Security Hacks

1530 Articles

LockCon Coming Soon

September 14, 2008 by 2 Comments

The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) is planning a new annual gathering for lockpickers. October 9-12th they will hold the first ever LockCon in Sneek, Netherlands. The event was spawned from the Dutch Open lockpicking championships, but they’ve decided to expand beyond just competition into a full conference. This year the conference is limited to just 100 lockpickers, technicians, manufacturers, hackers, and law enforcement members. They’ll compete in picking competitions, safe manipulation, and key impressioning.

On a related note: Organizer [Barry Wels] just became the first non-German to win an SSDeV competition with his key impressioning skills. We covered key impressioning when we saw his talk about high security keys at The Last Hope. He says it’s only been about two years worth of study and 500 keys to become a master. He managed to open the lock in 5:13 filing two whole keys during that time.

[photo: Rija 2.0]

Passive Network Tap

September 14, 2008 by 32 Comments

Making a passive network tap can be an easy and inexpensive undertaking as shown in this Instructable. Passive monitoring or port mirroring is needed because most networks use switches which isolate the network traffic and this does not allow for the entire network to be monitored.  This example uses a single tap, using multiple taps will provide access to the full-duplex data separately. By using two taps you are able to monitor inbound data that is passed through one tap, and outbound data that is passed through the other tap.  Separate taps are desired because most sniffer software handles half-duplex traffic only and requires two network cards for full-duplex.

Continue reading “Passive Network Tap” →

Reverse Engineering Silicon Logic

September 13, 2008 by 4 Comments

[Karsten Nohl] has recently joined the team on Flylogic’s blog. You may remember him as part of the team that reverse engineered the crypto in MiFare RFID chips. In his first post, he starts out with the basics of identifying logic cells. By studying the specific layout of the transistors you can reproduce the actual logic functions of the chip. The end of post holds a challenge for next week (pictured above). It has 34 transistors, 3 inputs, 2 outputs, and time variant behavior. Also, check out the Silicon Zoo which catalogs individual logic cells for identification.

IPhone Screengrab Issues

September 13, 2008 by 8 Comments

This is unfortunately another story we missed out on while we were trying to keep things from burning down. We told you that [Jonathan Zdziarski] was going to demonstrate iPhone lock code bypassing in a webcast. The real surprise came when he pointed out that the iPhone takes a screenshot every time you use the home button. It does this so it can do the scaling animation. The image files are presumably deleted immediately, but as we’ve seen before it’s nearly impossible to guarantee deletion on a solid state device. There’s currently no way to disable this behavior. So, even privacy conscious people have no way to prevent their iPhone from filling up storage with screenshots of all their text message, email, and browsing activities. Hopefully Apple will address this problem just like they did with the previous secure erase issue. O’Reilly promises to publish the full webcast soon.

[via Gizmodo]

Israeli Hacker “the Analyzer” Arrested

September 6, 2008 by 4 Comments

The Israeli hacker [Ehud Tenenbaum], known as “the Analyzer”, was arrested along with 3 Canadians for allegedly hacking into a Calgary-based financial services company and withdrawing almost CDN $2 million. The arrests were the results of a months-long investigation by both the Canadian police and the U.S. Secret Service.  In 1998, [Tenenbaum] was accused of hacking into unclassified computer systems owned by NASA, and the Pentagon, among others. He is in custody without bail, although the three other suspects have been released on bond.

[thanks vor]

Security Flaw Allows Full Access To Locked IPhones

August 28, 2008 by 2 Comments

[greenmymac] on the MacRumors forums recently exposed a security flaw that allows anyone full access to a locked iPhone running firmware version 2.0.2. The flaw works by entering the emergency call menu of a locked iPhone, and double tapping the home button. This opens the iPhone’s Favorites menu, allowing anyone in your Favorites to be called. From here, an attacker has access to your SMS messages and potentially your email or Safari browser. While we are sure that Apple has a patch for this flaw on the way in the next firmware update, there is a temporary way to secure your locked iPhone. Simply enter the Settings menu on your iPhone and enter General > Home Button and select “Home” or “iPod”. Now when you double tap your home button, it will navigate to either your home screen or the iPod screen. While this fix might be annoying for some, as of right now it seems like the only way to secure your locked iPhone.

[photo: Refracted Moments™]

[via Gizmodo]

Testing IR Camera Blocking

August 27, 2008 by 37 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u5hAfnq2-4&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0][randy] from F.A.T. tested the theory that infrared LEDs can actually hide you from the prying eyes of surveillance cameras. We’ve previously covered camouflage, IR, and other suggestions for eluding the cameras, but haven’t taken to sewing stuff onto our clothes yet. [randy] lined his hoodie with high-intensity infrared LEDs, hoping to create a halo effect that would hide his head, and tested his results. Unfortunately, his efforts were unsuccessful. He tested many many different combinations and we’re confident in his conclusion that it would be very hard to make this work.