Author: Jonathan Bennett

442 Articles

This Week In Security: Footguns, Bing Worms, And Gogs

November 22, 2024 by 5 Comments

The world of security research is no stranger to the phenomenon of not-a-vulnerability. That’s where a security researcher finds something interesting, reports it to the project, and it turns out that it’s something other than a real security vulnerability. There are times that this just means a researcher got over-zealous on reporting, and didn’t really understand what was found. There is at least one other case, the footgun.

A footgun is a feature in a language, library, or tool that too easily leads to catastrophic mistake — shooting ones self in the foot. The main difference between a footgun and a vulnerability is that a footgun is intentional, and a vulnerability is not. That line is sometimes blurred, so an undocumented footgun could also be a vulnerability, and one possible solution is to properly document the quirk. But sometimes the footgun should really just be eliminated. And that’s what the article linked above is about. [Alex Leahu] takes a look at a handful of examples, which are not only educational, but also a good exercise in thinking through how to improve them.

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This Week In Security: Hardware Attacks, IoT Security, And More

November 15, 2024 by 9 Comments

This week starts off with examinations of a couple hardware attacks that you might have considered impractical. Take a Ball Grid Array (BGA) NAND removal attack, for instance. The idea is that a NAND chip might contain useful information in the form of firmware or hard-coded secrets.

The question is whether a BGA desolder job puts this sort of approach out of the reach of most attackers. Now, this is Hackaday. We regularly cover how our readers do BGA solder jobs, so it should come as no surprise to us that less than two-hundred Euro worth of tools, and a little know-how and bravery, was all it took to extract this chip. Plop it onto a pogo-pin equipped reader, use some sketchy Windows software, and boom you’ve got firmware.

What exactly to do with that firmware access is a little less straightforward. If the firmware is unencrypted and there’s not a cryptographic signature, then you can just modify the firmware. Many devices include signature checking at boot, so that limits the attack to finding vulnerabilities and searching for embedded secrets. And then worst case, some platforms use entirely encrypted firmware. That means there’s another challenge, of either recovering the key, or finding a weakness in the encryption scheme. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Hardware Attacks, IoT Security, And More” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 809: Pi4J – Stable And Boring On The Raspberry Pi

November 13, 2024 by No comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett and David Ruggles chat with Frank Delporte about Pi4J, the friendly Java libraries for the Raspberry Pi, that expose GPIO, SPI, I2C and other IO interfaces. Why would anyone want to use Java for the Pi? And what’s changed since the project started? Listen to find out!

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This Week In Security: Linux VMs, Real AI CVEs, And Backscatter TOR DoS

November 8, 2024 by 4 Comments

Steve Ballmer famously called Linux “viral”, with some not-entirely coherent complaints about the OS. In a hilarious instance of life imitating art, Windows machines are now getting attacked through malicious Linux VM images distributed through phishing emails.

This approach seems to be intended to fool any anti-malware software that may be running. The VM includes the chisel tool, described as “a fast TCP/UDP tunnel, transported over HTTP, secured via SSH”. Now that’s an interesting protocol stack. It’s an obvious advantage for an attacker to have a Linux VM right on a target network. As this sort of virtualization does require hardware virtualization, it might be worth disabling the virtualization extensions in BIOS if they aren’t needed on a particular machine.

AI Finds Real CVE

We’ve talked about some rather unfortunate use of AI, where aspiring security researchers asked an LLM to find vulnerabilities in a project like curl, and then completely wasted a maintainer’s time on those bogus reports. We happened to interview Daniel Stenberg on FLOSS Weekly this week, and after he recounted this story, we mused that there might be a real opportunity to use LLMs to find vulnerabilities, when used as a way to direct fuzzing, and when combined with a good test suite.

And now, we have Google Project Zero bringing news of their Big Sleep LLM project finding a real-world vulnerability in SQLite. This tool was previously called Project Naptime, and while it’s not strictly a fuzzer, it does share some similarities. The main one being that both tools take their educated guesses and run that data through the real program code, to positively verify that there is a problem. With this proof of concept demonstrated, it’s sure to be replicated. It seems inevitable that someone will next try to get an LLM to not only find the vulnerability, but also find an appropriate fix. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Linux VMs, Real AI CVEs, And Backscatter TOR DoS” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 808: Curl – Gotta Download ’em All

November 6, 2024 by 9 Comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Randal Schwartz chat with Daniel Stenberg about curl! How many curl installs are there?! What’s the deal with CVEs? How has curl managed to not break its ABI for 18 years straight? And how did Daniel turn all this into a career instead of just a hobby? Watch to find out!

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This Week In Security: Playing Tag, Hacking Cameras, And More

November 1, 2024 by 3 Comments

Wired has a fascinating story this week, about the length Sophos has gone to for the last 5 years, to track down a group of malicious but clever security researchers that were continually discovering vulnerabilities and then using those findings to attack real-world targets. Sophos believes this adversary to be overlapping Chinese groups known as APT31, APT41, and Volt Typhoon.

The story is actually refreshing in its honesty, with Sophos freely admitting that their products, and security products from multiple other vendors have been caught in the crosshairs of these attacks. And indeed, we’ve covered stories about these vulnerabilities over the past weeks and months right here on this column. The sneaky truth is that many of these security products actually have pretty severe security problems.

The issues at Sophos started with an infection of an informational computer at a subsidiary office. They believe this was an information gathering exercise, that was a precursor to the widespread campaign. That campaign used multiple 0-days to crack “tens of thousands of firewalls around the world”. Sophos rolled out fixes for those 0-days, and included just a bit of extra logging as an undocumented feature. That logging paid off, as Sophos’ team of researchers soon identified an early signal among the telemetry. This wasn’t merely the first device to be attacked, but was actually a test device used to develop the attack. The game was on. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Playing Tag, Hacking Cameras, And More” →