Verifying the integrity of peripherals’ firmware

  • Jonathan McCune | Carnegie Mellon University

Recent research demonstrates that malware can infect peripherals’ firmware in a typical computer system, e.g., by exploiting vulnerabilities in the firmware itself or in the firmware update tools. Verifying the integrity of peripherals’ firmware is thus an important challenge. We propose software-only attestation protocols to verify the integrity of peripherals’ firmware, and show that they can detect all known software-based attacks. We implement our scheme using Netgear GA620 network adapter in an x86 PC, and evaluate our system with known attacks.

Speaker Details

Jonathan McCune is a Research Systems Scientist for CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and received the A.G. Jordan thesis award. He received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Virginia (UVA). Jonathan’s research interests include secure systems, trusted computing, virtualization, and spontaneous interaction between mobile devices. When keyboards and LCDs get to be too much for him, Jon can usually be found riding a bike.

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      Jeff Running

Series: Microsoft Research Talks