Monday, March 4th 2019
New "Thunderclap" Vulnerability Threatens to Infect Your PC Over Thunderbolt Peripherals
A new security vulnerability named "Thunderclap" severely compromises security of computers with USB type-C Thunderbolt ports, or machines with Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps) ports. This would be pretty much every MacBook released in the past two years, Macs, and PCs with certain aftermarket Thunderbolt 3 adapters. Chronicled in a paper by the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, Rice University and SRI International, is a method for Thunderbolt devices to bypass the host machine's IOMMU (I/O memory management unit), and read its main memory over DMA.
An IOMMU translates address-spaces between devices and main memory, and hence protects your memory's contents being read by just about any device. The group has detailed possible ways to mitigate this vulnerability, and forwarded these mitigations to Apple, Intel, and Microsoft. For now no public mitigation exists other than disabling the Thunderbolt controller of your machine in your motherboard's UEFI setup program.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
An IOMMU translates address-spaces between devices and main memory, and hence protects your memory's contents being read by just about any device. The group has detailed possible ways to mitigate this vulnerability, and forwarded these mitigations to Apple, Intel, and Microsoft. For now no public mitigation exists other than disabling the Thunderbolt controller of your machine in your motherboard's UEFI setup program.
14 Comments on New "Thunderclap" Vulnerability Threatens to Infect Your PC Over Thunderbolt Peripherals
This is really quite silly, as it's being blown out of proportion. Yes, be careful what you plug in, there are rouge devices, but this isn't nearly as bad as it's hyped up to be.
External interfaces with direct memory access is always trouble (but facilitates faster transfer)
That's the real concern with this.
Physical access and mailed materials. Be careful what you plug in. This isn't new.
Again, if you have local access to a device then that device is as good as p0wned.
The risk USB4 poses, thanks to Thunderbolt, far exceeds that of USB 3.2 and older.