Security Hacks

1422 Articles

This Week In Security: Session Puzzling, Session Keys, And Speculation

April 28, 2023 by 7 Comments

Last week we briefly mentioned a vulnerability in the Papercut software, and more details and a proof of concept have been published. The vulnerability is one known as session puzzling. That’s essentially where a session variable is used for multiple purposes, or gets incorrectly set. In Papercut, it was possible to trigger the SetupCompleted class on a server that had already finished that initial setup process. And part of SetupCompleted validated the session of the current user. In a normal first-setup case, that might make sense, but as anyone could trigger that code, it allowed anonymous users to jump straight to admin.

The other half of the exploit leverages the “print script” feature, which lets admins write code that runs on printing. A simple java.lang.Runtime.getRuntime().exec('calc.exe'); does the trick to jump from web interface to remote code execution. The indicators of compromise are reasonable generic, including User "admin" logged into the administration interface. and Admin user "admin" modified the print script on printer "".. A Shodan search turns up around 1,700 Papercut servers accessible from the Internet, which prompts the painfully obvious observation that your internal print auditing solution’s web interface definitely should not be exposed online.

Apache Superset

Superset is a nifty data visualization tool for showing charts, graphs, and all sorts of pretty data sets on a dashboard. It also has some weirdness with using web sessions for user management. The session is stored on the user side in a cookie, signed with a secret key. This works great, unless the key used is particularly weak. And guess what, the default configuration of Superset uses a pre-populated secret key. thisismysecretkey is arguably a bad key to start with, but it turns out it’s also shared by more than 70% of the accessible Superset servers.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Session Puzzling, Session Keys, And Speculation” →

This Week In Security: Spandex Tempest, Supply Chain Chain, And NTP

April 21, 2023 by 14 Comments

Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence group has announced a new naming scheme for threat actors. It sounds great, naming groups after weather phenomenon, based on the groups motivations or nation of origin. Then each discreet group is given an additional adjective. That’s where things get interesting.

It seems like the adjectives were chosen at random, giving rise for some suitably impressive names, like Ghost Blizzard, Ruby Sleet, or Granite Typhoon. Some of the other names sound like they should be desserts: Caramel Tsunami, Peach Sandstorm, Aqua Blizzard, or Raspberry Typhoon. But then there the really special names, like Wine Tempest and Zigzag Hail. But the absolute winner is Spandex Tempest. No word yet on whether researchers managed to keep a straight face when approving that name.

Chrome 0-day Double

A pair of Chrome browser releases have been minted in the past week, both to address vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited. Up first was CVE-2022-2033, type confusion in the V8 JS engine. That flaw was reported by Google’s Threat Analysis Group, presumably discovered in the wild, and the fix was pushed as stable on the 14th.

Then, on th 18th, yet another released rolled out to fix CVE-2023-2136, also reported by the TAG, also being exploited in the wild. It seems likely that both of these 0-days were found in the same exploitation campaign. We look forward to hearing the details on this one. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Spandex Tempest, Supply Chain Chain, And NTP” →

Circumvent Facial Recognition With Yarn

April 16, 2023 by 38 Comments

Knitwear can protect you from a winter chill, but what if it could keep you safe from the prying eyes of Big Brother as well? [Ottilia Westerlund] decided to put her knitting skills to the test for this anti-surveillance sweater.

[Westerlund] explains that “yarn is a programable material” containing FOR loops and other similar programming concepts transmitted as knitting patterns. In the video (after the break) she also explores the history of knitting in espionage using steganography embedded in socks and other knitwear to pass intelligence in unobtrusive ways. This lead to the restriction of shipping handmade knit goods in WWII by the UK government.

Back in the modern day, [Westerlund] took the Hyperface pattern developed by the Adam Harvey and turned it into a knitting pattern. Designed to circumvent detection by Viola-Jones based facial detection systems, the pattern presents a computer vision system with a number of “faces” to distract it from covered human faces in an image. While the knitted jumper (sweater for us Americans) can confuse certain face detection systems, [Westerlund] crushes our hope of a fuzzy revolution by saying that it is unsuccessful against the increasingly prevalent neural network-based facial detection systems creeping on our day-to-day activities.

The knitting pattern is available if you want to try your hands at it, but [Westerlund] warns it’s a bit of a pain to actually implement. If you want to try knitting and tech mashup, check out this knitting clock or this software to turn 3D models into knitting patterns.

Continue reading “Circumvent Facial Recognition With Yarn” →

Sufficiently Advanced Tech: Has Bugs

April 15, 2023 by 74 Comments

Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. He was a sci-fi writer, though, and not a security guy. Maybe it should read “Any sufficiently advanced tech has security flaws”. Because this is the story of breaking into a car through its headlight.

In a marvelous writeup, half-story, half CAN-bus masterclass, [Ken Tindell] details how car thieves pried off the front headlight of a friend’s Toyota, and managed to steal it just by saying the right things into the network. Since the headlight is on the same network as the door locks, pulling out the bulb and sending the “open the door” message repeatedly, along with a lot of other commands to essentially jam some other security features, can pull it off.

Half of you are asking what this has to do with Arthur C. Clarke, and the other half are probably asking what a lightbulb is doing on a car’s data network. In principle, it’s a great idea to have all of the electronics in a car be smart electronics, reporting their status back to the central computer. It’s how we know when our lights are out, or what our tire pressure is, from the driver’s seat. But adding features adds attack surfaces. What seems like magic to the driver looks like a gold mine to the attacker, or to car thieves.

With automotive CAN, security was kind of a second thought, and I don’t mean this uncharitably. The first goal was making sure that the system worked across all auto manufacturers and parts suppliers, and that’s tricky enough. Security would have to come second. And more modern cars have their CAN networks encrypted now, adding layers of magic on top of magic.

But I’m nearly certain that, when deciding to replace the simple current-sensing test of whether a bulb was burnt out, the engineers probably didn’t have the full cost of moving the bulb onto the CAN bus in mind. They certainly had dreams of simplifying the wiring harness, and of bringing the lowly headlight into the modern age, but I’d bet they had no idea that folks were going to use the headlight port to open the doors. Sufficiently advanced tech.

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This Week In Security: QueueJumper, JS VM2 Escape, And CAN Hacking

April 14, 2023 by 9 Comments

You may not be familiar with the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service, a store and forward sort of inter-process and inter-system communication service. MSMQ has become something of a legacy product, but is still available as an optional component in Windows. And in addition to other enterprise software solutions, Microsoft Exchange turns the service on by default. That’s why it’s a bit spooky that there’s a one packet Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability that was just patched in the service.

CVE-2023-21554, also known as QueueJumper, is this unauthenticated RCE with a CVSS score of 9.8. It requires sending a packet to the service on TCP port 1801. The Check Point Research team scanned for listening MSMQ endpoints on the public Internet, and found approximately 360,000 of them. And no doubt far more are listening on internal networks. A one packet exploit is a prime example of a wormable problem, and now that the story has broken, and the patch is available, expect a rapid reverse engineering. Beware, the queue jumpers are coming.

JavaScript VM Escape

The VM2 library is a rather important JavaScript package that sandboxes code, letting a project run untrusted code securely. Or, that’s the idea. CVE-2023-29017 is an example of how hard sandboxing is to get right. It’s another CVSS 9.8 vulnerability, and this one allows a sandbox escape and code execution.

This one now has public Proof of Concept code, and this package has over 16 million monthly installs, so the attack surface is potentially pretty wide. The flaw is fixed in version 3.9.15. Continue reading “This Week In Security: QueueJumper, JS VM2 Escape, And CAN Hacking” →

Disabling Intel’s Backdoors On Modern Laptops

April 12, 2023 by 32 Comments

Despite some companies making strides with ARM, for the most part, the desktop and laptop space is still dominated by x86 machines. For all their advantages, they have a glaring flaw for anyone concerned with privacy or security in the form of a hardware backdoor that can access virtually any part of the computer even with the power off. AMD calls their system the Platform Security Processor (PSP) and Intel’s is known as the Intel Management Engine (IME).

To fully disable these co-processors a computer from before 2008 is required, but if you need more modern hardware than that which still respects your privacy and security concerns you’ll need to either buy an ARM device, or disable the IME like NovaCustom has managed to do with their NS51 series laptop.

NovaCustom specializes in building custom laptops with customizations for various components and specifications to fit their needs, including options for the CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, keyboard layout, and other considerations. They favor Coreboot as a bootloader which already goes a long way to eliminating proprietary closed-source software at a fundamental level, but not all Coreboot machines have the IME completely disabled. There are two ways to do this, the HECI method which is better than nothing but not fully trusted, and the HAP bit, which completely disables the IME. NovaCustom is using the HAP bit approach to disable the IME, meaning that although it’s not completely eliminated from the computer, it is turned off in a way that’s at least good enough for computers that the NSA uses.

There are a lot of new computer manufacturers building conscientious hardware nowadays, but (with the notable exception of System76) the IME and PSP seem to be largely ignored by most computing companies we’d otherwise expect to care about an option like this. It’s certainly still an area of concern considering how much power the IME and PSP are given over their host computers, and we have seen even mainline manufacturers sometimes offer systems with the IME disabled. The only other options to solve this problem are based around specific motherboards for 8th and 9th generation Intel desktops, or you can go way back to hardware from 2008 and install libreboot to eliminate, rather than disable, the IME.

Thanks to [Maik] for the tip!

This Week In Security: Cookie Monster, CyberGhost, NEXX, And Dead Angles

April 7, 2023 by 5 Comments

“Operation Cookie Monster” ranks as one of the best code names in recent memory. And it’s apropo, given what exactly went down. Genesis Market was one of those marketplaces where criminals could buy and sell stolen credentials. This one was a bit extra special.

Websites and services are getting better about detecting logins from unexpected computers. Your Google account suddenly logs in from a new computer, and a two-factor authentication challenge launches. Why? Your browser is missing a cookie indicating you’ve logged in before. But there’s more. Providers have started rolling out smart analytics that check for IP address changes and browser fingerprints. Your mix of time zone, user string, installed fonts, and selected language make a pretty unique identifier. So sites like Genesis offer Impersonation-as-a-Service (IMPaaS), which is session hijacking for the modern age.

A victim computer gets owned, and credentials are collected. But so are cookies and a browser fingerprint. Then a criminal buyer logs in, and runs a virtual browser with all that collected data. Run through a proxy to get a IP that is geolocated close enough to the victim, and Mr. Bad Guy has a cloned machine with all accounts intact.

And now back to Operation Cookie Monster, a multi-organization takedown of Genesis. It’s apparently a partial takedown, as the latest word is that the site is still online on the Tor network. But the conventional domains are down, and something like eight million credentials have been captured and added to the Have I Been Pwned database.

Another researcher team, Sector 7, has been working the case with Dutch authorities, and has some interesting details. The vector they cover was a fake activation crack for an antivirus product. Ironic. There are several extensions that get installed on the victim computer, and one of the most pernicious is disguised as Google Drive. This extension looks for a Command and Control server, using Bitcoin as DNS. A hardcoded Bitcoin address is polled for its latest transaction, and the receiving address is actually an encoded domain name, you-rabbit[.]com as of the latest check.

This extension will look for and rewrite emails that might be warning the victim about compromise. Get an email warning about a cryptocurrency withdrawal? It modifies it in the browser to be a sign-in warning. It also allows Genesis customers to proxy connections through the victim’s browser, bypassing IP address security measures. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Cookie Monster, CyberGhost, NEXX, And Dead Angles” →