Security Hacks

1425 Articles

This Week In Security: DNSSEC Temporarily Lost Their Keys, FIDO, And One Weird Windows Trick

February 21, 2020 by 12 Comments

DNSSEC is the system that allows for cryptographically secure DNS. It’s all based on a root cryptographic key, maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Ever wondered where the root Key Signing Key is stored, and how it’s accessed? Four times a year, a ceremony is held where the root key is pulled out of a physical safe, and maintenance tasks are performed in front of a group of witnesses.

Such an event was scheduled for February 12th, but a teensy problem was discovered. One of the safes that holds the key media had a broken lock, and the root key signing key was inaccessible for a few days while repairs were effected. The open nature of IANA means that much of their operations are publicly reported, and you can even watch the key signing ceremony, which was finally held on February 16th.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: DNSSEC Temporarily Lost Their Keys, FIDO, And One Weird Windows Trick” →

Password Keeper Uses Off-The-Shelf Formfactor

February 19, 2020 by 25 Comments

With every website these days demanding the creation of an account, it can become difficult to remember so many logins. Each password should ideally be unique, lest a leak from your fantasy football game cost you thousands in stolen bitcoins. To help, [vcch] developed a password vault, using an interesting off-the-shelf platform.

The platform in question is the M5stickC, which packs an ESP32, color LCD, and battery into an attractive orange enclosure. It’s even got USB-C, making it a tool with an eye on the future. It serves as a quick way to get a basic IOT project up and running, without having to fuss about designing your own enclosure or basic power supply hardware.

On this platform, [vcch] created a tool to make keeping track of passwords easy. The PassStrong, as it’s called, can store a huge number of passwords, and communicates with the host PC over Bluetooth. The interface makes good use of the LCD, displaying the current mode and function of each button on the device for the user. It’s capable of working in both QWERTY and AZERTY environments, which should appeal to European users.

The M5StickC is a perfect choice in this regard, packing enough buttons and the required Bluetooth hardware to get the job done. No need to spend any time integrating modules – simply open the box and get to coding. We expect to see more developments in this space in future, and look forward to the efficiency gains this will bring to all kinds of projects!

Wearable Cone Of Silence Protects You From Prying Ears

February 17, 2020 by 36 Comments

Careful,  the walls have ears. Or more specifically, the smart speaker on the table has ears, as does the phone in your pocket, the fitness band on your wrist, possibly the TV, the fridge, the toaster, and maybe even the toilet. Oh, and your car is listening to you too. Probably.

How does one fight this profusion of listening devices? Perhaps this wearable smart device audio jammer will do the trick. The idea is that the MEMS microphones that surround us are all vulnerable to jamming by ultrasonic waves, due to the fact that they have a non-linear response to ultrasonic signals. The upshot of that is when a MEMS hears ultrasound, it creates a broadband signal in the audible part of the spectrum. That creates a staticky noise that effectively drowns out any other sounds the microphone might be picking up.

By why a wearable? Granted, [Yuxin Chin] and colleagues from the University of Chicago have perhaps stretched the definition of that term a tad with their prototype, but it turns out that moving the jammer around does a better job of blocking sounds than a static jammer does. The bracelet jammer is studded with ultrasonic transducers that emit overlapping fields and result in zones of constructive and destructive interference; the wearer’s movements vary the location of the dead spots that result, improving jamming efficacy. Their paper (PDF link) goes into deeper detail, and a GitHub repository has everything you need to roll your own.

We saw something a bit like this before, but that build used white noise for masking, and was affixed to the smart speaker. We’re intrigued by a wearable, especially since they’ve shown it to be effective under clothing. And the effect of ultrasound on MEMS microphones is really interesting.

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This Week In Security: Robinhood, Apple Mail, ASLR, And More Windows 7

February 14, 2020 by 10 Comments

First off this week, a ransomware named Robinhood has a novel trick up its sleeve. The trick? Loading an old known-vulnerable signed driver, and then using a vulnerability in that driver to get a malicious kernel driver loaded.

A Gigabyte driver unintentionally exposed an interface that allows unfettered kernel level read and write access. Because it’s properly signed, Windows will happily load the driver. The ransomware code uses that interface to turn off the bit that enforces the loading of signed drivers only. From there, loading a malicious driver is trivial. Robinhood uses it’s kernel-level access to disable anti-virus applications before launching the data encryption.

This is a striking example of the weakness of binary signing without a mechanism to revoke those signatures. In an ideal world, once the vulnerability was found and an update released, the older, vulnerable driver would have its signature revoked.

The last Windows 7 Update For Real This Time, Maybe

More news in the ongoing saga of Windows 7/Server 2008 reaching end-of-life. KB4539602 was released this patch Tuesday, fixing the black background problem introduced in the last “final” round of updates. Surely that’s the last we’ll hear of this saga, right?

Not so fast. Apparently that patch has led to multiple Windows Server 2008 machines failing to boot after install. According to Microsoft, the problem is a missing previous patch that updates SHA-2 support. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Robinhood, Apple Mail, ASLR, And More Windows 7” →

USB Password Keeper Runs On Tiny Chip

February 8, 2020 by 37 Comments

The most important rule of password use, especially when used for online logins, is to avoid reusing passwords. From there, one’s method of keeping track of multiple passwords can vary considerably. While memorization is an option in theory, in practice a lot of people make use of a password manager like Lastpass or KeePass. For those with increased security concerns, though, you may want to implement a USB password keeper like this one based on an ATtiny.

This password keeper, called “snopf”, is a USB device with an ATtiny85 which adds a layer of separation to password keeping that increases security substantially. Passwords are created by the USB device itself using a 128-bit key to generate the passwords, which are physically detached from the computer. Password requests are made by the computer to the USB device, but the user must push a button on the snopf in order to send the password to the computer. It does this by emulating a keyboard, keeping the password information off of the computer’s clipboard.

Of course, snopf isn’t perfectly secure, and the project’s creator [Hajo] goes into detail on the project’s page about some of the potential vulnerabilities. For most use cases, though, none of these are of serious concern. Upgrading your password keeper to a physical device is likely to be a huge security improvement regardless, and one was actually developed on Hackaday a few years ago.

This Week In Security: Google Photos, Whatsapp, And Doom On Deskphones

February 7, 2020 by 12 Comments

Google Photos is handy. You take pictures and videos on your cell phone, and they automatically upload to the cloud. If you’re anything like me, however, every snap comes with a self-reminder that “the cloud” is a fancy name for someone else’s server. What could possibly go wrong? How about some of your videos randomly included in another user’s downloads?

Confirmed by Google themselves, this bug hit those using Google Takeout, the service that allows you to download all your data from a Google application, as a single archive. Google Photos archives downloaded between November 21 and November 25 may contain videos from other users, according to a notice sent to the users who downloaded said archives. It’s notable that those notices haven’t been sent to users who’s videos were exposed.
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This Week In Security: OpenSMTPD, Kali Release, Scareware, Intel, And Unintended Consequences

January 31, 2020 by 15 Comments

If you run an OpenBSD server, or have OpenSMTPD running on a server, go update it right now. Version 6.6.2, released January 28th, fixes an exploit that can be launched locally or remotely, simply by connecting to the SMTP service. This was found by Qualys, who waited till the update was released to publish their findings.

It’s a simple logic flaw in the code that checks incoming messages. If an incoming message has either an invalid sender’s username, or invalid domain, the message is sent into error handling logic. That logic checks if the domain is an empty string, in which case, the mail is processed as a local message, sent to the localhost domain. Because the various parts of OpenSMTPD operate by executing commands, this logic flaw allows an attacker to inject unexpected symbols into those commands. The text of the email serves as the script to run, giving an attacker plenty of room to totally own a system as a result.

Browser Locker

“Your browser has been locked to prevent damage from a virus. Please call our Windows help desk immediately to prevent further damage.” Sound familiar? I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve gotten from freaked-out customers, who stumbled upon a scare-ware site that locked their browser. This sort of scam is called a browlock, and one particular campaign was pervasive enough to catch the attention of the researchers at Malwarebytes (Note, the picture at the top of their article says “404 error”, a reference to a technique used by the scam. Keep reading, the content should be below that.).

“WOOF”, Malwarebyte’s nickname for this campaign, was unusual both in its sophistication and the chutzpah of those running it. Browsers were hit via ads right on the MSN homepage and other popular sites. Several techniques were used to get the malicious ads onto legitimate sites. The most interesting part of the campaign is the techniques used to only deliver the scareware payload to target computers, and avoid detection by automated scanners.

It seems that around the time Malwarebytes published their report, the central command and control infrastructure behind WOOF was taken down. It’s unclear if this was a coincidence, or was a result of the scrutiny they were under from the security community. Hopefully WOOF is gone for good, and won’t simply show up at a different IP address in a few days.

Kali Linux

Kali Linux, the distribution focused on security and penetration testing, just shipped a shiny new release. A notable new addition to the Kali lineup is a rootless version of their Android app. Running an unrooted Android, and interested in having access to some security tools on the go? Kali now has your back.

Not all the tools will work without root, particularly those that require raw sockets, and sending malformed packets. It’s still a potentially useful tool to put into your toolbox.

Cacheout, VRD, and Intel iGPU Leaks

Intel can’t catch a break, with three separate problems to talk about. First up is cacheout, or more properly, CVE-2020-0549, also known as L1DES. It’s a familiar song and dance, just a slightly different way to get there. On a context switch, data in the Level 1 cache isn’t entirely cleared, and known side-channel attacks can be used to read that data from unprivileged execution.

VRD, Vector Register Sampling, is another Intel problem just announced. So far, it seems to be a less exploitable problem, and microcode updates are expected soon to fix the issue.

The third issue is a bit different. Instead of the CPU, this is a data leak via the integrated GPU. You may be familiar with the most basic form of this problem. Some video games will flash garbage on the screen for a few moments while loading. In some cases, rather than just garbage, images, video stills, and other graphics can appear. Why? GPUs don’t necessarily have the same strict separation of contexts that we expect from CPUs. A group of researchers realized that the old assumptions no longer apply, as nearly every application is video accelerated to some degree. They published a proof of concept, linked above, that demonstrates the flaw. Before any details were released, Phoronix covered the potential performance hit this would cause on Linux, and it’s not great.

Unintended Legal Consequences

Remember the ransomware attack that crippled Baltimore, MD? Apparently the Maryland legislature decided to step in and put an end to ransomware, by passing yet another law to make it illegal. I trust you’ll forgive my cynicism, but the law in question is a slow-moving disaster. Among other things, it could potentially make the public disclosure of vulnerabilities a crime, all while doing absolutely nothing to actually make a difference.

GE Medical Equipment Scores 10/10

While scoring a 10 out of 10 is impressive, it’s not something to be proud of, when we’re talking about a CVE score, where it’s the most critical rating. GE Healthcare, subsidiary of General Electric, managed five separate 10.0 CVEs in healthcare equipment that they manufacture, and an 8.5 for a sixth. Among the jewels are statements like:

In the case of the affected devices, the configuration also contains a private key. …. The same private key is universally shared across an entire line of devices in the CARESCAPE and GE Healthcare family of products.

The rest of the vulnerabilities are just as crazy. Hard-coded SMB passwords, a network KVM that has no credential checking, and ancient VNC versions. We’ve known for quite some time that some medical equipment is grossly insecure. It will apparently take a security themed repeat of the Therac-25 incident before changes take place.

Odds’n’ends

The Windows 7 saga continues, as Microsoft’s “last” update for the venerable OS broke many users’ desktop backgrounds. Microsoft plans to release a fix.

Firefox purged almost 200 extensions from their official portal over the last few weeks. It was found that over 100 extensions by 2Ring was secretly pulling and running code from a central server.

The Citrix problems we discussed last week has finally been addressed, and patches released, but not soon enough to prevent the installation of future-proof backdoors on devices in the wild. There are already plenty of reports of compromised devices. Apparently the exploitation has been so widespread, that Citrix has developed a scanning tool to check for the indicators of compromise (IoCs) on your devices. Apply patch, check for backdoors.