The testing involved creating a fake network card that interacted with operating systems the same way as a real one. "This state of affairs is not good, and our investigations revealed significant further vulnerabilities even when the IOMMU is enabled," according to the researchers.
The enterprise version of Windows 10 "can optionally use it, but in a very limited way that leaves most of the system undefended," they write. The Home and Pro versions of Windows 7, 8 and 10 don't support it. Linus and FreeBSD support it, but it is not enabled by default.
To guard against malicious access, the Input-Output Memory Management Unit, or IOMMU, acts as a gatekeeper for access to the memory.īut the researchers found most systems don't use IOMMU out of the box except for MacOS. In contrast to regular USB ports, USB-C ports have higher privileges and low-level access to a device.
Theodore Markettos, Colin Rothwell, Brett F. The research paper from the University of Cambridge, Rice University and SRI International was presented on Tuesday at the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium in San Diego. "The combination of power, video and peripheral-device DMA over Thunderbolt 3 ports facilitates the creation of malicious charging stations or displays that function correctly but simultaneously take control of connected machines," the researchers write. Stealing data this way would require physical access to a device. The research also covered PCI Express, or PCIe, an older set of device connection and data transfer protocols. Although operating systems are supposed to only allow a peripheral to have direct memory access for the resources it needs, researchers found that this defense isn't implemented effectively to prevent data theft. The work focused on the Thunderbolt 3 data transfer standard over USB Type-C connectors.
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