stop-gap-solution.
For instance, my flush+flush detection blog post [7] or my work with Herath on detecting row hammer and cache attacks at BlackHat 2015 using performance counters [6] are examples of how detecting microarchitectural attacks can be automated in controlled environments. These methods are not without flaws, either. But from an attacker’s point of view they are at least more difficult to work around as they are often behavior-based and consequently circumvent the problem presented by the Rice theorem. Despite progress in defense research, we remain without strong defenses against microarchitectural attacks.

 

Literature

[1] Irazoqui, G., Eisenbarth T., an Sunar B.  MASScan: Stopping Microarchitectural Attacks Before Execution. http://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1196.pdf

[2] Oren, Y., Kemerlis, V. P., Sethumadhavan, S., and Keromytis, A. D. The spy in the sandbox: Practical  cache attacks in javascript and their implications. In Proceedings of the 22Nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (New York, NY, USA, 2015), CCS ’15, ACM, pp. 1406-1418.

[3] Gruss, D., Maurice, C., and Mangard, S. Rowhammer.js: A remote software-induced fault attack in javascript.  In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment -Volume 9721 (New  York,  NY,  USA,  2016),  DIMVA  2016,  Springer-Verlag  New York, Inc., pp. 300{321.

[4] Gruss, D., Spreitzer, R., and Mangard, S. Cache template attacks: Automating  attacks  on  inclusive  last level  caches.   In 24th USENIX Security Symposium (2015), USENIX Association, pp. 897-912

[5] Z0mbie, “Opcode Frequency Statistics”. http://z0mbie.daemonlab.org/opcodes.html

[6] Nishat, H., Fogh, A. “These Are Not Your Grand Daddys CPU Performance Counters”. Black Hat 2015. See also  http://dreamsofastone.blogspot.de/2015/08/speaking-at-black-hat.html

[7] Fogh, A. Detecting stealth mode cache attacks: Flush+Flush. Http://dreamsofastone.blogspot.de/2015/11/detecting-stealth-mode-cache-attacks.html

[8] Fogh, A. Row hammer, java script and MESI- http://dreamsofastone.blogspot.de/2016/02/row-hammer-java-script-and-mesi.html