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This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.

Stop Bad Laws Before They Start

July 25, 2020 by 88 Comments

With everything else going on this summer, you might be forgiven for not keeping abreast of new proposed regulatory frameworks, but if you’re interested in software-defined radio (SDR) or even reflashing your WiFi router, you should. Right now, there’s a proposal to essentially prevent you from flashing your own firmware/software to any product with a radio in it before the European Commission. This obviously matters to Europeans, but because manufacturers often build hardware to the strictest global requirements, it may impact everyone. What counts as radio equipment? Everything from WiFi routers to wearables, SDR dongles to shortwave radios.

The idea is to prevent rogue reconfigurable radios from talking over each other, and prevent consumers from bricking their routers and radios. Before SDR was the norm, and firmware was king, it was easy for regulators to test some hardware and make sure that it’s compliant, but now that anyone can re-flash firmware, how can they be sure that a radio is conformant? Prevent the user from running their own firmware, naturally. It’s pretty hard for Hackaday to get behind that approach.

The impact assessment sounds more like advertising copy for the proposed ruling than an honest assessment, but you should give it a read because it lets you know where the commission is coming from. Reassuring is that they mention open-source software development explicitly as a good to be preserved, but their “likely social impacts” include “increased security and safety” and they conclude that there are no negative environmental impacts. What do you do when the manufacturer no longer wants to support the device? I have plenty of gear that’s no longer supported by firmware updates that is both more secure and simply not in the landfill because of open-source firmware.

Similarly, “the increased capacity of the EU to autonomously secure its products is also likely to help the citizens to better protect their information-related rights” is from a bizarro world where you can trust Xiaomi’s home-automation firmware to not phone home, but can’t trust an open-source replacement.

Public comment is still open, and isn’t limited to European citizens. As mentioned above, it might affect you even if you’re not in the EU, so feel free to make your voice heard. You have until September, and you’ll be in some great company if you register your complaints. Indeed, reading through the public comments is quite heartening: Universities, researchers, and hackers alike have brought up reasons to steer clear of the proposed approach. We hope that the commission hears us.

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Hands-On: The Pandemic DEF CON Badge Is An Audio Cassette

July 24, 2020 by 29 Comments

My DEF CON Safe Mode badge just arrived in the mail this afternoon. The Vegas-based conference which normally hosts around 30,000 attendees every year has moved online in response to the global pandemic, and the virtual event spins up August 6-9. Known for creative badges, North America’s most well-known infosec con has a tick-tock cycle that alternates electronic and non-electronic badges from year to year. During this off-year, the badge is an obscure deprecated media: the audio cassette.

This choice harkens back to the DEF CON 23 badge which was an vinyl record — I have the same problem I did back in 2015… I lack access to playback this archaic medium. Luckily [Grifter] pointed everyone to a dump of the audio contents over at Internet Archive, although knowing how competitive the badge hacking for DEF CON is, I’m skeptical about the reliability of these files. Your best bet is to pull the dust cover off your ’88 Camry and let your own cassette roll in the tape deck. I also wonder if there are different versions of the tape.

But enough speculation, let’s look at what physically comes with the DEF CON 28 badge.

Continue reading “Hands-On: The Pandemic DEF CON Badge Is An Audio Cassette” →

Hackaday Podcast 077: Secret Life Of SD Cards, Mining Minecraft’s Secret Seed, BadPower Is Bad, And Sailing A Sea Of Neon

July 24, 2020 by 3 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are deep in the hacks this week. What if making your own display matrix meant a microcontroller board for every pixel? That’s the gist of this incredible neon display. There’s a lot of dark art poured into the slivers of microSD cards and this week saw multiple hacks digging into the hidden test pads of these devices. You’ve heard of Folding@Home, but what about Minecraft@Home, the effort to find world seeds from screenshots. And when USB chargers have exposed and rewritable firmware, what could possibly go wrong?

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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This Week In Security: Iran’s ITG18, ProcMon For Linux, And Garbage Collection Fail

July 24, 2020 by 4 Comments

Even top-tier security professionals make catastrophic mistakes, and this time it was the operators at Iran’s ITG18. We’re once again talking about the strange shadowy world of state sponsored hacking. This story comes from the IBM X-Force Incident Response Intelligence Services (IRIS). I suspect a Deadpool fan must work at IBM, but that’s beside the point.

A server suspected to be used by ITG18 was incorrectly configured, and when data and training videos were stored there, that data was publicly accessible. Among the captured data was records of compromised accounts belonging to US and Greek military personnel.

The training videos also contained a few interesting tidbits. If a targeted account used two factor authentication, the attacker was to make a note and give up on gaining access to that account. If a Google account was breached, the practice was to start with Google Takeout, the service from Google that allows downloading all the data Google has collected related to that account. Yoiks. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Iran’s ITG18, ProcMon For Linux, And Garbage Collection Fail” →

Hands-On: Wireless Login With The New Mooltipass Mini BLE Secure Password Keeper

July 23, 2020 by 34 Comments

Remembering passwords is one of those things which one just cannot seem to escape. At the very least, we all need to remember a single password: namely the one for unlocking a password manager. These password managers come in a wide variety of forms and shapes, from software programs to little devices which one carries with them. The Mooltipass Mini BLE falls into the latter category: it is small enough to comfortably fit in a hand or pocket, yet capable of remembering all of your passwords.

Heading into its crowdfunding campaign, the Mooltipass Mini BLE is an evolution of the Mooltipass Mini device, which acts as a USB keyboard by default, entering log-in credentials for you. With the required browser extension installed, this process can also be automated when browsing to a known website. Any new credentials can also be saved automatically this way.

Where the Mooltipass Mini BLE differs from the original is in that it also adds a Bluetooth (BLE) mode, enabling it to be used easily with any BLE-capable device, including laptops and smartphones, without having to dig around for a USB cable and/or OTG adapter.

I have already been using the original Mooltipass Mini for a while, and the Mooltipass team was kind enough to send me a prototype Mooltipass Mini BLE for evaluation and comparison. Let’s take a look.

Continue reading “Hands-On: Wireless Login With The New Mooltipass Mini BLE Secure Password Keeper” →

Linux Fu: Keep In Sync

July 23, 2020 by 28 Comments

Once upon a time, computers were very expensive and you were lucky to have shared access to one computer. While that might seem to be a problem, it did have one big advantage: all of your files were on that computer.

Today, we all probably have at least a desktop and one laptop. Your phone is probably a pretty good computer by most standards. You might have multiple computers and a smattering of tablets. So what do you do to keep your files accessible everywhere? Why not run your own peer-to-peer synchronization service? Your files are always under your control and encrypted in motion. There’s no central point of failure. You can do it with one very slick piece of Open Source software called syncthing. It runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, and Solaris. There are also Android clients. We haven’t tested it, but one caveat is that the unofficial iOS support sounds a little spotty.

The joke about the cloud — that it’s just other people’s servers — is on point here. Some people don’t like their files sitting on a third-party server. Even if your files are encrypted or you don’t care, you still have the problem of what happens if you can’t reach the server — may be on an airplane with no WiFi — or the server goes down. Sure, Google and Microsoft don’t go dark very often, but they can and do. Even if you build your own cloud, it runs on your servers. Syncthing is serverless: it simply makes sure that all files are up-to-date on all your end devices. Continue reading “Linux Fu: Keep In Sync” →

Beyond Printf(): Better Logging Practices For Faster Debugging

July 21, 2020 by 27 Comments

All of us who do some programming know that logging is a time-tested way to output messages about the internal state of our code. With varying degrees of adjustable granularity, these messages allow us to keep track of not only the state of the application, but also its overall health. When things do end up going FUBAR, these log messages are usually the first thing we look at as a software equivalent of a Flight Data Recorder in an airplane.

Spending some time and care in not only designing the logging system, but also in deciding what should be logged and at what level, can make our future self appreciate life a lot more. We’re all familiar with the practice of ‘printf-debugging’, where logging is added as part of the usual post-crash autopsy as one tries to figure out what exactly went wrong. It’s one way of doing it, and eventually it works, but we can do much better.

People are lazy, and you’re only going to stick to good logging practices if they are at least as easy if not easier than sprinkling printf() statement throughout the code. Yet at the same time we want to be able to handle things like log levels and newlines without too much extra typing. The most successful logging libraries are built with this

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