I'm currently in the middle of writing a Thesis on this stuff, and joined this forum because I saw an intelligent discussion.
Code…..
Very interesting things you posted.
Please keep 'em coming.
I am sure you know and use ChipGenius, if not, just in case
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jaclaz
Lol Thanks!!,
I'm WAY past using chip genius. (think $3,000US of homebrew kit designed for internally mapping a Nand-Flash arrays plus data tracking on any device that utilises Nand-Flash Memory including those damned SDD that poor Scott M. is having so much fun with)
If Scott thinks SDD will be the death of forensics extraction, wait until the "new" flashchips hit the market…., these babies have the controller AND wearleveling/remapping built into the Nand-Flash chip!!
Before you asked the Controller for "block 0" , and it asked the nand-flash chip based on some table maintained by the controller.
With the new devices you ask the Nand-Flash CHIP!! for block 0 , and that block can be ANYWHERE inside of the memory chip with zero access to the decoding tables from outside of the device.
The only way to get access is to crack the top off the chip, and probe about internally, but even that will not stop the data moving about internally ,plus now they are taking about damned encription of the data.
Anyway my next target is "IRONKEY" , some time in December 2009 after my thesis.
Also watch out for the "buried" Trojans in many copies of the "chip genius" program, unfortunatly there are MANY "elements" within China determined to passout hardware and software with built in Trojens (even at the factory level, ESP. on these new picture frames.)
C.
Lol Thanks!!,
Anyway my next target is "IRONKEY" , some time in December 2009 after my thesis.
I'd be interested in your thoughts/experiences so far with these devices - we're looking at purchasing some for use within our department. Are you aware of any successful attacks against the devices so far?
I'm sure if there were any sucessful attacks , they would have been on "blackhat" or "defcon"
That's one of the reasons I would very much like to get my hands on some "Ironkeys" for the "Hay guys is this a cool trick or what!!" factor, but they are like 75 Bucks each!!
Looking at them and if what they say is true , they should be very secure,
ESP. as they claim they are manufacturing in the USA.
(also I guess the picture of the device internals is a fake)
For a Hacker, the biggest hurdle is going to be the "custom chip" Ironkey have acting as a controller.
Even if you circumvent that, you still have Two Nand-Flash memories full of AES encrypted data, potentially that is a very long (in time) brute force attack.
I can think of a number of attack vectors, but not things I would expect to see from a 'normal' hacker.
Specifically any attack would have a key requirment of physically extracting the Nand-Flash Memory chips (or being very lucky to guess the password in less than 10 attempts), to prevent the custom device from zapping the content, however there may even be an "exploit" that can be targetted against a full device without disassembly.
I might contact Ironkey in a "research" capacity, but I cannot see them being willing for some guy to take their kit apart.
C.
I might contact Ironkey in a "research" capacity, but I cannot see them being willing for some guy to take their kit apart.
C.
Never know - they might be open to proving how secure their devices really are? Still, keep us all posted - I'm sure others would be interested in hearing about your results.
The difference between these three sceptics discussing wear-levelling and me is that I have spend about a month researching the subject. During this month I have read many technical documents, white papers and corresponded with various people to get the answers. I also spent hours examining several troublemaking USB Flash drives, used hardware write blocking devices, software write blocking, Linux and Windows OS. All of that was performed in my own free time (though the problem was work related), and I shared this information with everyone interested. There is no bias or commercial interests involved.
I'm facing a related problem. Have you written a paper on your research I could have a look at? I need to exclude this as a issue with the problem I am tackling. Thanks!
-Stigster!
hi stigster,
I haven't written the paper on this subject.
Regards,
Ecophobia