A Practical Recipe for Hardware Implants

This recipe has all the necessary ingredients to reach success. A piece of hardware, a little bit of firmware and that beautiful smell of recently welded tin. After our talk is finished, the audience will be able to cook their own Hardware Implants.

Hardware Implants are, without any doubt, one of the delicacies of the Offensive Security. Served in the most exclusive restaurants of China, Rusia and the United States of America. This delicate pieces are no other thing than just a beautiful combination between Hardware and Software that are intended to provide access to a device or modify its behaviour while trying to remain undetectable. Contrary to what is usually believed, cooking a Hardware Implant is not an impossible task nor it is reserved just for the most talented world chefs. In order to accomplish this, we will need to keep some details in mind, them being (as an example):

• Which will be our target device?
• Which bus will be used in order to comunicate with the target?
• How we will develop and debug our own firmware?
• How we will manage to remain stealth against the visual inspection process?

In this talk we will make an introduction to Harware Implants, showing some Attack Vectors and the potential Defense Mechanisms that can prevent them. As a practical example, we will go through the necessary steps to create an Implant using an ARM Microcontroller to take control of a Wireless Router without modifying it’s firmware.