DEF CON 33 - ReVault! Compromised by your Secure SoC - Philippe Laulheret
Source: YouTube · DEFCONConference · published Oct 10, 2025 · 42:00
Control Vault, Dell's secure chip in millions of laptops, contains critical vulnerabilities allowing attackers to compromise firmware, bypass authentication, and gain system privileges.
Key Takeaways:
• Control Vault handles fingerprint/NFC/smart card readers in Dell laptops with no public documentation.
• Firmware lacks basic protections like ASLR and stack cookies, making exploitation easier.
• Multiple vulnerabilities enable code execution, key leaking, and persistent firmware modification.
• Attackers can bypass fingerprint auth by making firmware always approve verification attempts.
• Exploits can escalate to system-level privileges in Windows via malicious firmware responses.
This research highlights firmware security risks in undocumented components widely deployed systems.
Sources:
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First 800 characters of the transcript
I'd like to introduce uh Phipe who's going to be talking to us about um secure systems on a chip systems. Um and I'm really excited for this talk and I hope you are too. Phipe, >> thank you. >> Hi everyone. [Applause] So uh yeah, so today I'm going to talk about free vault and how you can get compromised by uh your secure system on ship. So uh hi, I'm Philip Lorett. I'm a senior v researcher at Cisco Talos. I focus on Windows uh embedded systems and basically what I do is to look for uh vulnerabilities in third party software and we find stuff we we report the stuff to the vendors and when everything is fixed we know we publish reports and you know publish the research as I'm doing today so uh that's what is that's what it is about uh what can you expect from today's presentation um it's a…