32C3: Beyond Your Cable Modem

December 29, 2015 by Elliot Williams 20 Comments

[Alexander Graf] gave an absolutely hilarious talk at 32C3 about the security flaws he found in cable modems from two large German ISPs. The vulnerability was very serious, resulting in remote root terminals on essentially any affected cable modem, and the causes were trivial: unencrypted passwords in files that are sent over TFTP or Telnet to the modems, for instance.

While [Alexander] was very careful to point out that he’d disclosed all of these vulnerabilities to the two German cable ISPs that were affected, he notably praised one of them for its speedy response in patching up the holes. As for the other? “They’d better hurry up.” He also mentions that, although he’s not sure, he suspects that similar vulnerabilities are present in other countries. Oh dear.

A very interesting point in the talk is the way that [Alexander] chose to go about informing the cable ISPs. Instead of going to them directly and potentially landing himself in jail, he instead went to the press, and let his contacts at the press talk to the ISPs. This both shielded him from the potential initial heat and puts a bit of additional pressure on the ISPs to fix the vulnerability — when the story hits the front page, they would really like to be ahead of the problem.

There’s even a bone for you die-hard hardware hackers out there who think that all of this software security stuff is silly. To get the modem’s firmware in the first place, at minute 42 of the talk, [Alexander] shows briefly how he pulled the flash chip off the device and read it into his computer using a BeagleBone Black. No JTAG, no nothing. Just pulling the chip off and reading it the old-fashioned way.

If you’ve got an hour, go watch [Alexander]’s talk. It’s a fun romp through some serious vulnerabilities.

Capture The Flag With Lightsabers

December 15, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 2 Comments

There’s a great game of capture-the-flag that takes place every year at HITCON. This isn’t your childhood neighborhood’s capture-the-flag in the woods with real flags, though. In this game the flags are on secured servers and it’s the other team’s mission to break into the servers in whatever way they can to capture the flag. This year, though, the creators of the game devised a new scoreboard for keeping track of the game: a lightsaber.

In this particular game, each team has a server that they have to defend. At the same time, each team attempts to gain access to the other’s server. This project uses a lightsaber stand that turns the lightsabers into scoreboards for the competition at the 2015 Hacks In Taiwan Conference. It uses a cheap OpenWRT Linux Wi-Fi/Ethernet development board, LinkIt Smart 7688 which communicates with a server. Whenever a point is scored, the lightsaber illuminates and a sound effect is played. The lightsabers themselves are sourced from a Taiwanese lightsabersmith and are impressive pieces of technology on their own. As a bonus the teams will get to take them home with them.

While we doubt that this is more forced product integration advertisement from Disney, it certainly fits in with the theme of the game. Capture-the-flag contests like this are great ways to learn about cyber security and how to defend your own equipment from real-world attacks. There are other games going on all around the world if you’re looking to get in on the action.

Continue reading “Capture The Flag With Lightsabers” →

DEF CON Vs IoT: On Hackability And Security

August 10, 2015 by Elliot Williams 16 Comments

Ahh DEF CON! One group of hackers shows off how they’ve broken into all sorts of cool devices and other hackers (ahem… “security professionals”) lament the fact that the first group were able to do so. For every joyous “we rooted the Nest thermostat, now we can have fun” there’s a doom-mongering “the security of network-connected IoT devices is totally broken!”.

And like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, these two sides of the hacker persona can coexist within the same individual. At Hackaday, we’re totally ~~paranoid~~ security conscious, but we also like to tinker with stuff. We believe that openness and security are best friends forever. If you can open it, you can see if it’s well-made inside, at least in principle. How do we reconcile this with the security professional’s demand for devices that only accept signed binary firmware updates so that they can’t be tampered with?

We’ve got no answers, but we’ve got plenty of questions. Read on, and let us know what you think.

Continue reading “DEF CON Vs IoT: On Hackability And Security” →

Fooling Google Search Console With Tricky PHP

July 17, 2015 by Rick Osgood 42 Comments

When [Steve] received a notice from Google that a new owner had been added to his Google Search Console account, he knew something was wrong. He hadn’t added anyone to his account. At first he thought it might be a clever phishing tactic. Maybe the email was trying to get him to click a malicious link. Upon further investigation, he discovered that it was legitimate. Some strange email address had been added to his account. How did this happen?

When you want to add a website to Google’s services, they require that you prove that you own the actual website as a security precaution. One method to provide proof is by uploading or creating an HTML file to your website with some specific text inside. In this case, the file needed to be called “google1a74e5bf969ded17.html” and it needed to contain the string “google-site-verification: googlea174e5bf969ded17.html”.

[Steve] logged into his web server and looked in the website directory but he couldn’t find the verification file. Out of curiosity, he tried visiting the web page anyways and was surprised to find that it worked. After some experimentation, [Steve] learned that if he tried to load any web page that looked like “googleNNNNNNN.html”, he would be presented with the corresponding verification code of “google-site-verification: googleNNNNNNNN.html”. Something was automatically generating these pages.

After further investigation, [Steve] found that some malicious PHP code had been added to his website’s index.php page. Unfortunately the code was obfuscated, so he couldn’t determine exactly what was happening. After removing the new code from the index.php file, [Steve] was able to remove the hacker’s email address from [Steve’s] Google account.

This is a very interesting hack, because not only did it allow this one hacker to add himself to [Steve’s] Google account, but it would also have allowed anyone else to do the same thing. This is because each new hacker would have been able to fool Google’s servers into thinking that they had uploaded the verification file thanks to the malicious PHP code. It makes us think that perhaps Google’s verification system should use a separate randomized string inside of the verification file. Perhaps one that can’t be guessed or calculated based on known variables such as the file name.

Hacking A Thin Client To Gain Root Access

April 29, 2015 by Rick Osgood 15 Comments

[Roberto] recently discovered a clever way to gain root access to an HP t520 thin client computer. These computers run HP’s ThinPro operating system. The OS is based on Linux and is basically just a lightweight system designed to boot into a virtual desktop image loaded from a server. [Roberto’s] discovery works on systems that are running in “kiosk mode”.

The setup for the attack is incredibly simple. The attacker first stops the virtual desktop image from loading. Then, the connection settings are edited. The host field is filled with garbage, which will prevent the connection from actually working properly. The real trick is in the “command line arguments” field. The attacker simply needs to add the argument “&& xterm”. When the connection is launched, it will first fail and then launch the xterm program. This gives the attacker a command shell running under the context of whichever user the original software is running as.

The next step is to escalate privileges to root. [Roberto] discovered a special command that the default user can run as root using sudo. The “”hpobl” command launches the HP Easy Setup Wizard. Once the wizard is opened, the attacker clicks on the “Thank You” link, which will then load up the HP website in a version of Firefox. The final step is to edit Firefox’s default email program association to xterm. Now when the attacker visits an address like “mailto:test@test.com”, Firefox (running as root) launches xterm with full root privileges. These types of attacks are nothing new, but it’s interesting to see that they still persist even in newer software.

Race Conditions Exploit Granted Free Money On Web Services

April 29, 2015 by Rick Osgood 10 Comments

[Josip] has been playing around with race conditions on web interfaces lately, finding vulnerabilities on both Facebook and Digital Ocean. A race condition can occur when a piece of software processes multiple threads using a shared resource.

For example, [Josip] discovered that he was able to manipulate page reviews using just a single Facebook account. Normally, a user is permitted to leave just one review for any given Facebook page. This prevents a single user from being able to skew the page’s overall ranking by making a bunch of positive or negative reviews. The trick to manipulating the system was to intercept the HTTP request that submitted the page review. The request was then replayed over and over in a very short amount of time.

Facebook’s servers ended up processing some of these requests simultaneously, essentially unaware that multiple requests had come in so close together. The result was that multiple reviews were submitted, artificially changing the pages overall ranking even though only one review actually showed up on the page for this user. The user can then delete their single review, and repeat this cycle over and over. It took Facebook approximately two months to fix this vulnerability, but in the end it was fixed and [Josip] received a nice bounty.

The Digital Ocean hack was essentially the exact same process. This time instead of hacking page reviews, [Josip] went after some free money. He found that he was able to submit the same promotional code multiple times, resulting in a hefty discount at checkout time. Digital Ocean wasted no time fixing this bug, repairing it within just ten days of the disclosure.

Bypassing The Windows Lock Screen

February 28, 2015 by Rick Osgood 87 Comments

Most of us know that we should lock our computers when we step away from them. This will prevent any unauthorized users from gaining access to our files. Most companies have some sort of policy in regards to this, and many even automatically lock the screen after a set amount of time with no activity. In some cases, the computers are configured to lock and display a screen saver. In these cases, it may be possible for a local attacker to bypass the lock screen.

[Adrian] explains that the screen saver is configured via a registry key. The key contains the path to a .scr file, which will be played by the Adobe Flash Player when the screen saver is activated. When the victim locks their screen and steps away from the computer, an attacker can swoop in and defeat the lock screen with a few mouse clicks.

First the attacker will right-click anywhere on the screen. This opens a small menu. The attacker can then choose the “Global settings” menu option. From there, the attacker will click on “Advanced – Trusted Location Settings – Add – Add File”. This opens up the standard windows “Open” dialog that allows you to choose a file. All that is required at this point is to right-click on any folder and choose “Open in a new window”. This causes the folder to be opened in a normal Windows Explorer window, and from there it’s game over. This window can be used to open files and execute programs, all while the screen is still locked.

[Adrian] explains that the only remediation method he knows of is to modify the code in the .swf file to disable the right-click menu. The only other option is to completely disable the flash screen saver. This may be the safest option since the screen saver is most likely unnecessary.

Update: Thanks [Ryan] for pointing out some mistakes in our post. This exploit specifically targets screensavers that are flash-based, compiled into a .exe file, and then renamed with the .scr extension. The OP mentions these are most often used in corporate environments. The exploit doesn’t exist in the stock screensaver.