Top 10 Secure Boot Mistakes
summary
Top ten failure modes in secure boot appear as concrete, reproducible flaws: missing signature checks for headers and pointers, insecure firmware-update paths with buffer overflows and mis-stitched chunks, recovery drivers exposing parsers to fuzzable bugs, and time-of-check time-of-use race between signature verification and execution (external flash address flip via a button). Practical attacks include fault injection to flip authentication branch, reused ECDSA nonce leaking private keys, leaked debug backdoors, uncleared key slots, and absent anti-rollback.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Introduction to Secure Boot
- 5:21Verification Mistakes in Boot Chains
- 8:19Firmware Update Mechanism Flaws
- 10:25Chunked Firmware Verification Risks
- 11:59Anti-Rollback Bypass Attacks
- 12:20Driver and Parser Vulnerabilities
- 13:42External Flash Exploitation
- 16:12Time-of-Check Time-of-Use Issues
- 17:43Timing Attacks on HMAC Verification
- 21:42Fault Injection via Glitching
- 25:17Persistent Attacks via Fault Injection
- 26:46Sleep State Tampering Risks
- 28:35Fault Injection via EMP Pulses
- 29:59Debugging Interfaces as Backdoors
- 31:52Disabling Debugging Safely
- 33:19Key Table Manipulation Attacks
- 35:03Crypto Engine Sanitization
- 36:09Misusing Cryptography Wrongly
- 38:47ECDSA Nonce Reuse Vulnerabilities
- 39:09Secure Boot Challenges Summary
- 40:12Q&A Session
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