08-17, 15:00–15:45 (Europe/Berlin), Milliways
Language: English
In this talk we will discuss the radio jailbreaking journey that enabled us to perform the first public disclosure and security analysis of the proprietary cryptography used in TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio): a European standard for trunked radio globally used by government agencies, police, prisons, emergency services and military operators. Besides governemental applications, TETRA is also widely deployed in industrial environments such as factory campuses, harbor container terminals and airports, as well as critical infrastructure such as SCADA telecontrol of oil rigs, pipelines, transportation and electric and water utilities.
For over two decades, the underlying algorithms have remained secret and bound with restrictive NDAs prohibiting public scrutiny of this highly critical technology. As such, TETRA was one of the last bastions of widely deployed secret proprietary cryptography. We will discuss in detail how we managed to obtain the primitives and remain legally at liberty to publish our findings.
This journey has involved reverse-engineering and exploiting multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in the highly popular Motorola MTM5x00 TETRA radio and its TI OMAP-L138 trusted execution environment (TEE) and covers everything from side-channel attacks on DSPs, through writing decompilers headache-inducing DSP architectures, all the way to exploiting ROM vulnerabilities in the Texas Instruments TEE.
Wouter Bokslag is an embedded and automotive security researcher known for the reverse-engineering and cryptanalysis of several proprietary in-vehicle immobilizer authentication ciphers used by major automotive manufacturers. He holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and designed and assisted teaching hands-on offensive security classes for graduate students at the Dutch Kerckhoffs Institute for several years.
Jos Wetzels is a co-founding partner and security researcher at Midnight Blue. His research has involved reverse-engineering, vulnerability research and exploit development across various domains ranging from industrial and automotive systems to IoT, networking equipment and deeply embedded SoCs. He has uncovered critical zero-day vulnerabilities in dozens of embedded TCP/IP stacks, Industrial Control Systems (ICS), and RTOSes. He previously worked as a researcher at the Distributed and Embedded Security Group (DIES) at the University of Twente (UT) in the Netherlands where he developed exploit mitigation solutions for constrained embedded devices deployed in critical infrastructure, performed security analyses of state-of-the-art network and host-based intrusion detection systems and has been involved in research projects regarding on-the-fly detection and containment of unknown malware and APTs.
Carlo Meijer is a PhD candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen (RU). His research focuses on the analysis of cryptographic systems deployed in the wild. He is known for his work on the security of so-called Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs). Furthermore, he is known for breaking a hardened variant of Crypto1, the cipher used in the Mifare Classic family of cryptographic RFID tags. Finally, he co-authored research into default passwords in consumer routers as deployed by ISPs in the Netherlands. All three studies have uncovered major security shortcomings with widespread impact.
At RU, he taught the Hacking in C and Operating System Security courses. Both of which aimed to give students hands-on practical experience with binary exploitation, in-depth knowledge of several mitigation schemes and their respective bypasses.