Making sense of the alleged Supermicro motherboard attack
I don't understand why everybody assumes it must be pulling data over the network autonomously. It could simply compromise the host OS to augment other, targeted attacks. Say, by reintroducing a buffer overflow or race condition. It would be incredibly short-sighted to go to such lengths to compromise these machines just to naively pull from a command+control server, virtually advertising its presence.<p>Defenders simply do not think like attackers. If you're a defender it's <i>lethal</i> to try to think like an attacker. "I can't imagine how this would be useful therefore it must not be useful" are the famous last words of everybody who has cast doubt on a new and novel attack vector. As a defender you need to first estimate the unknowns and unknown unknowns, which over the last year alone have exploded (e.g. actual and potential Intel microcode vulnerabilities). If you needed this article to convince you of feasibility or even just practicality, please don't pretend to be capable of assessing the security posture of any complex system.<p>And let's be clear: this is <i>not</i> a new and novel attack vector. There are companies that have existed for quite some time researching and selling products to deal with this sort of attack vector. On the spectrum of hardware based attacks feasible today, this chip isn't at the complex end of the spectrum but rather the simple end of the spectrum. The complex end of the spectrum involves hiding logic deep within existing ICs, and there's ample literature to demonstrate feasibility of both implementation and detection.<p>The difficulty in pulling off these attacks lies not in the software or hardware, but the political, intelligence, and military apparatus of attacking countries. The economic costs of detection are huge precisely because, at the end of the day, fundamental security relies on trust, not technological hurdles per se.