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Week 3: Attackers can use sonic and ultrasonic methods to attack hard drives!

This is an interesting bit of information that I found that was posted this previous wednesday and I thought it was very intriguing. While most of the articles I read are less hardware and more software/firmware focused it was a nice change of pace to see an article focused on a hardware issue that has arisen. According to the article, computer scientists have discovered that "...sonic and ultrasonic signals (inaudible to human) can be used to cause physical damage to hard drives just by playing ultrasonic sounds through a target computer's own built-in speaker or by exploiting a speaker near the targeted device." 

 This is an interesting development as it wasn't something that I had thought could happen. Hard drives normally have protection features against outside interference such as vibrations, but according to the article, "To prevent a head crash from acoustic resonance, modern HDDs use shock sensor-driven feedforward controllers that detect such movement and improve the head positioning accuracy while reading and writing the data.

However, according to a new research paper published by a team of researchers from the University of Michigan and Zhejiang University, sonic and ultrasonic sounds causes false positives in the shock sensor, causing a drive to unnecessarily park its head." I.E. it will damage or destroy it's own platters accidentally when trying to prevent such a thing from happening.

 If it isn't immediately obvious, this sort of attack works against traditional platter based HDD, and since SSD do not have any moving parts, this would not be effective against them.

https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/hard-drive-failure-hack.html

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