Secure Digital

The Exploration and Exploitation of an SD Memory Card [30c3]

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• published: 02 Jan 2014
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The Exploration and Exploitation of an SD Memory Card by xobs & bunnie All "managed FLASH" devices, such as SD, microSD, and SSD, contain an embedded controller to assist with the complex tasks necessary to create an abstraction of reliable, contiguous storage out of FLASH silicon that is fundamentally unreliable and unpredictably fragmented. This controller is an attack surface of interest. First, the ability to modify the block allocation and erasure algorithms introduces the opportunity to perform various MITM attacks in a virtually undetectable fashion. Second, the controller itself is typically powerful, with performance around 50MIPS, yet with a cost of mere pennies, making it an interesting and possibly useful development target for other non-storage related purposes. Finally, understanding the inner workings of the controller enables opportunities for data recovery in cards that are thought to have been erased, or have been partially damaged. This talk demonstrates a method for reverse engineering and loading code into the microcontroller within a SD memory card. TECHNICAL APPROACH Publicly available documentation on SD card controllers is scarce. However, based upon tear-down and decap analysis as well as a survey of the publicly available product briefs, most controllers are believed to be either an enhanced 8051, or an ARM derivative. A further challenge to overcome is the fact that SD card manufacturers typically reserve the right to change the controller IC within a card without updating the external markings to reflect the change. This policy favors the SD card manufacturers, as it allows them to swap out existing controllers for lower-cost devices as new controllers are introduced. However, it is problematic for users as it means that two otherwise identical looking cards can have different performance and/or bugs with which to contend. To kick off the effort, a survey of available cards was made at an SD card gray market in Shenzhen, China. Each card was dissected and visually inspected for cues, such as the layout of the traces going to the controller glob-top, that would indicate the type of controller within. About a dozen different controller types were identified, of which one was picked for further investigation due to its use of SLC FLASH memory. SLC is a good starting point for reverse engineering because no storage-level scrambling is required to prevent the read and write-disturb issues typical of MLC and TLC FLASH. A simple binary dump of the FLASH memory within the card revealed structure within the first erase block consistent with what we might expect for code storage. Since FLASH memory is inherently unreliable, four CRC + ECC protected copies of code are located within the first sector. This crude duplication scheme allows the card to boot even if bit errors creep into the code storage sector. We also noted the existence of the string "BUILDWIN" within the code storage sector, which indicates that the controller is likely from a series made by a company called Appotech. Product briefs from the Appotech/Buildwin websites indicated that the architecture of the code is likely an 8051-derivative, and the model of the controller is probably an AX211. At this point, our effort to reverse engineer the controller split into two paths. One path was static analysis, where extracted binaries and manufacturing-related tools were analyzed with IDA to determine key entry points, storage locations, and most importantly a method for injecting code into the card via the SD interface. The other path was dynamic analysis, where the signals going to the SD card bus and to the NAND FLASH were instrumented with logging and stimulus facilities, and the controller's operation could be observed with exquisite resolution, enabling a broad class of fuzzing and other brute-force analysis attacks, as well as the rapid confirmation or rejection of hypotheses generated by static analysis. Dynamic analysis was key in determining features such as the location of the GPIO control registers and the function and format of otherwise undocumented extended instruction opcodes. [...] Speaker: bunnie Xobs EventID: 5294 Event: 30th Chaos Communication Congress [30c3] by the Chaos Computer Club [CCC] Location: Congress Centrum Hamburg (CCH); Am Dammtor; Marseiller Straße; 20355 Hamburg; Germany Language: english Begin: Sun, 12/29/2013 14:00:00 +01:00 Lizenz: CC-by Help us caption & translate this video! http://amara.org/v/DY39/