Persistent, Stealthy, Remote-controlled Dedicated Hardware Malware

Patrick Stewin

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In this work we present a stealthy malware that exploits dedicated hardware on the target system and remains persistant across boot cycles. The malware is capable of gathering valuable information such as passwords. Because the infected hardware can perform arbitrary main memory accesses, the malware can modify kernel data structures and escalate privileges of processes executed on the system.

The malware itself is a DMA malware implementation referred to as DAGGER. DAGGER exploits Intel’s Manageability Engine (ME), that executes firmware code such as Intel’s Active Management Technology (iAMT), as well as its OOB network channel. We have recently improved DAGGER’s capabilites to include support for 64-bit operating systems and a stealthy update mechanism to download new attack code.