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With no easy way to revoke compromised keys, MSI, and its customers, are in a real pickle:
A ransomware intrusion on hardware manufacturer Micro-Star International, better known as MSI, is stoking concerns of devastating supply chain attacks that could inject malicious updates that have been signed with company signing keys that are trusted by a huge base of end-user devices, a researcher said.
"It's kind of like a doomsday scenario where it's very hard to update the devices simultaneously, and they stay for a while not up to date and will use the old key for authentication," Alex Matrosov, CEO, head of research and founder of security firm Binarly, said in an interview. "It's very hard to solve, and I don't think MSI has any backup solution to actually block the leaked keys."
The intrusion came to light in April when, as first reported by Bleeping Computer, the extortion portal of the Money Message ransomware group listed MSI as a new victim and published screenshots purporting to show folders containing private encryption keys, source code, and other data. A day later, MSI issued a terse advisory saying that it had "suffered a cyberattack on part of its information systems." The advisory urged customers to get updates from the MSI website only. It made no mention of leaked keys.
Since then, Matrosov has analyzed data that was released on the Money Message site on the dark web. To his alarm, included in the trove were two private encryption keys. The first is the signing key that digitally signs MSI firmware updates to cryptographically prove that they are legitimate ones from MSI rather than a malicious impostor from a threat actor.
This raises the possibility that the leaked key could push out updates that would infect a computer's most nether regions without triggering a warning. To make matters worse, Matrosov said, MSI doesn't have an automated patching process the way Dell, HP, and many larger hardware makers do. Consequently, MSI doesn't provide the same kind of key revocation capabilities.
"It's very bad, it doesn't frequently happen," he said. "They need to pay a lot of attention to this incident because there are very serious security implications here."
Adding to the concern, MSI to date has maintained radio silence on the matter. Company representatives didn't respond to emails seeking comment and asking if the company planned to issue guidance to its customers.
[...] Whatever the difficulty, possession of the signing key MSI uses to cryptographically verify the authenticity of its installer files significantly lowers the effort and resources required to pull off an effective supply chain attack.
"The worst scenario is if the attackers gain not only access to the keys but also can distribute this malicious update [using those keys]," Matrosov said.
In an advisory, the Netherlands-based National Cybersecurity Center didn't rule out the possibility.
"Because successful abuse is technically complex and in principle requires local access to a vulnerable system, the NCSC considers the risk of abuse to be small," NCSC officials wrote.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday May 12, @03:20PM (5 children)
Exactly!
The fact that MSI didn't treat those keys like the crown jewels makes them criminally negligent AND demonstrates without the shadow of a doubt that they're fucking incompetent.
I hope this ends in a class-action lawsuit and they lose, because they deserve to have their ass handed to them, to teach them a lesson and let it be a lesson for everybody else.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday May 12, @03:38PM
Customers may simply lose trust in their brand. Trust is easy to lose and difficult to earn.
These singing keys are the first or even zero'th level defense against malware.
While Republicans can get over Trump's sexual assaults, affairs, and vulgarity; they cannot get over Obama being black.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Friday May 12, @04:30PM (2 children)
I'm sure if you'll read the fine print you'll find MSI never made any security-related guarantees when providing you with their motherboards.
In fact, secure boot isn't there to provide security for you. It's there to provide DRM through a verifiable execution chain similar to what SafetyNet provides on Android. So, at most, you get to ask a refund from the game company which *might* get to sue the company that provided with the anti-piracy/cheat library which, in-turn, *might* get to sue Intel for not fulfilling whatever which, in-turn, *might* get to sue MSI for failing to uphold to whatever.
Welcome to the wonderful world of "security".
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Friday May 12, @06:56PM (1 child)
If you keep in mind the fact that things like rooting and jailbreaking are exactly the same as exploiting security vulnerabilities, you can see this as an opportunity to take back full control of your hardware. I expected Soylentils would support this outcome.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Touché) by RamiK on Friday May 12, @08:06PM
Rooting doesn't exploit any security vulnerabilities. Many manufacturers provide the tools to unlock the bootloader on their website ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootloader_unlocking#Android [wikipedia.org] ) and SuperSu and Magisk are just fancy GUIs around su (sudo) that have installers that make sure the various selinux policies and such are setup correctly. The end result is simply you being able to elevate the privilege of certain apps to ring 0.
Anyhow, I'm pretty sure most if not all of MSI's motherboards already let users disable the secure boot or even install their own keys (so you can setup your PC to only boot bootloaders and kernels you yourself compiled and signed).
compiling...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by digitalaudiorock on Friday May 12, @05:53PM
After I built the machine I'm using now with an ASRock X570 PHANTOM GAMING 4 motherboard, I had several people online tell me that ASRock was crap and also recommended MSI. For what it's worth the ASRock has been really solid, and I'm liking the decision even more after this debacle. Horrible.