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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 22 2017, @06:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the Use-only-Official®-Authorized-Parts-and-Repair-Services dept.

People with cracked touch screens or similar smartphone maladies have a new headache to consider: the possibility the replacement parts installed by repair shops contain secret hardware that completely hijacks the security of the device.

The concern arises from research that shows how replacement screens—one put into a Huawei Nexus 6P and the other into an LG G Pad 7.0—can be used to surreptitiously log keyboard input and patterns, install malicious apps, and take pictures and e-mail them to the attacker. The booby-trapped screens also exploited operating system vulnerabilities that bypassed key security protections built into the phones. The malicious parts cost less than $10 and could easily be mass-produced. Most chilling of all, to most people, the booby-trapped parts could be indistinguishable from legitimate ones, a trait that could leave many service technicians unaware of the maliciousness. There would be no sign of tampering unless someone with a background in hardware disassembled the repaired phone and inspected it.

The research, in a paper presented this week at the 2017 Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies, highlights an often overlooked disparity in smartphone security. The software drivers included in both the iOS and Android operating systems are closely guarded by the device manufacturers, and therefore exist within a "trust boundary." The factory-installed hardware that communicates with the drivers is similarly assumed to be trustworthy, as long as the manufacturer safeguards its supply chain. The security model breaks down as soon as a phone is serviced in a third-party repair shop, where there's no reliable way to certify replacement parts haven't been modified.

The researchers, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, wrote:

The threat of a malicious peripheral existing inside consumer electronics should not be taken lightly. As this paper shows, attacks by malicious peripherals are feasible, scalable, and invisible to most detection techniques. A well motivated adversary may be fully capable of mounting such attacks in a large scale or against specific targets. System designers should consider replacement components to be outside the phone's trust boundary, and design their defenses accordingly

Source: Ars Technica

Also covered at: Engadget.


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  • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday August 23 2017, @03:49AM (2 children)

    by DECbot (832) on Wednesday August 23 2017, @03:49AM (#557836) Journal

    I wish it were a joke... I threw my pants in the wash and 30 minutes later I couldn't find my phone. Low and behold, it was eventually found in the wash, still in my pants.

    --
    cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:14AM (1 child)

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:14AM (#557874) Homepage Journal

    So it never worked again?

    --
    jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
    • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday August 23 2017, @11:01PM

      by DECbot (832) on Wednesday August 23 2017, @11:01PM (#558212) Journal

      Correct. I even disassembled the device and stuck the boards in a bag of rice. It never booted again. Now the replacement device (same make and model) I had in my pocket when I fell waist deep into a lake. That one was disassembled and sun-dried. About 4 hours later it was working again.

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base