TPM-FAIL vulnerabilities impact TPM chips in desktops, laptops, servers

mood · Nov 13, 2019

TPM-FAIL vulnerabilities impact TPM chips in desktops, laptops, servers
TPM-FAIL lets attackers steal private keys from TPMs. Attacks take from minutes to a few hours
November 13, 2019
https://www.zdnet.com/article/tpm-fail-vulnerabilities-impact-tpm-chips-in-desktops-laptops-servers/

A team of academics has disclosed today two vulnerabilities known collectively as TPM-FAIL that could allow an attacker to retrieve cryptographic keys stored inside TPMs.

Nowadays, it's hard to find a device that's not using a TPM, either in the form of a hardware-isolated chip, or a software-based solution. TPMs are at the heart of most devices, even in tiny electronics, such as some IoT "smart" devices.
TPM-FAIL -- WHAT IS IMPACTED
In a research paper published today, a team of academics from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (USA), the University of Lübeck (Germany), and the University of California, San Diego (USA) has disclosed two vulnerabilities that impact two very widely used TPM solutions.

The first vulnerability is CVE-2019-11090 and impacts Intel's Platform Trust Technology (PTT).
The second is CVE-2019-16863 and impacts the ST33 TPM chip made by STMicroelectronics.
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TPM-FAIL -- THE ATTACKS
The actual attacks on these two TPM technologies is what security researcher call a "timing leakage."

An external observer can record the time differences when the TPM is performing repetative operations and infer the data being processed inside the secure chip -- all based on the amount of time the TPM takes to do the same thing over and over again.

"A local adversary can recover the ECDSA key from Intel fTPM in 4-20 minutes depending on the access level," they said.
The research team told ZDNet they plan to publish the tools they used to analyze the vulnerable TPMs, along with proof-of-concept code, on GitHub.
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TPM-FAIL: TPM meets Timing and Lattice Attacks (PDF - 2.99 MB): http://tpm.fail/tpmfail.pdf

BoerenkoolMetWorst · Nov 13, 2019

Is there any patch for these vulnerabilities?
Intel upgraded their fTPM firmware to fix the reported vulnerabilities.
STMicroelectronics issued a new TPM chip and we have verified that it is resistant against TPM-FAIL.
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So all current STMicroelectronics TPM chips remain vulnerable..

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TPM-FAIL vulnerabilities impact TPM chips in desktops, laptops, servers

mood Updates Team

BoerenkoolMetWorst Registered Member

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TPM-FAIL vulnerabilities impact TPM chips in desktops, laptops, servers

mood Updates Team

BoerenkoolMetWorst Registered Member

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