This Week In Security: More State-Sponsored Activity, Spring4Shell

April 1, 2022 by 4 Comments

[Editor’s note: There is a second, fake iteration of this column out today. This is obviously the real column.]

An alert from CISA, combined with an unsealed pair of indictments, sheds some new light on how Russian hackers pursue high-value targets. The key malware here is Triton, essentially a rootkit designed for the Tricon safety systems, widely deployed at refineries and other infrastructure facilities. One of the early deployments of this was to a Saudi oil plant in 2017. This deployment seems to have been botched, as it caused malfunctions and shut the plant down for about a week.

The new information is confirmation that the same operators, out of the “Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics”, attempted to target US facilities with the same campaign. The Wired coverage initially struck me as odd, as it detailed how these Russian attackers researched US refineries, looking for the most promising targets. How exactly did US intelligence agencies know about the research habits of agents in Russia? The details of the indictment has the answer: They were researching US refineries by downloading papers from the US Department of Energy. As the IP addresses of this Russian research group is known and tracked, it was easy enough for US agencies to make the connection.

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This WeeΚ In Security: Hackerman, Twitter’s Best, And Signs To Watch Out For

April 1, 2022 by 6 Comments

[Editor’s note: There is a second, fake iteration of this column out today. This is obviously the real column.]

First off, there’s an amazing video tutorial from [Hackerman], embedded below the break. It’s a beginners guide to temporal displacement through GPU accelerated, cellular-connected partition board. The central flaw that makes this possible is a segmentation violation, accessible through a mode 6 cursor address reset. Watch out, though, because many mainframes actually have a core terminal capable of shutting such an attempt out of the grid altogether.

It’s a great guide, and definitely worth a watch if temporal security tickles your fancy. Watch out, though, because everyday objects can apparently act as bridges, infecting even users with temporal effects.

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An M-Core module plugged into its devboard. Around it are Ethernet, HDMI, Type-C, two USB-A ports, one MicroSD card socket and one unpopulated footprint for a WiFi module

MangoPi To Bring A SD-Card-Sized Linux Module

April 1, 2022 by 14 Comments

Today’s Diminutive Device is a small castellated System-On-Module (Twitter link, nitter proxy) from [MangoPi] called M-Core, with a quad-core A53 CPU and 1 GB of RAM. As such, it’s very capable of running Linux, and even sports an HDMI output! Taking a closer look at the devboard picture, we can spot traces for three USB 2.0 ports, what seems to be two SDIO interfaces for MicroSD or WiFi cards, and an Ethernet MagJack with its termination network. This is a decent set of interfaces, rivaling what we’d expect out of a Pi Zero!

More importantly, this module is as small as an SD card itself – or as an OLED display that we hobbyists sprinkle onto our projects. Having power of Linux in such a small footprint is certainly something to behold! The back of the module is mostly flat, save for a few decoupling capacitors on the other side of the CPU – it seems, an Allwinner H616. On top of it, we can see the CPU itself, a small buck regulator and a DDR3 RAM chip, as well as tightly-packed passives. There’s even an unpopulated footprint for a DFN8 QSPI flash chip – with a lightweight enough OS build, you could perhaps dedicate your MicroSD card to storage only.

The devboard for uses the “FlexyPins”-like connectivity technique we’ve covered recently, and [MangoPi] say they bought those pins on TaoBao. We can’t help but be a bit amused at the thought of putting HDMI through such connections, but it seems to work well enough! Castellated modules like these are relatively easy to work with, so it shouldn’t be hard to literally pop this module out of the devboard and figuratively pop it onto your PCB. Next step is, reportedly, porting Armbian to this board, likely solving quite a few software support hurdles.

MangoPi have been posting updates on their Twitter page over the last few weeks, and, as it comes with the format, a lot of questions are left unanswered. Why does the devboard only show a single linear regulator of the kind we typically expect to deliver 1 A at most? Will we get higher-RAM versions? What’s the price going to look like? Will this module ever get to market? We can only hope, but if it does indeed, we are sure to see a few projects with these, whether it’s smart glasses, smart displays, phones, handhelds or malicious wall chargers. As usual, community makes or breaks an SBC, and we shall watch this one closely.

We thank [WifiCable] and [DjBiohazard] for sharing this with us!

The Tracer board strapped to the frame of a bicycle with a red Velcro strap

Tracer, A Platform For All Things Movement Logging

April 1, 2022 by 2 Comments

[elektroThing] is building a lightweight, battery-powered board to track and measure movement of all kinds, called Tracer. Powered by an ESP32, it has a LSM6DSL 6DoF accelerometer & gyroscope sensor, and a VL53L0X Time-of-Flight sensor. A small Li-ion battery in a holder reportedly provides for 5 hours of streaming data over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) at 100 Hz. It’s essentially a wireless movement sensor platform to be paired with a more powerful computer for data logging and analysis. What’s such a platform good for?

They show it attached to a tennis racket, saying you could use the data to, for a start, count the strokes done in a given match. They’ve also strapped it to a bicycle’s crankshaft and used it as a cadence sensor – good for gauging your cycling efficiency! But of course, this can be used in more applications than sport. A device like this could be used for logging movement of any relatively nearby objects, be it your cat, an office chair, or a door someone might slam a bit too hard at times. Say, you wanted to develop a sleep tracker and were to collect some data for defining your algorithms and planning your hardware requirements – this would work wonders.

There’s already available example code for streaming data into the Phyphox data logging and graphing app, as well as schematics – hopefully, the full board files will be available soon. A worthy open-source opponent to commercial devices available for similar purposes, this platform is good news for any hacker that wants to do motion measurement projects without reinventing quite a few wheels at once. We are told this board might get to CrowdSupply soon, and we can’t wait! Platforms like these, if done well, can grow an offspring of new projects for us to have fun with, and our paid projects get all that much easier to work on.

We’ve shown projects with such sensors before – here’s one that helps your rifle aim by giving you data to debug your last-second rifle movements, and another that logs movement data from inside a football. There’s a million endpoints you could stream your data into, and we are told you could even use Google Sheets. Just a year ago, we held our Data Logging contest and the entries we received will surely point out quite a few under-explored areas in your daily life!

Watching A Spacewalk In Real Time

March 31, 2022 by 6 Comments

If you go to, say, a football game, you probably don’t get to see as much of the game as close as you do when you stay home and watch on TV. But there’s something about being there that counts. That’s probably how [Sebastian Voltmer] feels. While we’ve all seen video of astronauts and cosmonauts spacewalking, [Sebastian] managed to take a snapshot of a pair of spacewalkers from his telescope.

Of course, this wasn’t your ordinary department store Christmas gift telescope. The instrument was a Celestron 11 inch EdgeHD Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on a very expensive GM2000 HPS mount. An ASI290 planetary camera took the shot. You can see the gear and more about the photos in the video below.

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Texture Map GCode Directly In Blender With NozzleBoss

March 31, 2022 by 5 Comments

We’ve seen this funky dual disk polar printer already recently, but [Heinz Loepmeier] has been busy working on it, so here’s an update. The primary focus here is nozzleboss, a blender plugin which enables the surface textures of already sliced objects to be manipulated. The idea is to read in the gcode for the object, and convert it to an internal mesh representation that blender needs in order to function. From there the desired textures can be applied to the surfaces for subsequent stages to operate upon. One trick that nozzleboss can do is to create weight maps to tweak the extrusion flow rate or print velocity value according to the pixel value at the surface — such ‘velocity painting’ can produce some very subtle surface effects on previously featureless faces. Another trick is to use the same weight maps and simply map colours to blender text blocks which are injected into the gcode at export time. These gcode blocks can be used swap tool heads or extruders, enabling blending of multiple filament colours or types in the same object.

Some nice examples of such printing manipulation can be seen on [Heinz’s] instagram page for the project. So, going back to the hardware again, the first video embedded below shows the ‘dual disk polar printer’ fitted with a crazy five-extruders-into-one-nozzle mixing hotend setup, which should be capable of full CMYK colour mixing and some. The second video below shows an interesting by-product of the wide horizontal motion range of the machine, that the whole printing area can be shifted to a nozzle at the other end of the gantry. This enables a novel way to switch extruders, by just moving the whole bed and print under the nozzle of interest! One final observation — is that of the print surface — it does look rather like they’re printing direct onto a slab of marble, which I think is the first time we’ve seen that.

Interesting printer designs are being worked on a lot these days, here’s a really nice 5-axis prusa i3 hack, and if you want to stay in the cartesian world, but your desktop machine is just too small, then you can always supersize it.

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A vintage watch with a new PCB inside, next to a 3D rendered image of the PCB

Modern, Frugal PCB Breathes New Life Into Soviet-Made LED Watch

March 31, 2022 by 12 Comments

The first electronic digital watches were admired for their pioneering technology, if not their everyday practicality, when they were introduced in the 1970s. Their power-hungry LED displays lit up only when you pressed a button, and even then the numbers shown were tiny. Their cases were large and heavy, and they drained their batteries rather quickly even when not displaying the time. Still, the deep red glow of their displays gave them a certain aesthetic that’s hard to replicate with today’s technology.

A vintage LED watch displaying "16.42"
Pressing the top-right button enables those beautiful LED modules

When [Benjamin Sølberg] got his hands on an Elektronika-1, a first-generation digital watch designed in the Soviet Union, he set about designing a modern replacement for its internals. Where the original had several custom chips wire-bonded directly onto a substrate, the new board contains an MSP430 series microcontroller as well as an AS1115 display driver. The PCB makes contact with the watch’s pushbuttons through clever use of castellated holes.

For the display [Benjamin] went with period-correct LED modules made by HP, which keep the display’s appearance as close to the original as possible. While these draw quite a bit of current, the rest of the watch has become an order of magnitude more frugal: the stand-by time is now estimated to be about ten years, where the old design often needed new batteries within a year. [Benjamin] uses his renovated watch on a daily basis, apparently without trouble.

If you’ve got an old Soviet digital watch that you’d like to upgrade, you’ll be pleased to hear that the entire design is open source. Just like this retro watch, in fact, that uses a similar LED display. If you’re into original vintage watches, we’ve covered them in depth, too.