Ringzer0 BOOTSTRAP24 Austin

Matthew Alt (wrongbaud)

Matthew began his reverse engineering career in the aftermarket automotive industry, searching for vulnerabilities in engine control units' diagnostic protocol implementations. Next, he worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he led a team focused on embedded systems analysis. While at MIT, Matthew was awarded the Outstanding Contributor Award for his technical contributions. You can find other examples of his work and teaching style on his personal blog, the VSS research blog and through the free Ghidra course he authored at Hackaday.


What is your Twitter/X Handle?

wrongbaud

What is your Linked In URL?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-t-alt/

What is your Mastodon ID?

wrongbaud@infosec.exchange


Session

02-24
11:30
45min
Glitching in 3D: Low Cost EMFI Attacks
Matthew Alt (wrongbaud)

Advances in embedded device security features have led to more and more researchers utilizing fault injection techniques to bypass security features and gain increased access to systems. While some open-source tools exist to perform these types of attacks, there are still many hurdles that researchers must overcome when conducting their power analysis of a device that they wish to perform a fault injection attack.

While vulnerable to voltage glitching attacks, sudden voltage drops at specific timings can cause permanent damage to devices. We will begin this talk by describing our power analysis research that led us to an RDP bypass on the STM32F4 via voltage glitching. Despite being able to bypass RDP protections with a traditional voltage glitch, the attack would occasionally permanently damage the device. As a result of this, we developed a more reliable EMFI attack.

This talk describes utilizing open-source tools to perform an EMFI attack on an STM32F4 microcontroller, allowing for a full RDP (read-out-protection) bypass via a targeted EMP. This research will release the open-source tooling used to instrument a generic 3D printer and examples of how we integrated it into the workflow utilizing the ChipWhisperer Husky and PicoEMP.

Track 1 📍 Auditorium 1.110