Encryption For Arduino With Spritz

December 12, 2015 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

Hackaday.io user [Abderraouf] has written an implementation of the new(ish) Spritz cipher and hash for Arduino. While we’re not big enough crypto-nerds to assess the security of the code, it looks like it’s going to be pretty handy.

Spritz itself is a neat cipher. Instead of taking in fixed blocks of data and operating on them, it allows you to process it in (almost) whatever chunks it comes in naturally, and then extract out the encrypted results piecewise. It works both as a two-way cipher and as a one-way hash function. It looks like Spritz is a one-stop-shop for all of your encryption needs, and now you can run it on your Arduino.

In case you are afraid of new implementations of new ciphers (and you should be), Spritz’s pedigree should help to put you at ease: it was developed by [Ron Rivest] to be a successor to his RC4 algorithm, and it incorporates a lot of the lessons learned about that algorithm over the past. This doesn’t exclude subtle flaws in the implementation of the library (no offence, [Abderraouf]!) or your work downstream, but at least the underlying algorithm seems to be the real deal.

[Abderraouf] links it in his writeup, but just for completeness, here’s the Spritz paper (PDF). What crypto libraries do you currently use for Arduino or microcontroller projects? We’ve been fans of XXTEA for ages, but more because it’s simple and small than because it’s secure. Spritz may be simple enough to implement easily, and still more secure. Sweet.

Biometric Bracelet Electrifies You To Unlock Your Tablet

December 8, 2015 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

Researchers [Christian Holz] and [Marius Knaust] have come up with a cool new way to authenticate you to virtually any touchscreen device. This clever idea couples a biometric sensor and low-data-rate transmitter in a wearable wrist strap that talks to the touch screen by electrifying you.

Specifically the strap has electrodes that couple a 50V, 150kHz signal through your finger, to the touchscreen. The touchscreen picks up both your finger’s location through normal capacitive-sensing methods and the background signal that’s transmitted by the “watch”. This background signal is modulated on and off, transmitting your biometric data.

The biometric data itself is the impedance through your wrist from one electrode to another. With multiple electrodes encircling your wrist, they end up with something like a CAT scan of your wrist’s resistance. Apparently this is unique enough to be used as a biometric identifier. (We’re surprised.)

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Hacker Uncovers Security Holes At CSL Dualcom

November 26, 2015 by Will Sweatman 14 Comments

CSL Dualcom, a popular maker of security systems in England, is disputing claims from [Cybergibbons] that their CS2300-R model is riddled with holes. The particular device in question is a communications link that sits in between an alarm system and their monitoring facility. Its job is to allow the two systems to talk to each other via internet, POT lines or cell towers. Needless to say, it has some heavy security features built in to prevent tampering. It appears, however, that the security is not very secure. [Cybergibbons] methodically poked and prodded the bits and bytes of the CS2300-R until it gave up its secrets. It turns out that the encryption it uses is just a few baby steps beyond a basic Caesar Cipher.

A Caesar Cipher just shifts data by a numeric value. The value is the cipher key. For example, the code IBDLBEBZ is encrypted with a Caesar Cipher. It doesn’t take very much to see that a shift of “1” would reveal HACKADAY. This…is not security, and is equivalent to a TSA lock, if that. The CS2300-R takes the Caesar Cipher and modifies it so that the cipher key changes as you move down the data string. [Cybergibbons] was able to figure out how the key changed, which revealed, as he put it – ‘the keys to the kingdom’.

There’s a lot more to the story. Be sure to read his detailed report (pdf) and let us know what you think in the comments below.

We mentioned that CSL Dualcom is disputing the findings. Their response can be read here.

Defeating Chip And PIN With Bits Of Wire

November 25, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 120 Comments

One of many ways that Americans are ridiculed by the rest of the world is that they don’t have chip and PIN on their credit cards yet; US credit card companies have been slow to bring this technology to millions of POS terminals across the country. Making the transition isn’t easy because until the transition is complete, the machines have to accept both magnetic stripes and chip and PIN.

This device can disable chip and PIN, wirelessly, by forcing the downgrade to magstripe. [Samy Kamkar] created the MagSpoof to explore the binary patterns on the magnetic stripe of his AmEx card, and in the process also created a device that works with drivers licenses, hotel room keys, and parking meters.

The electronics for the MagSpoof are incredibly simple. Of course a small microcontroller is necessary for this build, and for the MagSpoof, [Samy] used the ATtiny85 for the ‘larger’ version (still less than an inch square). A smaller, credit card-sized version used an ATtiny10. The rest of the schematic is just an H-bridge and a coil of magnet wire – easy enough for anyone with a soldering iron to put together on some perfboard.
By pulsing the H-bridge and energizing the coil of wire, the MagSpoof emulates the swipe of a credit card – it’s all just magnetic fields reversing direction in a very particular pattern. Since the magnetic pattern on any credit card can be easily read, and [Samy] demonstrates that this is possible with some rust and the naked eye anyway, it’s a simple matter to clone a card by building some electronics.

[Samy] didn’t stop there, though. By turning off the bits that state that the card has a chip onboard, his device can bypass the chip and PIN protection. If you’re very careful with a magnetized needle, you could disable the chip and PIN protection on any credit card. [Samy]’s device doesn’t need that degree of dexterity – he can just flip a bit in the firmware for the MagSpoof. It’s all brilliant work, and although the code for the chip and PIN defeat isn’t included in the repo, the documents that show how that can be done exist.

[Samy]’s implementation is very neat, but it stands on the shoulders of giants. In particular, we’ve covered similar devices before (here and here, for instance) and everything that you’ll need for this hack except for the chip-and-PIN-downgrade attack are covered in [Count Zero]’s classic 1992 “A Day in the Life of a Flux Reversal“.

Thanks [toru] for sending this one in. [Samy]’s video is available below.

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Turning A Teensy Into A Better U2F Key

November 14, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

A few days ago, we saw a project that used a Teensy to build a Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) key. While this project was just an experiment in how to implement U2F on any ‘ol microcontroller, and the creator admitted it wasn’t very secure, the comments for that post said otherwise: “making your own thing is the ONLY way to be secure,” read the comments.

In a stunning turn of events, writing comments on a blog post doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about. It turns out, to perform a security analysis of a system, you need to look at the code. Shocking, yes, but [makomk] took a good, hard look at the code and found it was horribly broken.

The critical error of the Teensy U2F key crypto is simply how U2F is performed. During authentication, the device sends the U2F key handle to whatever service is trying to authenticating it. Because the key in the Teensy implementation is only ‘encrypted’ with XOR, it only takes 256 signing requests to recover the private key.

The original experimentation with using the Teensy as a U2F key was an educational endeavor, and it was never meant to be used by anyone. The attack on this small lesson in security is interesting, though, and [makomk] wrote a proof of concept that demonstrates his attack. This could be used to perform attacks from a remote server, but hopefully that won’t happen, because the original code should never be used in the wild.

Physical Security For Desktop Computers

November 13, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 134 Comments

There’s a truism in the security circles that says physical security is security. It doesn’t matter how many bits you’ve encrypted your password with, which elliptic curve you’ve used in your algorithm, or if you use a fingerprint, retina scan, or face print for a second factor of authentication. If someone has physical access to a device, all these protections are just road bumps in the way of getting your data. Physical access to a machine means all that data is out in the open, and until now there’s nothing you could do to stop it.

This week at Black Hat Europe, Design-Shift introduced ORWL, a computer that provides the physical security to all the data sitting on your computer.

The first line of protection for the data stuffed into the ORWL is unique key fob radio. This electronic key fob is simply a means of authentication for the ORWL – without it, ORWL simply stays in its sleep mode. If the user walks away from the computer, the USB ports are shut down, and the HDMI output is disabled. While this isn’t a revolutionary feature – something like this can be installed on any computer – that’s not the biggest trick ORWL has up its sleeve.

The big draw to the ORWL is a ‘honeycomb mesh’ that completely covers every square inch of circuit board. This honeycomb mesh is simply a bit of plastic that screws on to the ORWL PCB and connects dozens of electronic traces embedded in this board to a secure microcontroller. If these traces are broken – either through taking the honeycomb shell off or by breaking it wide open, the digital keys that unlock the computer are erased.

The ORWL specs are what you would expect from a bare-bones desktop computer: Intel Skylake mobile processors, Intel graphics, a choice of 4 or 8GB of RAM, 64 to 512GB SSD. WiFi, two USB C ports, and an HDMI port provide all the connections to the outside world.

While this isn’t a computer for everyone, and it may not even a very large deployment, it is an interesting challenge. Physical security rules over all, and it would be very interesting to see what sort of attack can be performed on the ORWL to extract all the data hidden away behind an electronic mesh. Short of breaking the digital key hidden on a key fob, the best attack might just be desoldering the chips for the SSD and transplanting them into a platform more amenable to reading them.

In any event, ORWL is an interesting device if only for being one of the few desktop computers to tackle the problem of physical security. As with any computer, if you have physical access to a device, you have access to all the data on the device; we just don’t know how to get the data off one of these tiny computers.

Video below.

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Your Unhashable Fingerprints Secure Nothing

November 10, 2015 by Elliot Williams 95 Comments

Passwords are crap. Nobody picks good ones, when they do they re-use them across sites, and if you use even a trustworthy password manager, they’ll get hacked too. But you know what’s worse than a password? A fingerprint. Fingerprints have enough problems with them that they should never be used anywhere a password would be.

Passwords are supposed to be secret, like the name of your childhood pet. In contrast, you carry your fingers around with you out in the open nearly everywhere you go. Passwords also need to be revocable. In the case that your password does get revealed, it’s great to be able to simply pick another one. You don’t want to have to revoke your fingers. Finally, and this is the kicker, you want your password to be hashable, in order to protect the password database itself from theft.

In the rest of the article, I’ll make each of these three cases, and hopefully convince you that using fingerprints in place of a password is even more broken than using a password in the first place. (You listening Apple and Google? No, I didn’t think you were.)

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