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Making Autonomous Racing Drones Lean And Mean

May 31, 2019 by 3 Comments

Recently the MAVLab (Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory) at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands proudly proclaimed having made an autonomic drone that’s a mere 72 grams in weight. The best part? It’s designed to take part in drone races. What this means is that using a single camera and onboard processing, this little drone with a diameter of 10 centimeters has to navigate the course, while avoiding obstacles.

To achieve this goal, they took an Eachine trashcan drone, replacing its camera with an open source JeVois smart machine vision camera and the autopilot software with the Paparazzi open UAV software. Naturally, scaling a racing drone down to this size came at an obvious cost: with its low-quality sensors, relatively low-quality camera and limited processing power compared to its big brothers it has to rely strongly on algorithms that compensate for drift and other glitches while racing.

Currently the drone is mainly being tested at a four-gate race track at TU Delft’s Cyberzoo, where it can fly multiple laps at a leisurely two meters per second, using its gate-detecting algorithms to zip from gate to gate. By using machine vision to do the gate detection, the drone can deal with gates being displaced from their position indicated on the course map.

While competitive with other, much larger autonomous racing drones, the system is still far removed from the performance of human-controlled racing drones. To close this gap, MAVLab’s [Christophe De Wagter] mentions that they’re looking at improving the algorithms to make them better at predictive control and state estimation, as well as the machine vision side. Ideally these little drones should be able to be far more nimble and quick than they are today.

See a video of the drone in action after the link.

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Please Meet ‘Capability Inquiry’, Part Of The MIDI 2.0 Standard

May 28, 2019 by 23 Comments

It may have passed you by in the news, but the MIDI Manufacturers Association (MMA) has recently unveiled more details about the upcoming MIDI 2.0 standard. Previously we covered the prototyping phase start of this new standard. The original Musical Instrument Digital Interface standard was revealed all the way back in August of 1983, as a cooperation between companies including Moog Music, Roland, Yamaha, Korg, Kawai and others. It was the first universal interface that allowed one to connect and control all kinds of musical instruments.

Over the years, MIDI has seen use with the composing of music, allowing instruments to be controlled by a computer system and to easily share compositions between composers. Before MIDI such kind of control was limited to a number of proprietary interfaces, with limited functionality.

The MMA lists the key features of MIDI 2.0 as: Bidirectional, Backwards Compatible, and the enhancing of MIDI 1.0 where possible. Using a new technology called MIDI Capability Inquiry (MIDI-CI), a MIDI 2.0 device can exchange feature profiles and more with other 2.0 devices. 1.0 is the fallback if MIDI-CI finds no new functionality. MIDI-CI-based configuration can allow 2.0 devices to automatically configure themselves for their environment.

Suffice it to say, MIDI 2.0 is a far cry from the original MIDI standard. By transforming MIDI into a more versatile, bidirectional protocol, it opens new ways in which it can be used to tie musical devices and related together. It opens the possibility of even more creative hacks, many of which were featured on Hackaday already. What will you make with MIDI 2.0?

See a brief demonstration of this feature of MIDI 2.0 in the below video:

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This Week In Security: Zombieload, And Is Your Router Leaking?

May 28, 2019 by 8 Comments

Do you know what your router is doing? We have two stories of the embedded devices misbehaving. First, Linksys “Smart” routers keep track of every device that connects to its network. Right, so does every other router. These routers, however, also helpfully expose that stored data over JNAP/HNAP.

Some background is needed here. First, HNAP is the Home Network Administration Protocol, designed to manage routers and network devices. Originally designed by Pure Networks, HNAP is a SOAP based protocol, and has been part of security problems in the past. You may also see the term JNAP. It seems that JNAP is the JSON Network Administration Protocol, identical to HNAP except for using JSON instead of SOAP.

The odd part is that this is an old problem. CVE-2014-8244 was disclosed and fixed in 2014. According to the writeup at Badpackets.net, the problem was re-discovered as a result of observing active network attacks targeting JNAP. When Linksys was informed of the rediscovered problem, they responded that the problem was fixed in 2014, and devices with updated firmware and default settings are not accessible from the public internet. The presence of over 20,000 devices leaking data casts doubt on their response. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Zombieload, And Is Your Router Leaking?” →

Hacker Dosed With LSD While Restoring Historical Synth

May 28, 2019 by 54 Comments

[Eliot Curtis] found himself a little too close to 1960’s counterculture while restoring a vintage modular synthesizer — he began tripping out on acid. The instrument in question is a Buchla Model 100. The Buchla is a modular synth. Instead of a keyboard, it used capacitance-sensitive touch plates. This particular model 100 was purchased by California State University East Bay Campus. The synth was popular for a while, but eventually fell into disuse, and was stored in a classroom closet.

Modular synths are experiencing a renaissance, as can be seen right here on Hackaday. The Buchla was pulled out of storage and given a proper restoration. [Eliot Curtis] is the Broadcast Operations Manager at KPIX 5, the San Francisco CBS TV station. He also is the hacker who volunteered to restore the Buchla.
During the restoration, [Curtis] found residue and crystals stuck under one of the knobs of the Control Voltage Processing Module. Was it flux, conformal coating, or something else? [Eliot] hit the board with contact cleaner and wiped it down. Within 45 minutes, he was feeling a strange tingling. It was the beginning of a nine-hour LSD trip. Three independent tests on the module came back positive for LSD.

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD for short) can be readily absorbed through the skin, which is exactly what happened to [Eliot]. Synth designer [Don Buchla] was friends with [Owsley Stanley], who worked for the Grateful Dead and allegedly cooked up some very potent LSD. Some of Buchla’s modules even found their way into Ken Keesey’s hands, where they wound up on his famous bus “further”. As it turns out there were rumors that modules had been dipped in LSD back in the ’60s. Why someone would do that to an electronic module, we’re not sure — they must have been on drugs. [Eliot] recovered from his brush with the ’60s and continued with the restoration with gloves on.

If there is a moral here, it should be to take precautions when working on equipment which might contain dangerous substances. We’ve learned this lesson ourselves cracking open broken laptops. You might find anything from coffee to soda, to pet urine or worse. A box of nitrile gloves definitely should be standard equipment in any hacker’s lab.

Student Rocket Makes It To Space

May 23, 2019 by 23 Comments

Where does the Earth’s atmosphere stop and space begin? It is tempting to take the approach Justice Potter Stewart did for pornography when judging a 1964 obscenity case and say “I know it when I see it.” That’s not good enough for scientists, though. The Kármán line is what the World Air Sports Federation (FAI) defines as space. That line is 100 km (62 miles or about 330,000 feet) above sea level. A recent student-built rocket — Traveler IV — claims to be the first entirely student-designed vehicle to pass that line.

The students from the University of Southern California launched the rocket from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The new record is over twice as high as the old record, set by the same team. The rocket reached approximately 340,000, although the margin of error on the measurement is +/- 16,800 feet, so there’s a slight chance they didn’t quite cross the line.

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Wolfram Engine Now Free… Sort Of

May 22, 2019 by 8 Comments

You’ve probably used Wolfram Alpha and maybe even used the company’s desktop software for high-powered math such as Mathematica. One of the interesting things about all of Wolfram’s mathematics software is that it shares a common core engine — the Wolfram Engine. As of this month, the company is allowing free use of the engine in software projects. The catch? It is only for preproduction use. If you are going into production you need a license, although a free open source project can apply for a free license. Naturally, Wolfram gets to decide what is production, although the actual license is pretty clear that non-commercial projects for personal use and approved open source projects can continue to use the free license. In addition, work you do for a school or large company may already be covered by a site license.

Given how comprehensive the engine is, this is reasonably generous. The engine even has access to the Wolfram Knowledgebase (with a free Basic subscription). If you don’t want to be connected, though, you don’t have to be. You just won’t be able to get live data. If you want to play with the engine, you can use the Wolfram Cloud Sandbox in which you can try some samples.

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This Week In Security: What’s Up With Whatsapp, Windows XP Patches, And Cisco Is Attacked By The Thrangrycat

May 21, 2019 by 21 Comments

Whatsapp allows for end-to-end encrypted messaging, secure VoIP calls, and until this week, malware installation when receiving a call. A maliciously crafted SRTCP connection can trigger a buffer overflow, and execute code on the target device. The vulnerability was apparently found first by a surveillance company, The NSO Group. NSO is known for Pegasus, a commercial spyware program that they’ve marketed to governments and intelligence agencies, and which has been implicated in a number of human rights violations and even the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. It seems that this Whatsapp vulnerability was one of the infection vectors used by the Pegasus program. After independently discovering the flaw, Facebook pushed a fixed client on Monday.

Windows XP Patched Against Wormable Vulnerability

What year is it!? This Tuesday, Microsoft released a patch for Windows XP, five years after support for the venerable OS officially ended. Reminiscent of the last time Microsoft patched Windows XP, when Wannacry was the crisis. This week, Microsoft patched a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) vulnerability, CVE-2019-0708. The vulnerability allows an attacker to connect to the RDP service, send a malicious request, and have control over the system. Since no authentication is required, the vulnerability is considered “wormable”, or exploitable by a self-replicating program.

Windows XP through Windows 7 has the flaw, and fixes were rolled out, though notably not for Windows Vista. It’s been reported that it’s possible to download the patch for Server 2008 and manually apply it to Windows Vista. That said, it’s high time to retire the unsupported systems, or at least disconnect them from the network.

The Worst Vulnerability Name of All Time

Thrangrycat. Or more accurately, “😾😾😾” is a newly announced vulnerability in Cisco products, discovered by Red Balloon Security. Cisco uses secure boot on many of their devices in order to prevent malicious tampering with device firmware. Secure boot is achieved through the use of a secondary processor, a Trust Anchor module (TAm). This module ensures that the rest of the system is running properly signed firmware. The only problem with this scheme is that the dedicated TAm also has firmware, and that firmware can be attacked. The TAm processor is actually an FPGA, and researchers discovered that it was possible to modify the FPGA bitstream, totally defeating the secure boot mechanism.

The name of the attack, thrangrycat, might be a satirical shot at other ridiculous vulnerability names. Naming issues aside, it’s an impressive bit of work, numbered CVE-2019-1649. At the same time, Red Balloon Security disclosed another vulnerability that allowed command injection by an authenticated user.

Odds and Ends

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