Is It A Boat? Is It A Hammock? No, It’s Both!

September 13, 2019 by 15 Comments

If you’re enjoying a Western Canadian summer, two of the best ways to do so involve a hammock, or a boat. Seeking to improve on this mighty duo with a hammock-boat combo, [Jarrett] describes his progress at Vancouver Hack Space.

The boat he chose was a one-person catamaran with an aluminium frame and what appear to be inflatable pontoons, while the hammock is one designed for a garden or patio with a steel tubular frame. A design goal was to not modify or destroy the structure of either item, so the challenge was to securely mount the two frames together. A variety of false starts involving bent steel or aluminium were tried, followed by a final success with the aluminium tubes reinforced with more tube inside them, and the hammock attached with U-bolts.

The testing took place on what appears to be a public lake, and the contraption floated well. When it had been pushed out to a landing stage our intrepid adventurer boarded the hammock —  and promptly the whole edifice tipped itself over, depositing him in the drink. Further experimentation revealed that balance was critical, and a revised position could achieve a stable boarding. He paddles off into the sunset as you can see in the video below the break, though as his friends remind him, without his beer.

Commercial hammocks are surprisingly expensive for what they are. Don’t worry though, if you find them to be beyond your budget you can always make a frame for one yourself.

Continue reading “Is It A Boat? Is It A Hammock? No, It’s Both!” →

This Week In Security: Simjacker, Microsoft Updates, Apple Vs Google, Audio DeepFakes, And NetCAT

September 13, 2019 by 20 Comments

We often think of SIM cards as simple data storage devices, but in reality a SIM card is a miniature Universal integrated circuit card, or smart card. Subscriber data isn’t a simple text string, but a program running on the smart cards tiny processor, acting as a hardware cryptographic token. The presence of this tiny processor in everyone’s cell phone was eventually put to use in the form of the Sim application ToolKit (STK), which allowed cell phone networks to add services to very basic cell phones, such as mobile banking and account management.

Legacy software running in a place most of us have forgotten about? Sounds like it’s ripe for exploitation. The researchers at Adaptive Mobile Security discovered that exploitation of SMS messages has been happening for quite some time. In an era of complicated and sophisticated attacks, Simjacker seems almost refreshingly simple. An execution environment included on many sim cards, the S@T Browser, can request data from the cell phone’s OS, and even send SMS messages. The attacker simply sends an SMS to this environment containing instructions to request the phones unique identifier and current GPS location, and send that information back in another SMS message.

It’s questionable whether there is actually an exploit here, as it seems the S@T Browser is just insecure by design. Either way, the fact that essentially anyone can track a cell phone simply by sending a special SMS message to that phone is quite a severe problem. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Simjacker, Microsoft Updates, Apple Vs Google, Audio DeepFakes, And NetCAT” →

Side-Channel Attack Shows Vulnerabilities Of Cryptocurrency Wallets

September 13, 2019 by 13 Comments

What’s in your crypto wallet? The simple answer should be fat stacks of Bitcoin or Ethereum and little more. But if you use a hardware cryptocurrency wallet, you may be carrying around a bit fat vulnerability, too.

At the 35C3 conference last year, [Thomas Roth], [Josh Datko], and [Dmitry Nedospasov] presented a side-channel attack on a hardware crypto wallet. The wallet in question is a Ledger Blue, a smartphone-sized device which seems to be discontinued by the manufacturer but is still available in the secondary market. The wallet sports a touch-screen interface for managing your crypto empire, and therein lies the weakness that these researchers exploited.

By using a HackRF SDR and a simple whip antenna, they found that the wallet radiated a distinctive and relatively strong signal at 169 MHz every time a virtual key was pressed to enter a PIN. Each burst started with a distinctive 11-bit data pattern; with the help of a logic analyzer, they determined that each packet contained the location of the key icon on the screen.

Next step: put together a training set. They rigged up a simple automatic button-masher using a servo and some 3D-printed parts, and captured signals from the SDR for 100 presses of each key. The raw data was massaged a bit to prepare it for TensorFlow, and the trained network proved accurate enough to give any hardware wallet user pause – especially since they captured the data from two meters away with relatively simple and concealable gear.

Every lock contains the information needed to defeat it, requiring only a motivated attacker with the right tools and knowledge. We’ve covered other side-channel attacks before; sadly, they’ll probably only get easier as technologies like SDR and machine learning rapidly advance.

[via RTL-SDR.com]

Steel Battalion Controller Grows Up And Gets A Job

September 13, 2019 by 13 Comments

We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that the controller for Steel Battalion on the original Xbox is the most impressive video game peripheral ever made. Designed to make players feel like they were really in the cockpit of a “Vertical Tank”, the controller features dual control sticks, three pedals, a gear selector, and dozens of buttons, switches, and knobs. Unfortunately, outside of playing Steel Battalion and its sequel, there’s not a whole lot you can do with the monstrous control deck.

HID Report Descriptor

But now, nearly 20 years after the game released, [Oscar Sebio Cajaraville] has not only developed an open source driver that will allow you to use the infamous mech controller on a modern Windows machine, but he’s part of the team developing a new game that can actually be played with it. Though gamers who are imagining piloting a futuristic combat robot in glorious 4K might be somewhat disappointed to find that this time around, the Steel Battalion controller is being used to operate a piece of construction equipment.

In his blog post, [Oscar] focuses on what it took to develop a modern Windows driver for a decades old controller. It helps that the original Xbox used what was essentially just a rewiring of USB 1.0 for its controllers, so connecting it up didn’t require any special hardware. Unfortunately, while the controller used USB to communicate with the console, it was not USB-HID compliant.

As it turns out, Microsoft actually provides an open source example driver that’s specifically designed to adapt non-HID USB devices into a proper game controller the system will recognize. This gave [Oscar] a perfect starting point, but he still needed to explore the controller’s endpoints and decode the data it was sending over the wire. This involved creating a HID Report Descriptor for the controller, a neat trick to file away mentally if you’ve ever got to talk to an oddball USB device.

In the end, [Oscar] created a driver that allows players to use the Steel Battalion controller in his game, BH Trials. Unfortunately there’s something of a catch, as drivers need to be signed by a trusted certification authority before Windows 10 will install them. As he can’t quite justify the expense of this step, he’s written a second post that details what’s required to turn driver signing off so you can get the device working.

Earlier this year we saw an incredible simulator built around the Steel Battalion controller, were an external “coach” could watch you play and give you tips on surviving the virtual battlefield. But even that project still used the original game; hopefully an open source driver that will get this peripheral working on Microsoft’s latest OS will help spur the development of even more impressive hacks.

Continue reading “Steel Battalion Controller Grows Up And Gets A Job” →

Wall-Mounted Ground Station Tames Unruly SatNOGS Node

September 12, 2019 by 8 Comments

For many of us, ad hoc projects end up having a certain permanence to them. Think of the number of Raspberry Pis and RTL-SDRs that are just dangling from a USB cable under a desk or stuffed behind a monitor, quietly going about their business. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Some projects, though, just end up accreting past the acceptable point. This wall-mounted SatNOGS ground station is a great example of what happens when something needs to be done about the mess. The pile of stuff that [cshields] had cobbled together over time for his ground station needed tidying, so he laid hands on a new Pi 4 and a cool enclosure/breadboard called a Stegoboard. This is just a piece of acrylic with a variety of holes laid out to match every imaginable PC board, hard drive, PC motherboard, Arduino, and just about anything out there that needs mounting. To contain the mess, he mounted the Pi and a 7″ touchscreen to the Stegoboard, along with an RTL-SDR and an Arduino to control his antenna rotator. The ground station wiring is still a little rough, but worlds better than what it was, and now that it’s mounted on the wall it’ll be much easier to use.

For those not familiar with SatNOGS, check out our article back from when the Satellite Network of Ground Stations won the 2014 Hackaday Prize. In the half-decade since then, SatNOGS has only grown, with a huge following of dedicated enthusiasts pointing their antennas at the sky. We know how to pick ’em, and we’ll be selecting the 2019 Hackaday Prize winner very soon.

Thanks to [elkos] for the tip.

Frequency Counting A Different Way

September 12, 2019 by 9 Comments

Counting frequency is one of those tasks that seems simple on the face of it, but actually has quite a bit of nuance. There are two obvious methods, of which the first is to count zero crossings for some period. If that period is one second you are done, otherwise it’s a simple enough case of doing the math. That is, if you count for half a second, multiply the result by 2, or if you count for 10 seconds, divide by 10. The other obvious method is to measure the period of a single cycle as accurately as you can. Then there’s this third method.from [WilkoL], which simultaneously counts a known reference clock alongside the frequency to be measured.  You can see the result in the video, below.

The first method is easy but the lower the frequency you want to measure, the longer you have to count to get any real resolution. Also, you need the time base to be exact. For the second method, you need to be able to make a highly precise measurement. The reason [WikolL] chose the third method is that it doesn’t require a very precise time base — a moderately accurate reference oscillator will do. The instrument gets good resolution quickly at both high and low frequencies.  Continue reading “Frequency Counting A Different Way” →

These Tips Make Assembling A Few Hundred PCBs Easier

September 12, 2019 by 7 Comments

There are a few common lessons that get repeated by anyone who takes on the task of assembling a few hundred PCBs, but there are also unique insights to be had. [DominoTree] shared his takeaways after making a couple hundred electronic badges for DEFCON 26 (that’s the one before the one that just wrapped up, if anyone’s keeping track.) [DominoTree] assembled over 200 Telephreak badges and by the end of it he had quite a list of improvements he wished he had made during the design phase.

Some tips are clearly sensible, such as adding proper debug and programming interfaces, or baking an efficient test cycle into the firmware. Others are not quite so obvious, for example “add a few holes to your board.” Holes can be useful in unexpected ways and cost essentially zero. Even if the board isn’t going to be mounted to anything, a few holes can provide a way to attach jigs or other hardware like test fixtures.

[DominoTree] ended up having to attach multiple jumper wires to reprogram boards after assembly, and assures us that “doing this a bunch of times really sucked.”
Other advice is more generic but no less important, as with “eliminate as many steps as possible.” Almost anything adds up to a significant chunk of time when repeated hundreds of times. To the basement hacker, something such as pre-cut and pre-tinned wires might seem like a shameful indulgence. But cutting, stripping, tinning, then hand-soldering a wire adds up to significant time and effort by iteration number four hundred (that’s two power wires per badge) even if one isn’t staring down a looming deadline.

[DominoTree] also followed up with additional advice on making assembly easier. Our own [Brian Benchoff] has also shared his observations on the experience of developing and assembling a large number of Hackaday Superconference badges, including what it took to keep things moving along when inevitable problems surfaced.

You don’t need to be making batches of hundreds for these lessons to pay off, so keep them in mind and practice them on your next project.