Reversing Industrial Firmware for Fun and Backdoors I

http://reversemode.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=80&Itemid=1

by Devko • 15 years ago

86 23 15 years ago

DanBC• 15 years ago

> Despite I'm releasing this information when there is still no patch available, It has been my decission. I reported it to the ICS-CERT months ago, I would like to thank the ICS-CERT and the Schneider security team, they have taken these issues very seriously and are working on a patch. During the process they have been keeping me updated on every decission/progress. However, time ago I decided to change my disclosure policy.

That's a lousy disclosure policy.

dguido• 15 years ago

Playing devil's advocate: As the title says, the vendor included backdoors in the application. I'm not sure I can trust them and their clearly irresponsible development practices to patiently wait for them to handle this on their own.

dexen• 15 years ago

> Playing devil's advocate: (...)

No you aren't. The parent post is playing devel's advocate; you are a down-to-earth, honest, practical user of software.

barik5• 15 years ago

Almost all PLCs have back doors. Just because it uses Ethernet doesn't mean it does anything fancy. Almost all the PLCs I am aware of simply wrap existing RS 232 protocols over IP from the 80s and even earlier. Most of the plants actually seem to want these back doors, because downtime at a production facility is incredibly expensive.

PLCs are not designed to externally accessible, ever. The back doors are completely irrelevant anyway given that the PLC will accept any packet from anywhere, and perform the operation. The RS-232 commands are functions such as "enable bit", "disable bit", "set value", "read value", for actuating inputs and outputs.

lawnchair_larry• 15 years ago

Nope, the only thing lousy is not saying it sooner. I am glad he decided that he will not be complicit in such reprehensible behavior from a vendor. Knowingly exposing your customers to harm without disclosure should have stiff penalties.

joelhaasnoot4• 15 years ago

Surprise surprise...

PLC and other industrial software is a long way behind in terms of "software engineering". A college classmate did a graduation project/internship figuring out how to do version control and modularize PLC programs with device drivers.

YetAnotherAlias• 15 years ago

What makes you think that the engineering teams in companies like Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Mitsubishi, GE etc. are "a long way behind in terms of 'software engineering'"? It is extremely misguided to think that all the thousands of engineers working in the Industrial Automation field are somehow behind others. I guess most of the HN crowd has very little exposure to the technologies in this field and most people probably consider this field uncool. But that doesn't mean the engineers working on these technologies are dumb and lagging behind others.

munin• 15 years ago

> What makes you think that the engineering teams in companies like Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Mitsubishi, GE etc. are "a long way behind in terms of 'software engineering'"?

data.

http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2010/09/the-sad-state-of-...

I was in a class taught by this guy and I seem to recall him saying that a large (20-40%) of embedded developers he surveyed reported using no version control software.

and look at some of the responses in that thread!

"I think that gcc -Wall -Wextra can be subtituted by lint tool (if you use gcc)."

joelhaasnoot4• 15 years ago

You're right, I should have quantified that statement a little better. The PLC manufacturers I'm sure have good software engineering practices. I'm just not sure the rest of the ecosystem is as developed as for instance the "web development" ecosystem, atleast from my experiences.

Mind you, I do live in the Netherlands, and it seems lots of PLC systems are designed by electrical engineers who started out in that or something else and don't know about much on the Joel Test. But I can be proven wrong.

A contributing factor is probably that each vendor has his/her toolkit which in some sense is proprietary, and so the market for general tools is smaller, and it's an enterprise market making it harder to sell to.

VMG• 15 years ago

Try to work with Siemens Step7 for just one day.

eigenvector• 15 years ago

> I guess most of the HN crowd has very little exposure to the technologies in this field and most people probably consider this field uncool.

I'm always reminded of a conversation with a fresh Google hire wherein she said "How can you stand working at a utility, don't you want your work to affect PEOPLE?", as if utilities don't have hundreds of thousands or millions of customers that we provide an essential service to.

romaniv• 15 years ago

What makes you think that the engineering teams in companies like Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Mitsubishi, GE etc. are "a long way behind in terms of 'software engineering'"?

A bit of personal experience, stuff like Stuxnet as well as seeing bits of security research that confirm that notion.

Besides, not all control engineering is done by large corporations. There are tons of customizations done by smaller companies, whose competence varies.

mrmekon• 15 years ago

I'm an embedded consultant at a small firm of young guys. We use subversion, git and mercurial internally. We have project management tools, bug tracking and issue management, scheduling and time tracking and version control. We use VMware and VirtualBox to keep versioned installs of operating systems and toolchains. We're up to speed on the latest languages and frameworks, and we use whatever is right for the task at hand.

Our customers do not, in general, have any of those things. Many of them have no central version control (independent teams sometimes have subversion setup for themselves). Those who have it are usually using CVS, and usually don't use it very well.

Embedded is a field of "old fogeys" still. It isn't taught in school, it isn't advertised very well, and the companies who do it don't offer the cool perks that web companies do. A lot of these companies are running into problems where a large portion of their engineering force is retiring, and nobody is available to replace them.

This is more likely to be the case with our big customers than the smaller ones. The small ones usually have at least have some people pushing for modern project management, though it's often not implemented across the whole company.

Many of them got into the field when microcontrollers were extremely limited and C compilers were unreliable -- most of them learned assembly and used it for most of their career. There is still a tendency for the older ones to not believe us when we say their project can be written in C. Ten years ago, they would have been right.

Obviously, you can't generalize an entire industry as being "way behind", but many embedded firms just haven't progressed the same way those in other industries have.

Also, it's critical to realize that it has nothing to do with the engineers not being smart. They tend to be quite brilliant, in fact. But many of them are electrical engineers with a background in analog electronics, physics, and math, instead of modern software development.

Reversing Industrial Firmware for Fun and Backdoors I

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