GPU Processing And Password Cracking

September 27, 2010 by James Munns 53 Comments

Recently, research students at Georgia Tech released a report outlining the dangers that GPUs pose to the current state of password security. There are a number of ways to crack a password, all with their different pros and cons, but when it comes down to it, the limiting factor in all of these methods is processing complexity. The more operations that need to be run, the longer it takes, and the less useful each tool is for cracking passwords. In the past, most recommendations for password security revolved around making sure your password wasn’t something predictable, such as “password” or your birthday. With today’s (and tomorrows) GPUs, this may no longer be enough.

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DRM Causes Vulnerabilities

September 26, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

This image is from Microsoft's DRM page.

We often hear people touting the evilness of DRM, but usually they are talking about the idea of ownership. In this case, DRM is actually causing harm. It turns out that Microsoft’s msnetobj.dll, which is supposed to enforce DRM on your computer, stopping you from doing certain things like saving files you don’t “own” is open to 3 attacks. Vulnerable to buffer overflow, integer overflow, and denial of service, this sucker is riddled with issues.

The vulnerabilities in this file aren’t groundbreaking. Buffer overflow is a common method to get to many systems. The problem here, according to some commenters at BoingBoing, is the fact that this DLL is called every time you open a media file.

[via BoingBoing]

Portable Password Vault

September 26, 2010 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

This little box remembers all of your user names and passwords. Inside you’ll find an Atmel AT89S5131 microcontroller which has built-in USB capability. When the box is plugged into a USB port it identifies as a keyboard. Manipulating the buttons on the top and side will select and print out various stored usernames and passwords. Passwords are generated on-chip from a random seed and the device itself requires a passcode after power up as a security feature.

[SigFLUP’s] included a pretty nifty configuration algorithm. It doesn’t rely on a terminal connection, since the device is a keyboard you can communicate with it in an editor window (which should make it platform independent). There’s no code available, but trying to write your own to the spec outlined in the demo after the break will make for a fun weekend project.

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RFID Readers, Writers, And Spoofers

September 25, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Carl] has done a lot of work developing a collection of RFID hardware. The two cards you see above are spoofers that can be programmed in the field using the keypad on the left, or the rather intimidating banks of DIP switches on the right. We also enjoyed his look at the Atmel T5557 and ATA5567 on-card chips used for the tags themselves. He shared the schematics for his designs but unfortunately he’s not distributing the firmware. None-the-less, if you’re interested in learning more about RFID this is a wonderful resource as it covers readers, writers, spoofer, and tags.

The HDCP Master Key

September 24, 2010 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

Pastebin has the HDCP master key that we talked about in a post last week. This is the encryption protocol used for HDMI content protection on media such as Blu-Ray and High Definition cable television.

The master key array is a 40×40 set of 56-bit hex used to generate the key sets. You get one brief paragraph at the top of the document explaining what to do with this information. If you ask us we’re more interested in how this set was determined. So for some background information read the key selection vector (KSV) Wikipedia page. That points us to an interesting discussion proposing that if 40 unique device-specific KSVs can be captured, they could be used to reverse-engineer the master key. And finally, a bit of insight from a Reddit user (make your own decision on the dependability of this information) commenting on the value of having the master key.

In his comment, [iHelix150] covers the revocation system that HDCP uses to ban devices that are being used to circumvent copy protection. He says that having the master key makes it possible to push your own revocation lists onto devices. Each time a list is written to your device (TV, Blu-ray, etc.) the version number field for the list is updated. If you push an update with nothing on the revocation list, and set the version number to a binary value of all 1’s it will prevent any more rewrites of the list. This means that any previously banned hardware will be allowed back into the chain or trust.

So far this probably means nothing for you. But it’s fun to watch the cat-and-mouse involved in the DRM struggle, isn’t it?

Thieves, Armed With A Vacuum Cleaner, Still On The Run

September 24, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 32 Comments

Thieves in Paris have been stealing money with the clever use of a vacuum. Not just bits of change here and there, they’ve stolen over 500,000 euros. They noticed that Monoprix supermarkets use a pneumatic tube system to transport rolls of cash to and from the safe. Realizing this was the weakest point in the security, they simply drilled a big hole in the tube, hooked up a vacuum and sucked the cash out. Forget lock picking or safe cracking, this had to be ridiculously easy.

The thieves are still out there, sucking their way to riches. At this point, they’ve hit 15 locations. Their luck has to run out some time right?

[via Slashdot]

Intel: High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection Cracked

September 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 54 Comments

Intel says that HDCP has been cracked, but they also say that it’s unlikely this information will be used to unlock the copying of anything. Their reasoning for the second statement is that for someone to make this work they would need to produce a computer chip, not something that is worth the effort.

We question that logic. Not so much for Blu-Ray, which is the commonly associated media format that uses HDCP, but for HD digital cable programming. There are folks out there who would like to have the option of recording their HD television shows without renting a DVR from the cable company. CableCard tuners have been mostly absent from the market, making this type of recording difficult or impossible. Now that there’s a proven way to get the encryption key for HDCP how hard would it really be to create a man-in-the-middle device that uses that key to authenticate, decrypt, and funnel the audio and video to another encoder card? We know next-to-nothing about the protocol but why couldn’t any powerful processor, like an ARM, or even an FPGA (both rather inexpensive and readily available) be programmed for this task?

Leave a comment to let us know what you think about HDCP, and what the availability of the master-key really means.

[Thanks Dave]