Larry Trowell
Goes by PATCH
Larry is a Director at NetSPI responsible for leading and executing IOT/Embedded Penetration Testing and researching new security techniques to ensure the safety of embedded systems. Larry has a master's degree in mathematics with emphases on Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Georgia Southern University. He has worked with several Fortune 250 companies both as an embedded systems engineer and security expert focused on medical devices. He has aided in the design and security of multiple devices in the Automotive, Financial, Medical, Wireless, and Multimedia spectrums, has been published in medical journals, and has spoken at conferences all over the globe. Larry has extensive knowledge of the design of various bare metal and low-level embedded devices.
Session
Stored memory in hardware has had a long history of being influenced by light, by design. For instance, as memory is represented by the series of transistors, and their physical state represents 1's and 0's, original EEPROM memory could be erased via the utilization of UV light, in preparation for flashing new memory.
Naturally, whilst useful, this has proven to be an avenue of opportunity to be leveraged by attackers, allowing them to selectively influence memory via a host of optical/light-based techniques. As chips became more advanced, the usage of opaque resin was used as a "temporary" measure to combat this flaw, by coating chips in a material that would reflect UV.
Present day opinions are that laser (or light) based hardware attacks, are something that only nation state actors are capable of doing Currently, sophisticated hardware labs use expensive, high frequency IR beams to penetrate the resin.
This project demonstrates that with a limited budget and hacker-and-maker mentality and by leveraging more inexpensive technology alternatives, we implement a tool that does laser fault injection, can detect hardware malware, detect supply chain chip replacements, and delve into the realm of laser logic state imaging.