Inspecting and knowing your firmware images

Update: for context, here’s the talk I was watching while writing this post.

Again posting about the Enigma conference. Teddy Reed talked about firmware security, in particular based on pre-boot EFI services. The video will be available at some point, it talks in details about osquery (which I’d like to package for Gentoo), but also has a lower-key announcement of something I found very interesting: VirusTotal is now (mostly) capable of scanning firmware images of various motherboard manufacturers.

The core of this implementation leverages two open-source tools: uefi_firmware by Teddy himself, and UEFITool by Nikolaj Schlej. They are pretty good but since this is still in the early stages, there are still a few things to iron out.

For instance, when I first scanned the firmware of my home PC it was reported with a clearly marker of malware, which made me suspicious – and indeed got ASUS to take notice and look into it themselves – but it looks like it was a problem with parsing the file, Teddy’s looking into it.

On the other hand, sticking with ASUS, my ZenBook shows in its report the presence of CompuTrace — luckily for me I don’t run this on Windows.

This tool is very interesting under many different point of views, because not only it will (maybe in due time, as firmware behaviour analysis improves) provide information about possibly-known malware (such as CompuTrace) in a firmware upgrade, before you apply it, but even before you even buy the computer.

And this is not just about malware. The information that VirusTotal provides (or to be precise the tools behind it) include information about certificates, which for instance told me that my home PC would allow me to install Ubuntu under SecureBoot, since the Canonical certificate is present — or, according to Matthew Garrett, it will allow an Ubuntu signed bootloaded to boot just about anything defeating SecureBoot altogether.

Unfortunately this only works for manufacturers that provide raw firmware updates right now. ASUS and Intel both do that, but for instance Dell devices will provide the firmware upgrade only as a Windows (or DOS) executable. Some old extraction instructions exist, but they are out of date. Thankfully, Nikolaj pointed me at a current script that works at least for my E6510 laptop — which by the way also has CompuTrace.

That script, though, fails with my other Dell laptop, a Vostro 3750 — in that case, you can get your hands on the BIOS image by simply executing it with Wine (it will fail with an obscure error message) and then fetching it from Wine’s temporary folder. Similarly, it does not work with the updater for the XPS 13 (which I’m considering buying to replace the Zenbook), and in this case Wine is not of enough help (because it does not

Unfortunately that script does not work with the more recent laptops such as the XPS13 that I’m considering buying, so I should possibly look into extending it if I can manage to get it work, although Nikolaj with much more experience than me tried and failed to get a valid image out of it.

To complete the post, I would like to thank Teddy for pointing the audience to Firmware Security — I know I’ll be reading a lot more about that soon!