Security Hacks

1439 Articles

This Week In Security: The Geopolitical Kernel, Roundcube, And The Archive

October 25, 2024 by 13 Comments

Leading off the week is the controversy around the Linux kernel and an unexpected change in maintainership. The exact change was that over a dozen developers with ties to or employment by Russian entities were removed as maintainers. The unfortunate thing about this patch was that it was merged without any discussion or real explanation, other than being “due to various compliance requirements”. We eventually got more answers, that this was due to US sanctions against certain Russian businesses, and that the Linux Foundation lawyers gave guidance that:

If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.

So that’s that. One might observe that it’s unfortunate that a single government has that much control over the kernel’s development process. There were some questions about why Russian entities were targeted and not sanctioned Chinese companies like Huawei. [Ted Ts’o] spoke to that, explaining that in the US there are exemptions and different rules for each country and business. This was all fairly standard compliance stuff, up until a very surprising statement from [James Bottomley], a very core Kernel maintainer:

We are hoping that this action alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in charge of sanctions and we won’t also have to remove any existing patches.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: The Geopolitical Kernel, Roundcube, And The Archive” →

This Week In Security: Quantum RSA Break, Out Of Scope, And Spoofing Packets

October 18, 2024 by 13 Comments

Depending on who you ask, the big news this week is that quantum computing researchers out of China have broken RSA. (Here’s the PDF of their paper.) And that’s true… sort of. There are multiple caveats, like the fact that this proof of concept is only factoring a 22-bit key. The minimum RSA size in use these days is 1024 bits. The other important note is that this wasn’t done on a general purpose quantum computer, but on a D-Wave quantum annealing machine.

First off, what is the difference between a general purpose and annealing quantum computer? Practically speaking, a quantum annealer can’t run Shor’s algorithm, the quantum algorithm that can factor large numbers into primes in a much shorter time than classical computers. While it’s pretty certain that this algorithm works from a mathematical perspective, it’s not at all clear that it will ever be possible to build effective quantum computers that can actually run it for the large numbers that are used in cryptography.

We’re going to vastly oversimplify the problem, and say that the challenge with general purpose quantum computing is that each q-bit is error prone, and the more q-bits a system has, the more errors it has. This error rate has proved to be a hard problem. The D-wave quantum annealing machine side-steps the issue by building a different sort of q-bits, that interact differently than in a general purpose quantum computer. The errors become much less of a problem, but you get a much less powerful primitive. And this is why annealing machines can’t run Shor’s algorithm.

The news this week is that researchers actually demonstrated a different technique on a D-wave machine that did actually factor an RSA key. From a research and engineering perspective, it is excellent work. But it doesn’t necessarily demonstrate the exponential speedup that would be required to break real-world RSA keys. To put it into perspective, you can literally crack a 22 bit RSA key by hand.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Quantum RSA Break, Out Of Scope, And Spoofing Packets” →

This Week In Security: The Internet Archive, Glitching With A Lighter, And Firefox In-the-wild

October 11, 2024 by 7 Comments

The Internet Archive has been hacked. This is an ongoing story, but it looks like this started at least as early as September 28, while the site itself was showing a creative message on October 9th, telling visitors they should be watching for their email addresses to show up on Have I Been Pwnd.

There are questions still. The site defacement seems to have included either a subdomain takeover, or a long tail attack resulting from the polyfill takeover. So far my money is on something else as the initial vector, and the polyfill subdomain as essentially a red herring.

Troy Hunt has confirmed that he received 31 million records, loaded them into the HIBP database, and sent out notices to subscribers. The Internet Archive had email addresses, usernames, and bcrypt hashed passwords.

In addition, the Archive has been facing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks off and on this week. It’s open question whether the same people are behind the breach, the message, and the DDoS. So far it looks like one group or individual is behind both the breach and vandalism, and another group, SN_BLACKMETA, is behind the DDoS.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: The Internet Archive, Glitching With A Lighter, And Firefox In-the-wild” →

The Internet Archive Has Been Hacked

October 10, 2024 by 33 Comments

There are a great many organizations out there, all with their own intentions—some selfish, some selfless, some that land somewhere in between. Most would put the Internet Archive in the category of the library—with its aim of preserving and providing knowledge for the aid of all who might call on it. Sadly, as [theresnotime] reports, it appears this grand institution has been hacked.

On Wednesday, users visiting the Internet Archive were greeted with a foreboding popup that stated the following:

Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!

The quote appears to refer to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), a site that collates details of security breaches so individuals can check if their details have been compromised.

According to founder Brewster Kahle, the site was apparently DDOS’d, with the site defaced via a JavaScript library. It’s believed this may have been a polyfill supply chain attack. As for the meat of the hack, it appears the individuals involved made off with usernames, emails, and encrypted and salted passwords. Meanwhile, as Wired reports, it appears Have I Been Pwned first received the stolen data of 31 million users on September 30.

At the time of writing, it appears the Internet Archive has restored the website to some degree of normal operation. It’s sad to see one of the Internet’s most useful and humble institutions fall victim to a hack like this one. As is always the way, no connected machine is ever truly safe, no matter how much we might hope that’s not the case.

[Thanks to Sammy for the tip!]

The Piezoelectric Glitching Attack

October 7, 2024 by 18 Comments

Many readers will be familiar with the idea of a glitching attack, introducing electrical noise into a computer circuit in the hope of disrupting program flow and causing unexpected behaviour which might lead to hitherto unavailable access to memory or other system resources. [David Buchanan] has written a piece investigating glitching attacks on PC memory, and the tool he’s used is the ubiquitous piezoelectric lighter.

Attaching a short piece of wire to one of the lines on a SODIMM memory module, he can glitch a laptop at will with the lighter through the electromagnetic noise its discharge creates. It’s a cool trick, but the real meat of the write-up lies in his comprehensive description of how virtual memory works, and how a glitch can be used to break out of the “sandbox” of memory allocated to a particular process. He demonstrates it in a video which we’ve placed below the break, in which he gains root access and runs an arbitrary piece of code on a Linux laptop. It’s probable that not many of us have the inclination to do this for ourselves, but even so it’s fascinating to know how such an attack works.

Continue reading “The Piezoelectric Glitching Attack” →

This Week In Security: Zimbra, DNS Poisoning, And Perfctl

October 4, 2024 by 6 Comments

Up first this week is a warning for the few of us still brave enough to host our own email servers. If you’re running Zimbra, it’s time to update, because CVE-2024-45519 is now being exploited in the wild.

That vulnerability is a pretty nasty one, though thankfully requires a specific change from default settings to be exposed. The problem is in postjournal. This logging option is off by default, but when it’s turned on, it logs incoming emails. One of the fields on an incoming SMTP mail object is the RCPT TO: field, with the recipients made of the to, cc, and bcc fields. When postjournal logs this field, it does so by passing it as a bash argument. That execution wasn’t properly sanitized, and wasn’t using a safe call like execvp(). So, it was possible to inject commands using the $() construction.

The details of the attack are known, and researchers are seeing early exploratory attempts to exploit this vulnerability. At least one of these campaigns is attempting to install webshells, so at least some of those attempts have teeth. The attack seems to be less reliable when coming from outside of the trusted network, which is nice, but not something to rely on.

New Tool Corner

What is that binary doing on your system? Even if you don’t do any security research, that’s a question you may ask yourself from time to time. A potential answer is WhoYouCalling. The wrinkle here is that WYC uses the Windows Event Tracing mechanism to collect the network traffic strictly from the application in question. So it’s a Windows only application for now. What you get is a packet capture from a specific executable and all of its children processes, with automated DNS capture to go along. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Zimbra, DNS Poisoning, And Perfctl” →

MikroPhone – Open, Secure, Simple Smartphone

October 2, 2024 by 27 Comments

Modern smartphones try and provide a number of useful features to their users, and yet, they’re not exactly designed with human needs in mind. A store-bought smartphone will force a number of paradigms and features onto you no matter whether you want them, and, to top it off, it will encroach on your privacy and sell your data. It’s why self-built and hacker-friendly smartphone projects keep popping up, and the MikroPhone project fills a new niche for sure, with its LTE connectivity making it a promising option for all hackers frustrated with the utter state of smartphones today.

MikroPhone is open-source in every single aspect possible, and it’s designed to be privacy-friendly and easy to understand. At its core is a SiFive Freedom E310, a powerful RISC-V microcontroller – allowing for a feature phone-like OS that is easy to audit and hard to get bogged down by. You’re not limited to a feature phone OS, however – on the PCB, you will find a slot for an NXP i.MX8M-based module that can run a Linux-based mobile OS of your choice. MikroPhone’s display and touchscreen are shared between the Linux module and the onboard MCU, a trick that reminds us of the MCH2022 badge – you get as much “smartphone” as you currently need, no more, no less.

The cool features at MikroPhone’s core don’t end here. The MikroPhone has support for end-to-end encrypted communications, kept to its feature-phone layer, making for a high bar of privacy protection – even when the higher-power module might run an OS that you don’t necessarily fully trust. Currently, MikroPhone is a development platform, resembling the PinePhone’s Project Don’t Be Evil board back when PinePhone was just starting out, and just like with PinePhone, it wouldn’t be hard to minify this platform into a pocket-friendly form-factor, either. The PinePhone has famously become a decent smartphone replacement option in the hacker world, even helping kick off a few mobile OS projects and resulting in a trove of hacks to grace our pages.