As it stands on the modern Internet, your data is no longer your own. Your emails, photos, and posts all live on servers owned by large corporations. Their policies give them access to your data, which is mined to generate advertising revenue. And if you want your data back, there are innumerable hoops to jump through. Want it deleted entirely? Good luck.
Tim Berners-Lee, original creator of the World Wide Web, is behind the project.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as the original creator of what became the Web, has drawn issue with the current state of play. To move the ball on the issue, he’s been working on a design for decentralized internet and the efforts have led to the establishment of the Solid project. The goal is to rectify online privacy and ownership issues and give users greater control over their personal data.
The big question is how do you do that? When SOLID was announced last year there were few if any details on the approach taken by the program. But since then, more details have surface and you can even take an early version of the program for a spin. Let’s take a look.
LILIN DVRs and cameras are being actively exploited by a surprisingly sophisticated botnet campaign. There are three separate 0-day vulnerabilities being exploited in an ongoing campaigns. If you have a device built by LILIN, go check for firmware updates, and if your device is exposed to the internet, entertain the possibility that it was compromised.
The vulnerabilities include a hardcoded username/password, command injection in the FTP and NTP server fields, and an arbitrary file read vulnerability. Just the first vulnerability is enough to convince me to avoid black-box DVRs, and keep my IP cameras segregated from the wider internet.
Sometimes it feels as though all the good physical interactions with machines have disappeared. Given our current germ warfare situation, that is probably a good thing. But if fewer than ten people ever will be touching something, it’s probably okay to have a little fun and make your own interfaces for things.
The console is centered around a Yubikey, which is type of hardware dongle for 2FA. Flipping the guarded toggle switch will initiate the launch sequence, and then it’s time to insert the Yubikey into the 3D-printed lock cylinder and wait for authorization. If the Raspberry Pi decides all systems are go, then the key can be turned ninety degrees and the mushroom button mashed. You have our permission to peek at the declassified demo after the break. Stick around for a CAD view inside the lock cylinder.
As the world sits back and waits for Coronavirus to pass, the normally frantic pace of security news has slowed just a bit. Google is not exempt, and Chrome 81 has been delayed as a result. Major updates to Chrome and Chrome OS are paused indefinitely, but security updates will continue as normal. In fact, Google has verified that the security related updates will be packaged as minor updates to Chrome 80.
Chinese Viruses Masquerading as Chinese Viruses
Speaking of COVID-19, researchers at Check Point Research stumbled upon a malware campaign that takes advantage of the current health scare. A pair of malicious RTF documents were being sent to various Mongolian targets. Created with a tool called “Royal Road“, these files target a set of older Microsoft Word vulnerabilities.
This particular attack drops its payload in the Microsoft Word startup folder, waiting for the next time Word is launched to run the next stage. This is a clever strategy, as it would temporarily deflect attention from the malicious files. The final payload is a custom RAT (Remote Access Trojan) that can take screenshots, upload and download files, etc.
While the standard disclaimer about the difficulty of attribution does apply, this particular attack seems to be originating from Chinese intelligence agencies. While the Coronavirus angle is new, this campaign seems to stretch back to 2017. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Working From Home Edition”→
Ready for more speculative execution news? Hope so, because both Intel and AMD are in the news this week.
The first story is Load Value Injection, a different approach to reading arbitrary memory. Rather than try to read protected memory, LVI turns that on its head by injecting data into a target’s data. The processor speculatively executes based on that bad data, eventually discovers the fault, and unwinds the execution. As per other similar attacks, the execution still changes the under-the-hood state of the processor in ways that an attacker can detect.
What’s the actual attack vector where LVI could be a problem? Imagine a scenario where a single server hosts multiple virtual machines, and uses Intel’s Secure Guard eXentensions enclave to keep the VMs secure. The low-level nature of the attack means that not even SGX is safe.
The upside here is that the attack is quite difficult to pull off, and isn’t considered much of a threat to home users. On the other hand, the performance penalty of the suggested fixes can be pretty severe. It’s still early in the lifetime of this particular vulnerability, so keep an eye out for further updates.
AMD’s Takeaway Bug
AMD also found itself on the receiving end of a speculative execution attack (PDF original paper here). Collide+Probe and Load+Reload are the two specific attacks discovered by an international team of academics. The attacks are based around the reverse-engineering of a hash function used to speed up cache access. While this doesn’t leak protected data quite like Spectre and Meltdown, it still reveals internal data from the CPU. Time will tell where exactly this technique will lead in the future.
To really understand what’s going on here, we have to start with the concept of a hash table. This idea is a useful code paradigm that shows up all over the place. Python dictionaries? Hash tables under the hood.
Imagine you have a set of a thousand values, and need to check whether a specific value is part of that set. Iterating over that entire set of values is a computationally expensive proposition. The alternative is to build a hash table. Create an array of a fixed length, let’s say 256. The trick is to use a hash function to sort the values into this array, using the first eight bits of the hash output to determine which array location each value is stored in.
When you need to check whether a value is present in your set, simply run that value through the hash function, and then check the array cell that corresponds to the hash output. You may be ahead of me on the math — yes, that works out to about four different values per array cell. These hash collisions are entirely normal for a hash table. The lookup function simply checks all the values held in the appropriate cell. It’s still far faster than searching the whole table.
AMD processors use a hash table function to check whether memory requests are present in L1 cache. The Takeaway researchers figured out that hash function, and can use hash collisions to leak information. When the hash values collide, the L1 cache has two separate chunks of memory that need to occupy the same cache line. It handles this by simply discarding the older data when loading the colliding memory. An attacker can abuse this by measuring the latency of memory lookups.checking
If an attacker knows the memory location of the target data, he can allocate memory in a different location that will be stored in the same cache line. Then by repeatedly loading his allocated memory, he knows whether the target location has been accessed since his last check. What real world attack does that enable? One of the interesting ones is mapping out the memory layout of ASLR/KASLR memory. It was also suggested that Takeaway could be combined with the Spectre attack.
There are two interesting wrinkles to this story. First, some have pointed out the presence of a thank-you to Intel in the paper’s acknowledgements. “Additional funding was provided by generous gifts from Intel.” This makes it sound like Intel has been funding security research into AMD processors, though it’s not clear what exactly this refers to.
Lastly, AMD’s response has been underwhelming. At the time of writing, their official statement is that “AMD believes these are not new speculation-based attacks.” Now that the paper has been publicly released, that statement will quickly be proven to be either accurate or misinformed.
Closed Source Privacy?
The Google play store and iOS app store is full of apps that offer privacy, whether it be a VPN, adblocker, or some other amazing sounding application. The vast majority of those apps, however, are closed source, meaning that you have little more than trust in the app publisher to ensure that your privacy is really being helped. In the case of Sensor Tower, it seems that faith is woefully misplaced.
A typical shell game is played, with paper companies appearing to provide apps like Luna VPN and Adblock Focus. While technically providing the services they claim to provide, the real aim of both apps is to send data back to Sensor Tower. When it’s possible, open source is the way to go, but even an open source app can’t protect you against a malicious VPN provider.
Does the word “#backdoor” seem frightening? That’s because it’s often used incorrectly – sometimes to deliberately create fear. Watch to learn the truth about backdoors and other types of network access. #cybersecuritypic.twitter.com/NEUXbZbcqw
[Robert Graham] thought the whole story was fishy, and decided to write about it. He makes two important points. First, the Wall Street Journal article cites anonymous US officials. In his opinion, this is a huge red flag, and means that the information is either entirely false, or an intentional spin, and is being fed to journalists in order to shape the news. His second point is that Huawei’s redefinition of government-mandated backdoors as “front doors” takes the line of the FBI, and the Chinese Communist Party, that governments should be able to listen in on your communications at their discretion.
Graham shares a story from a few years back, when his company was working on Huawei brand mobile telephony equipment in a given country. While they were working, there was an unspecified international incident, and Graham watched the logs as a Huawei service tech remoted into the cell tower nearest the site of the incident. After the information was gathered, the logs were scrubbed, and the tech logged out as if nothing had happened.
Did this tech also work for the Chinese government? The NSA? The world will never know, but the fact is that a government-mandated “front door” is still a back door from the users’ perspective: they are potentially being snooped on without their knowledge or consent. The capability for abuse is built-in, whether it’s mandated by law or done in secret. “Front doors” are back doors. Huawei’s gear may not be dirtier than anyone else’s in this respect, but that’s different from saying it’s clean.
Abusing Regex to Fool Google
[xdavidhu] was poking at Google’s Gmail API, and found a widget that caught him by surprise. A button embedded on the page automatically generated an API key. Diving into the Javascript running on that page, as well as an iframe that gets loaded, he arrived at an ugly regex string that was key to keeping the entire process secure. He gives us a tip, www.debuggex.com, a regex visualizer, which he uses to find a bug in Google’s JS code. The essence of the bug is that part of the URL location is interpreted as being the domain name. “www.example.com\.corp.google.com” is considered to be a valid URL, pointing at example.com, but Google’s JS code sees the whole string as a domain, and thinks it must be a Google domain.
For his work, [xdavidhu] was awarded $6,000 because this bit of ugly regex is actually used in quite a few places throughout Google’s infrastructure.
SMBv3 Wormable Flaw
Microsoft’s SMBv3 implementation in Windows 10 and Server 2019 has a vulnerability in how it handles on-the-fly compression, CVE-2020-0796. A malicious packet using compression is enough to trigger a buffer overflow and remote code execution. It’s important to note that this vulnerability doesn’t required an authenticated user. Any unpatched, Internet-accessible server can be compromised. The flaw exists in both server and client code, so an unpatched Windows 10 client can be compromised by connecting to a malicious server.
There seems to have been a planned coordinated announcement of this bug, corresponding with Microsoft’s normal Patch Tuesday, as both Fortinet and Cisco briefly had pages discussing it on their sites. Apparently the patch was planned for that day, and was pulled from the release at the last moment. Two days later, on Thursday the 12th, a fix was pushed via Windows update. If you have Windows 10 machines or a Server 2019 install you’re responsible for, go make sure it has this update, as proof-of-concept code is already being developed.
But of course these smart speakers are listening all the time, at least locally. How else are they going to know that someone uttered one of their wake words, or something close enough? It would sure help a lot if we could change the wake word to something like ‘rutabaga’ or ‘supercalifragilistic’, but they probably have ASICs that are made to listen for a few specific words. On the Echo for example, your only choices are “Alexa”, “Amazon”, “Echo”, or “Computer”.
So how often are smart speakers listening when they shouldn’t? A team of researchers at Boston’s Northeastern University are conducting an ongoing study to determine just how bad the problem really is. They’ve set up an experiment to generate unexpected activation triggers and study them inside and out.
What do potato chips and lost car keys have in common? On the surface, it would seem not much, unless you somehow managed to lose your keys in a bag of chips, which would be embarrassing enough that you’d likely never speak of it. But there is a surprising link between the two, and Samy Kamkar makes the association in his newly published 2019 Superconference talk, which he called “FPGA Glitching and Side-Channel Attacks.”
