This Week In Security: Encrypted Messaging, NSO’s Judgement, And AI CVE DDoS

May 9, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

Cryptographic messaging has been in the news a lot recently. Like the formal audit of WhatsApp (the actual PDF). And the results are good. There are some minor potential problems that the audit highlights, but they are of questionable real-world impact. The most consequential is how easy it is to add additional members to a group chat. Or to put it another way, there are no cryptographic guarantees associated with adding a new user to a group.

The good news is that WhatsApp groups don’t allow new members to read previous messages. So a user getting added to a group doesn’t reveal historic messages. But a user added without being noticed can snoop on future messages. There’s an obvious question, as to how this is a weakness. Isn’t it redundant, since anyone with the permission to add someone to a group, can already read the messages from that group?

That’s where the lack of cryptography comes in. To put it simply, the WhatsApp servers could add users to groups, even if none of the existing users actually requested the addition. It’s not a vulnerability per se, but definitely a design choice to keep in mind. Keep an eye on the members in your groups, just in case. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Encrypted Messaging, NSO’s Judgement, And AI CVE DDoS” →

Rayhunter Sniffs Out Stingrays For $30

May 5, 2025 by Lewin Day 37 Comments

These days, if you’re walking around with a cellphone, you’ve basically fitted an always-on tracking device to your person. That’s even more the case if there happens to be an eavesdropping device in your vicinity. To combat this, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has created Rayhunter as a warning device.

Rayhunter is built to detect IMSI catchers, also known as Stingrays in the popular lexicon. These are devices that attempt to capture your phone’s IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) number by pretending to be real cell towers. Information on these devices is tightly controlled by manufacturers, which largely market them for use by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

To run Rayhunter, all you need is an Orbic RC400L mobile hotspot, which you can currently source for less than $30 USD online. Though experience tells us that could change as the project becomes more popular with hackers. The project offers an install script that will compile the latest version of the software and flash it to the device from a computer running Linux or macOS — Windows users currently have to jump through a few extra hoops to get the same results.

Rayhunter works by analyzing the control traffic between the cell tower and the hotspot to look out for hints of IMSI-catcher activity. Common telltale signs are requests to switch a connection to less-secure 2G standards, or spurious queries for your device’s IMSI. If Rayhunter notes suspicious activity, it turns a line on the Orbic’s display red as a warning. The device’s web interface can then be accessed for more information.

While IMSI catchers really took off on less-secure 2G networks, there are developments that allow similar devices to work on newer cellular standards, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own projects built around cellular security, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

This Week In Security: AirBorne, EvilNotify, And Revoked RDP

May 2, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 2 Comments

This week, Oligo has announced the AirBorne series of vulnerabilities in the Apple Airdrop protocol and SDK. This is a particularly serious set of issues, and notably affects MacOS desktops and laptops, the iOS and iPadOS mobile devices, and many IoT devices that use the Apple SDK to provide AirPlay support. It’s a group of 16 CVEs based on 23 total reported issues, with the ramifications ranging from an authentication bypass, to local file reads, all the way to Remote Code Execution (RCE).

AirPlay is a WiFi based peer-to-peer protocol, used to share or stream media between devices. It uses port 7000, and a custom protocol that has elements of both HTTP and RTSP. This scheme makes heavy use of property lists (“plists”) for transferring serialized information. And as we well know, serialization and data parsing interfaces are great places to look for vulnerabilities. Oligo provides an example, where a plist is expected to contain a dictionary object, but was actually constructed with a simple string. De-serializing that plist results in a malformed dictionary, and attempting to access it will crash the process.

Another demo is using AirPlay to achieve an arbitrary memory write against a MacOS device. Because it’s such a powerful primative, this can be used for zero-click exploitation, though the actual demo uses the music app, and launches with a user click. Prior to the patch, this affected any MacOS device with AirPlay enabled, and set to either “Anyone on the same network” or “Everyone”. Because of the zero-click nature, this could be made into a wormable exploit. Continue reading “This Week In Security: AirBorne, EvilNotify, And Revoked RDP” →

This Week In Security: XRP Poisoned, MCP Bypassed, And More

April 25, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 7 Comments

Researchers at Aikido run the Aikido Intel system, an LLM security monitor that ingests the feeds from public package repositories, and looks for anything unusual. In this case, the unusual activity was five rapid-fire releases of the xrpl package on NPM. That package is the XRP Ledger SDK from Ripple, used to manage keys and build crypto wallets. While quick point releases happen to the best of developers, these were odd, in that there were no matching releases in the source GitHub repository. What changed in the first of those fresh releases?

The most obvious change is the checkValidityOfSeed() function added to index.ts. That function takes a string, and sends a request to a rather odd URL, using the supplied string as the ad-referral header for the HTML request. The name of the function is intended to blend in, but knowing that the string parameter is sent to a remote web server is terrifying. The seed is usually the root of trust for an individual’s cryptocurrency wallet. Looking at the actual usage of the function confirms, that this code is stealing credentials and keys.

The releases were made by a Ripple developer’s account. It’s not clear exactly how the attack happened, though credential compromise of some sort is the most likely explanation. Each of those five releases added another bit of malicious code, demonstrating that there was someone with hands on keyboard, watching what data was coming in.

The good news is that the malicious releases only managed a total of 452 downloads for the few hours they were available. A legitimate update to the library, version 4.2.5, has been released. If you’re one of the unfortunate 452 downloads, it’s time to do an audit, and rotate the possibly affected keys. Continue reading “This Week In Security: XRP Poisoned, MCP Bypassed, And More” →

This Week In Security: No More CVEs, 4chan, And Recall Returns

April 18, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 7 Comments

The sky is falling. Or more specifically, it was about to fall, according to the security community this week. The MITRE Corporation came within a hair’s breadth of running out of its contract to maintain the CVE database. And admittedly, it would be a bad thing if we suddenly lost updates to the central CVE database. What’s particularly interesting is how we knew about this possibility at all. An April 15 letter sent to the CVE board warned that the specific contract that funds MITRE’s CVE and CWE work was due to expire on the 16th. This was not an official release, and it’s not clear exactly how this document was leaked.

Many people made political hay out of the apparent imminent carnage. And while there’s always an element of political maneuvering when it comes to contract renewal, it’s worth noting that it’s not unheard of for MITRE’s CVE funding to go down to the wire like this. We don’t know how many times we’ve been in this position in years past. Regardless, MITRE has spun out another non-profit, The CVE Foundation, specifically to see to the continuation of the CVE database. And at the last possible moment, CISA has announced that it has invoked an option in the existing contract, funding MITRE’s CVE work for another 11 months.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: No More CVEs, 4chan, And Recall Returns” →

A flowchart demonstrating the exploit described.

Vibe Check: False Packages A New LLM Security Risk?

April 12, 2025 by Tyler August 23 Comments

Lots of people swear by large-language model (LLM) AIs for writing code. Lots of people swear at them. Still others may be planning to exploit their peculiarities, according to [Joe Spracklen] and other researchers at USTA. At least, the researchers have found a potential exploit in ‘vibe coding’.

Everyone who has used an LLM knows they have a propensity to “hallucinate”– that is, to go off the rails and create plausible-sounding gibberish. When you’re vibe coding, that gibberish is likely to make it into your program. Normally, that just means errors. If you are working in an environment that uses a package manager, however (like npm in Node.js, or PiPy in Python, CRAN in R-studio) that plausible-sounding nonsense code may end up calling for a fake package.

A clever attacker might be able to determine what sort of false packages the LLM is hallucinating, and inject them as a vector for malicious code. It’s more likely than you think– while CodeLlama was the worst offender, the most accurate model tested (ChatGPT4) still generated these false packages at a rate of over 5%. The researchers were able to come up with a number of mitigation strategies in their full paper, but this is a sobering reminder that an AI cannot take responsibility. Ultimately it is up to us, the programmers, to ensure the integrity and security of our code, and of the libraries we include in it.

We just had a rollicking discussion of vibe coding, which some of you seemed quite taken with. Others agreed that ChatGPT is the worst summer intern ever. Love it or hate it, it’s likely this won’t be the last time we hear of security concerns brought up by this new method of programming.

Special thanks to [Wolfgang Friedrich] for sending this into our tip line.

This Week In Security: AI Spam, SAP, And Ivanti

April 11, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 13 Comments

AI continues to be used in new and exciting ways… like generating spam messages. Yes, it was inevitable, but we now have spammers using LLM to generate unique messages that don’t register as spam. AkiraBot is a Python-powered tool, designed to evade CAPTCHAs, and post sketchy SEO advertisements to web forms and chat boxes around the Internet.

AkiraBot uses a bunch of techniques to look like a legitimate browser, trying to avoid triggering CAPTCHAs. It also runs traffic through a SmartProxy service to spread the apparent source IP around. Some captured logs indicate that of over 400,000 attempted victim sites, 80,000 have successfully been spammed.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: AI Spam, SAP, And Ivanti” →