The hard problem of hardware attacks

By now, we’re all alert to the dangers that can lurk within even the most innocuous-seeming software. But what about hardware? As the dongles and cords for our devices proliferate and their capa­bil­i­ties increase, their attrac­tive­ness as attack vectors does as well. Recently, DCVC portfolio company Lumafield used its Neptune CT scanner to give a 3‑D peek inside a partic­u­larly devilish device called the O.MG cable.

Developed by veteran security researcher and red teamer Mike Grover (better known as MG), the cord has the appearance and function of the cheap USB‑C cables that many use every day to power our devices and share data between them. But built into the O.MG are active electronics that can be used to hack into any computer they’re inserted into, logging the user’s keystrokes to harvest passwords or injecting its own keystrokes to take over the machine.

A 2D scan might spot some of O.MG’s features, such as its micro­con­troller and antenna. But it was only with Lumafield’s 3D capa­bil­i­ties that the O.MG device’s subtlest and most dangerous features were revealed, such as the hidden second die stacked on top of the main chip in its microcontroller.

Lumafield’s affordable and office-friendly Neptune scanner is just one piece of its CT scanning platform, which also includes Voyager, its cloud-based software for analyzing industrial CT scans, as well as the production-ready Triton, now equipped with Ultra-Fast CT that can perform automated inspections on the factory floor in a tenth of a second — a 100x speedup over conven­tional CT scanning.

“Offensive” hardware is not merely hypo­thet­ical. Hidden threats inserted into devices that then enter the supply chain have already been seen in the real world, most dramat­i­cally in the case of Israel and its exploding pager attack on Hezbollah. And as Lumafield’s Head of Marketing, Jon Bruner, pointed out on X, ​“as complex, active electronics make their way into corners of our lives that were previously dumb, the surface area for attacks becomes larger.” And so too does the need for the type of hardware vigilance made possible by Lumafield’s expanding suite of CT-scanning tools.