A hijacker’s guide to communication interfaces of the trusted platform module

In this paper, we analyze the communication of trusted platform modules and their interface to the hosting platforms. While trusted platform modules are considered to be tamper resistant, the communication channel between these modules and the rest of the trusted platform turns out to be comparatively insecure. It has been shown that passive attacks can be mounted against TPMs and their bus communication with fairly inexpensive equipment, however, similar active attacks have not been reported, yet. We pursue the idea of an active attack and show how the communication protocol of the LPC bus can be actively manipulated with basic and inexpensive equipment. Moreover, we show how our manipulations can be used to circumvent the security mechanisms, e.g. the chain of trust, provided by modern trusted platforms. In addition, we demonstrate how the proposed attack can be extended to manipulate communication buses on embedded systems.