Hackaday Columns

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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.

This Week In Security: Black Hat, DEF CON, And Patch Tuesday

August 16, 2019 by 11 Comments

Blackhat and DEF CON both just wrapped, and Patch Tuesday was this week. We have a bunch of stories to cover today.

First some light-hearted shenanigans. Obviously inspired by Little Bobby Tables, Droogie applied for the vanity plate “NULL”. A year went by without any problems, but soon enough it was time to renew his registration. The online registration form refused to acknowledge “NULL” as a valid license plate. The hilarity didn’t really start until he got a parking ticket, and received a bill for $12,000. It seems that the California parking ticket collection system can’t properly differentiate between “NULL” and a null value, and so every ticket without a license plate is now unintentionally linked to his plate.

In the comments on the Ars Technica article, it was suggested that “NULL” simply be added to the list of disallowed vanity plates. A savvy reader pointed out that the system that tracks disallowed plates would probably similarly choke on a “NULL” value.

Hacking an F-15

In a surprising move, Air Force officials brought samples of the Trusted Aircraft Information Download Station (TADS) from an F-15 to DEF CON. Researchers were apparently able to compromise those devices in a myriad of ways. This is a radical departure from the security-through-obscurity approach that has characterized the U.S. military for years.

Next year’s DEF CON involvement promises to be even better as the Air Force plans to bring researchers out to an actual aircraft, inviting them to compromise it in every way imaginable.

Patch Tuesday

Microsoft’s monthly dump of Windows security fixes landed this week, and it was a doozy. First up are a pair of remotely exploitable Remote Desktop vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-1222 and CVE-2019-1226. It’s been theorized that these bugs were found as part of an RDP code review launched in response to the BlueKeep vulnerability from earlier this year. The important difference here is that these bugs affect multiple versions of Windows, up to and including Windows 10.

What the CTF

Remember Tavis Ormandy and his Notepad attack? We finally have the rest of the story! Go read the whole thing, it’s a great tale of finding something strange, and then pulling it apart looking for vulnerabilities.

Microsoft Windows has a module, MSCTF, that is part of the Text Services Framework. What does the CTF acronym even stand for? That’s not clear. It seems that CTF is responsible for handling keyboard layouts, and translating keystrokes based on what keyboard type is selected. What is also clear is that every time an application builds a window, that application also connects to a CTF process. CTF has been a part of Microsoft’s code base since at least 2001, with relatively few code changes since then.

CTF doesn’t do any validation, so an attacker can connect to the CTF service and claim to be any process. Tavis discovered he could effectively attempt to call arbitrary function pointers of any program talking to the same CTF service. Due to some additional security measures built into modern Windows, the path to an actual compromise is rather convoluted, but by the end of the day, any CFT client can be compromised, including notepad.

The most interesting CFT client Tavis found was the login screen. The exploit he demos as part of the write-up is to lock the computer, and then compromise the login in order to spawn a process with system privileges.

The presence of this unknown service running on every Windows machine is just another reminder that operating systems should be open source.

Biostar 2

Biostar 2 is a centralized biometric access control system in use by thousands of organizations and many countries around the globe. A pair of Israeli security researchers discovered that the central database that controls the entire system was unencrypted and unsecured. 23 Gigabytes of security data was available, including over a million fingerprints. This data was stored in the clear, rather than properly hashed, so passwords and fingerprints were directly leaked as a result. This data seems to have been made available through an Elasticsearch instance that was directly exposed to the internet, and was found through port scanning.

If you have any exposure to Biostar 2 systems, you need to assume your data has been compromised. While passwords can be changed, fingerprints are forever. As biometric authentication becomes more widespread, this is an unexplored side effect.

Fail Of The Week: Supercapacitor Spot Welder

August 15, 2019 by 33 Comments

[Julian] needed to weld a bit of nickel to some steel and decided to use a spot welding technique. Of course he didn’t have a spot welder sitting around. Since these are fairly simple machines so [Julian] set out to build a spot welder using a charged supercapacitor. The fundamentals all seem to be there — the supercap is a 100 Farad unit and with a charge of 2.6V, that works out to over 300 joules — yet it simply doesn’t work.

The problem is in how the discharge energy is being directed. Just using the capacitor would cause the charge to flow out as a spark when you got near the point to discharge. To combat this, [Julian] put a microswitch between the capacitor and the copper point he expected to use as the welding tip. The microswitch, of course, is probably not the best for carrying a large surge of current, so we suspect that may be part of why he didn’t get great results.

The other thing we noticed is that he used a single point and used the workpiece as a ground return. Most spot welders use two points near each other or on each side of the workpiece. The current from the capacitor is probably just absorbed by the relatively large piece of metal.

The second video below from [American Tech] shows a 500F capacitor doing spot welding with little more than two wires and it seems to work. Hackaday’s own [Sean Boyce] even made one out of some whopping 3000F caps. It did work, although he’s been pursuing improvements.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: Supercapacitor Spot Welder” →

India Launched A Moon Orbiter, Lander, And Rover All In One Shot With Chandrayaan-2

August 14, 2019 by 62 Comments

On July 22nd, India launched an ambitious mission to simultaneously deliver an orbiter, lander, and rover to the Moon. Launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on a domestically-built GSLV Mk III rocket, Chandrayaan-2 is expected to enter lunar orbit on August 20th. If everything goes well, the mission’s lander module will touch down on September 7th.

Attempting a multifaceted mission of this nature is a bold move, but the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) does have the benefit of experience. The Chandrayaan-1 mission, launched in 2008, spent nearly a year operating in lunar orbit. That mission also included the so-called Moon Impact Probe (MIP), which deliberately crashed into the surface near the Shackleton crater. The MIP wasn’t designed to survive the impact, but it still secured India a position on the short list of countries that have placed an object on the lunar surface.

If the lander component of Chandrayaan-2, named Vikram after Indian space pioneer Vikram Sarabhai, can safely touch down on the lunar surface it will be a historic accomplishment for the ISRO. To date, the only countries to perform a controlled landing on the Moon are the Soviet Union, the United States, and China. Earlier in the year, it seemed Israel would secure its position as the fourth country to perform the feat with their Beresheet spacecraft, but a last second fault caused the craft to crash into the surface. The loss of Beresheet, while unfortunate, has given India an unexpected chance to take the coveted fourth position despite Israel’s head start.

We have a few months before the big event, but so far, everything has gone according to plan for Chandrayaan-2. As we await word that the spacecraft has successfully entered orbit around the Moon, let’s take a closer look at how this ambitious mission is supposed to work.

Continue reading “India Launched A Moon Orbiter, Lander, And Rover All In One Shot With Chandrayaan-2” →

Retrotechtacular: Predictions That Just Missed It

August 13, 2019 by 40 Comments

Few occupations are more fraught with peril than predicting the future. If you are a science fiction author, it might not matter, but if you are trying to design the next game-changing piece of hardware, the stakes are higher.

It seems like, for the most part, even if you manage to get some of the ideas right, the form is often way off. Case in point: telemedicine. Today you can visit a doctor using video conferencing with your phone or a PC for many common maladies. A new idea? Not really. Hugo Gernsback wrote about it in Radio Electronics back in 1955.

Gernsback wrote:

The average medical doctor today is overworked and short-lived. There are never enough doctors anywhere for the world’s constantly multiplying population. Many patients die because the doctor cannot reach them in time, particularly at night and in remote regions.

…[H]e can only see a few [patients] during the day. With increasing traffic congestion, many doctors refuse to make personal calls — execept in emergencies. Even then they arrive often too late. Much of this dilemma will be archaic in the near future, thanks to the Teledoctor.

Gernsback envisioned a doctor using what we now call Waldos similar to what people use to manipulate radioactive material. These super mechanical hands (Gernsback’s words) would allow the doctor to write a prescription, pour liquids, or even diaper a baby thanks to a sense of touch built into them.

Oddly enough, Gernsback’s vision included renting a teledoctor from the drugstore for $3.50 a day. This way, the doctor could call on you and then follow up as well. The drug store would deliver the machine and it would — get this — connect to your phone:

A cord with the a telephone plug attached to the teledoctor instrument is now plugged into a special jack on your telephone. Future telephones will be provided with this facility. The TV signals and telehand electronic signals, etc., will all travel over the closed circuit telephone lines.

In a footnote, Gernsback notes that you can’t send a 525-line TV signal on current phone lines, but a 250-350 line picture was possible and that would be sufficient.

Visionary? In some ways, maybe. The basic idea is coming true today, although it isn’t likely doctors will do surgery or inject you remotely in your home anytime soon. The special telephone plug sort of came true and is already obsolete. The images, by the way, are the ones that accompanied the original article in Radio Electronics.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Predictions That Just Missed It” →

Homemade Integrated Circuits Hack Chat

August 12, 2019 by 6 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, August 14th at noon Pacific for the Homemade Integrated Circuits Hack Chat with Sam Zeloof!

While most of us are content to buy the chips we need to build our projects, there’s a small group of hackers more interested in making the chips themselves. What it takes the big guys a billion-dollar fab to accomplish, these hobbyists are doing with second-hand equipment, chemicals found in roach killers and rust removers, and a lot of determination to do what no DIYer has done before.

Sam Zeloof is one of this dedicated band, and we’ve been following his progress for years. While he was still in high school, he turned the family garage into a physics lab and turned out his first simple diodes. Later came a MOSFET, and eventually the Z1, a dual-differential amp chip that is the first IC produced by a hobbyist using photolithography.

Sam just completed his first year at Carnegie-Mellon, and he’s agreed to take some precious summer vacation time to host the Hack Chat. Join us as we learn all about the Z1, find out what improvements he’s made to his process, and see what’s next for him both at college and in his own lab.

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 14 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

What Happens To Tesla When The Sleeping Auto Giants Awake?

August 12, 2019 by 158 Comments

The history of automotive production is littered with the fallen badges of car companies that shone brightly but fell by the wayside in the face of competition from the industry’s giants. Whether you pine for an AMC, a Studebaker, or a Saab, it’s a Ford or a Honda you’ll be driving in 2019.

In the world of electric cars it has been a slightly different story. Though the big names have dipped a toe in the water they have been usurped by a genuinely disruptive contender. If you drive an electric car in 2019 it won’t be that Ford or Honda, it could be a Nissan, but by far the dominant name in EV right now is Tesla.

Motor vehicles are standing at the brink of a generational shift from internal combustion to electric drive. Will Tesla become the giant it hopes, or will history repeat itself?

Continue reading “What Happens To Tesla When The Sleeping Auto Giants Awake?” →

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Hackaday Links: August 11, 2019

August 11, 2019 by 13 Comments

By the time this goes to press, DEFCON 27 will pretty much be history. But badgelife continues, and it’d be nice to have a way of keeping track of all the badges offered. Martin Lebel stepped up to the challenge with a DEF CON 27 badgelife tracker. He’s been tracking the scene since March, and there are currently more than 170 badges, tokens, and shitty add-ons listed. Gotta catch ’em all!

Nice tease, Reuters. We spotted this story about the FAA signing off on beyond-visual-line-of-sight, or BVLOS, operation of a UAV. The article was accompanied by the familiar smiling Amazon logo, leading readers to believe that fleets of Amazon Prime Air drones would surely soon darken the skies with cargoes of Huggies and Tide Pods across the US. It turns out that the test reported was conducted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks along an oil pipeline in the Last Frontier state, and was intended to explore medical deliveries and pipeline surveillance for the oil industry. The only mention of Amazon was that the company reported they’d start drone deliveries in the US “in months.” Yep.

Ever wonder what it takes to get your widget into the market? Between all the testing and compliance requirements, it can be a real chore. Nathaniel tipped us off to a handy guide written by his friend Skippy that goes through the alphabet soup of agencies and regulations needed to get a product to market – CE, RoHS, WEEE, LVD, RED, CE for EMC. Take care of all that paperwork and you’ll eventually get a DoC and be A-OK.

A French daredevil inventor made the first crossing of the English Channel on a hoverboard on Sunday. Yes, we know it’s not an “actual” hoverboard, but it’s as close as we’re going to get with the physics we have access to right now, and being a stand-upon jet engine powered by a backpack full of fuel, it qualifies as pretty awesome. The report says it took him a mere 20 minutes to make the 22-mile (35-km) crossing.


We had a grand time last week around the Hackaday writing crew’s secret underground lair with this delightful Hackaday-Dilbert mashup-inator. Scroll down to the second item on the page and you’ll see what appears to be a standard three-panel Dilbert strip; closer inspection reveals that the text has been replaced by random phrases scraped from a single Hackaday article. It looks just like a Dilbert strip, and sometimes the text even makes sense with what’s going on in the art. We’d love to see the code behind this little gem. The strip updates at each page load, so have fun.

And of course, the aforementioned secret headquarters is exactly what you’d picture – a dark room with rows of monitors scrolling green text, each with a black hoodie-wearing writer furiously documenting the black arts of hacking. OpenIDEO, the “open innovation practice” of global design company IDEO, has issued a challenge to “reimagine a more compelling and relatable visual language for cybersecurity.” In other words, no more scrolling random code and no more hoodies. Do you have kinder, gentler visual metaphors for cybersecurity? You might win some pretty decent prizes for your effort to “represent different terms and ideas in the cybersecurity space in an accessible and compelling way.”