At the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium in San Diego today we’re presenting Thunderclap, which describes a set of new vulnerabilities involving the security of computer peripherals and the open-source research platform used to discover them. This is a joint work with Colin Rothwell, Brett Gutstein, Allison Pearce, Peter Neumann, Simon Moore and Robert Watson.

We look at the security of input/output devices that use the Thunderbolt interface, which is available via USB-C ports in many modern laptops. Our work also covers PCI Express (PCIe) peripherals which are found in desktops and servers.

Such ports offer very privileged, low-level, direct memory access (DMA), which gives peripherals much more privilege than regular USB devices. If no defences are used on the host, an attacker has unrestricted memory access, and can completely take control of a target computer: they can steal passwords, banking logins, encryption keys, browser sessions and private files, and they can also inject malicious software that can run anywhere in the system.

We studied the defences of existing systems in the face of malicious DMA-enabled peripheral devices and found them to be very weak.

The primary defence is a component called the Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU), which, in principle, can allow devices to access only the memory needed to do their job and nothing else. However, we found existing operating systems do not use the IOMMU effectively.

To begin with, most systems don’t enable the IOMMU at all. Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10 Home and Pro didn’t support the IOMMU. Windows 10 Enterprise can optionally use it, but in a very limited way that leaves most of the system undefended. Linux and FreeBSD do support using the IOMMU, but this support is not enabled by default in most distributions. MacOS is the only OS we studied that uses the IOMMU out of the box.

This state of affairs is not good, and our investigations revealed significant further vulnerabilities even when the IOMMU is enabled.

We built a fake network card that is capable of interacting with the operating system in the same way as a real one, including announcing itself correctly, causing drivers to attach, and sending and receiving network packets. To do this, we extracted a software model of an Intel E1000 from the QEMU full-system emulator and ran it on an FPGA. Because this is a software model, we can easily add malicious behaviour to find and exploit vulnerabilities.

We found the attack surface available to a network card was much richer and more nuanced than was previously thought. By examining the memory it was given access to while sending and receiving packets, our device was able to read traffic from networks that it wasn’t supposed to. This included VPN plaintext and traffic from Unix domain sockets that should never leave the machine.

On MacOS and FreeBSD, our network card was able to start arbitrary programs as the system administrator, and on Linux it had access to sensitive kernel data structures. Additionally, on MacOS devices are not protected from one another, so a network card is allowed to read the display contents and keystrokes from a USB keyboard.

Worst of all, on Linux we could completely bypass the enabled IOMMU, simply by setting a few option fields in the messages that our malicious network card sent.

Such attacks are very plausible in practice. The combination of power, video, and peripheral-device DMA over Thunderbolt 3 ports facilitates the creation of malicious charging stations or displays that function correctly but simultaneously take control of connected machines.

We’ve been collaborating with vendors about these vulnerabilities since 2016, and a number of mitigations have been shipped. We have also been working with vendors, helping them to use our Thunderclap tools to explore this vulnerability space and audit their systems for problems.

MacOS fixed the specific vulnerability we used to get administrator access in macOS 10.12.4 in 2016, although the more general scope of such attacks remain relevant. More recently, new laptops that ship with Windows 10 version 1803 or later have a feature called Kernel DMA Protection for Thunderbolt 3, which at least enables the IOMMU for Thunderbolt devices (but not PCI Express ones). Since this feature requires firmware support, older laptops that were shipped before 1803 remain vulnerable. Recently, Intel committed patches to Linux to enable the IOMMU for Thunderbolt devices, and to disable the ATS feature that allowed our IOMMU bypass. These are part of the Linux kernel 5.0 which is currently in the release process.

One major laptop vendor told us they would like to study these vulnerabilities in more detail before adding Thunderbolt to new product lines.

More generally, since this is a new space of many vulnerabilities, rather than a specific example, we believe all operating systems are vulnerable to similar attacks, and that more substantial design changes will be needed to remedy these problems. We noticed similarities between the vulnerability surface available to malicious peripherals in the face of IOMMU protections and that of the kernel system call interface, long a source of operating system vulnerabilities. The kernel system call interface has been subjected to much scrutiny, security analysis, and code hardening over the years, which must now be applied to the interface between peripherals and the IOMMU.

As well as asking vendors to improve the security of their systems, we advise users to update their systems and to be cautious about attaching unfamiliar USB-C devices to their machines – especially those in public places.

We have placed more background on our work and a list of FAQs on our website, thunderclap.io. There, we have also open sourced the Thunderclap research platform to allow other researchers to reproduce and extend our work, and to aid vendors in performing security evaluation of their products.

Thunderclap: Exploring Vulnerabilities in Operating System IOMMU Protection via DMA from Untrustworthy Peripherals A. Theodore Markettos, Colin Rothwell, Brett F. Gutstein, Allison Pearce, Peter G. Neumann, Simon W. Moore, Robert N. M. Watson. Proceedings of the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS), 24-27 February 2019, San Diego, USA.