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Leveraging Hardware RoT to Secure Firmware against Ambitious Threat Actors

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bharat malviya
Leveraging Hardware RoT to Secure Firmware against Ambitious Threat Actors

In their efforts to avoid detection, hackers are becoming smarter and more sophisticated. Bad actors are attempting to breach systems further down the stack at the firmware level, where IT security and visibility efforts are still mostly focused higher up the stack at the application layer.


Hackers can disable remote firmware updates once inside the firmware, making it impossible to fix remotely and requiring the services of a technician with physical access to the hardware/firmware, often requiring a complete shutdown and on-site visits are required, which can be quite costly for large scale deployments. Because of this, Zero-day vulnerabilities in firmware or hardware can take time to fix, leaving the system vulnerable for a longer period than a software breach.


These factors have resulted in an increase in the frequency of firmware attacks by state-sponsored actors and smaller, less resourceful but still lethal private groups.


According to survey data from Microsoft’s March 2021 Security Signals report, 83 percent of enterprise IT decision-makers had experienced a firmware attack in the last two years, yet only 29% of the average security budget is dedicated to firmware protection.


A Root of Trust (RoT) is required to safeguard firmware against ever more ambitious and innovative attackers as an entity against which to check every stage of the stack from hardware boot to firmware load, OS runtime, and finally running apps. The only way for a computational component to be trustworthy in this sense is for it to be immutable, which rules out any kind of software solution. As a result, a hardware solution is required, which frequently entails keeping crypto keys that are linked to the device owner who furnished the keys in the silicon of the system rather than in its software in a standalone implementation



Full Article: Leveraging Hardware RoT to Secure Firmware against Ambitious Threat Actors


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