The past few days have been busy if you’re trying to keep up with the pace of computer security news. Between a serious Chromium bug that’s actively being exploited on Windows 7 systems, the NSA releasing one of their tools as an open source project, and a new Spectre-like speculative execution flaw in Intel processors, there’s a lot to digest.
Continue reading “Spoiler, Use-After-Free, And Ghidra: This Week In Computer Security”
As reported by The Register, hackers can now listen in on conversations happening around your computer by turning a hard drive into a microphone. There are caveats: the hack only works if these conversations are twice as loud as a blender, or about as loud as a lawn mower. In short, no one talks that loud, move along, nothing to see here.
The attack is to be presented at the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and describes the attack as a modification of the firmware on a disk drive to read the Position Error Signal that keeps read/write heads in the optimal position. This PES is affected by air pressure, and if something is affected by air pressure, you’ve got a microphone. In this case, it’s a terrible microphone that’s mechanically coupled to a machine that has a lot of vibrations including the spinning platter and a bunch of fans inside the computer. This is an academic exercise, and not a real attack, and either way to exfiltrate this data you need to root the computer the hard drive is attached to. It’s attacks all the way down.
The limiting factor in this attack is that it requires a very loud conversation to be held near a hard drive. To record speech, the researchers had to pump up the volume to 85 dBA, or about the same volume as a blender crushing some ice. Recording music through this microphone so that Shazam could identify the track meant playing the track back at 90 dBA, or about the same volume as a lawnmower. Basically, this isn’t happening.
The interesting bit of this hack isn’t using a hard drive as a microphone. It’s modifying the firmware on a hard drive to do something. We’ve seen some hacks like this before, but the latest public literature on hard drive firmware hacking is years old. If you’ve got a tip on how to hack hard drives, even if it’s to do something that’s horribly impractical, we’d love to see it.
“Don’t Be Evil” was the mantra of Google from years before even Gmail was created. While certainly less vague than their replacement slogan “Do the Right Thing”, there has been a lot of criticism directed at Google over the past decade and a half for repeatedly being at odds with one of their key values. It seems as though they took this criticism to heart (or found it easier to make money without the slogan), and subsequently dropped it in 2018. Nothing at Google changed, though, as the company has continued with several practices which at best could be considered shady.
The latest was the inclusion of an undisclosed microphone in parts of their smart home system, the Nest Guard. This is a member of the Nest family of products — it is not the thermostat itself, but a base station for a set of home security hardware you can install yourself. The real issue is that this base station was never billed as being voice activated. If you’re someone who has actively avoided installing “always-listening” style devices in your home, it’s infuriating to learn there is hardware out that have microphones in them but no mention of that in the marketing of the product. Continue reading “What Hardware Lies Beneath? Companies Swear They Never Meant To Violate Your Privacy”
Security researchers have found that it is possible to alter a digitally signed PDF without invalidating its signatures. To demonstrate it, they produced a fake document “refund order” of $1,000,000,000,000 dollars, with a valid signature from Amazon. This sparked my attention, since I was quite sure that they didn’t use some sort of quantum device to break the cryptography involved in the signing process. So what exactly is going on?
The researchers claim to found at least three different ways to, in their words:
… use an existing signed document (e.g., amazon.de invoice) and change the content of the document arbitrarily without invalidating the signatures. Thus, we can forge a document signed by invoicing@amazon.de to refund us one trillion dollars.
That’s not good news if you take into account that the main purpose of digitally signing a document is, well, prevent unauthorized changes in that document. The good news is that you can update your software to fix this flaws because of this research; the main PDF readers companies were given time to fix the issues. The bad news is that if you rely on the signature verification for any sensitive process, you likely want to go back and see if you were using vulnerable software previously and check that documents were correctly validated. I’m thinking about government institutions, banks, insurance companies and so on.
The implications are yet to be seen and probably won’t even be fully known.
There are three classes of attacks that work on different software. I’ll try to go into each one from what I could tell from reading the research.
If you weren’t scared of USB cables before, you should be now. The O.MG cable (or Offensive MG kit) from [MG] hides a backdoor inside the shell of a USB connector. Plug this cable into your computer and you’ll be the victim of remote attacks over WiFi.
You might be asking what’s inside this tiny USB cable to make it susceptible to such attacks. That’s the trick: inside the shell of the USB ‘A’ connector is a PCB loaded up with a WiFi microcontroller — the documentation doesn’t say which one — that will send payloads over the USB device. Think of it as a BadUSB device, like the USB Rubber Ducky from Hak5, but one that you can remote control. It is the ultimate way into a system, and all anyone has to do is plug a random USB cable into their computer.
In the years BadUSB — an exploit hidden in a device’s USB controller itself — was released upon the world, [MG] has been tirelessly working on making his own malicious USB device, and now it’s finally ready. The O.MG cable hides a backdoor inside the shell of a standard, off-the-shelf USB cable.
The construction of this device is quite impressive, in that it fits entirely inside a USB plug. But this isn’t a just a PCB from a random Chinese board house: [MG] spend 300 hours and $4000 in the last month putting this project together with a Bantam mill and created his own PCBs, with silk screen. That’s impressive no matter how you cut it.
Future updates to this cable that will hack any computer might include a port of ESPloitV2, an Open Source WiFi controlled USB HID keyboard emulator. That will bring a lot of power to this device that’s already extremely capable. In the video attached to this tweet you can see the O.MG cable connected to a MacBook, with [MG] opening up a webpage remotely.
The USB Rubber Ducky burst onto the scene a few years ago, and invented a new attack vector – keystroke injection. The malicious USB device presents itself as a keyboard to the target system, blurting out keystrokes at up to 1000 words per minute. The device is typically used to open a phishing site or otherwise enter commands to exfiltrate data from the victim. Now things have stepped up a notch, with ESPloitV2 – a WiFi-enabled take on the same concept.
Running on the Cactus WHID platform, the device is so named for the ESP12 WiFi microcontroller it employs, along with an Atmega 32u4 for USB HID device emulation. By virtue of its wireless connection, no longer does the aspiring hacker have to rely on pre-cooked routines. Various exploits can be stored in the ESP12’s spacious 4 megabytes of flash, and there’s even the potential to live type your attack if you’re feeling bold.
It goes to show that the trust we implicitly place in foreign USB devices is potentially our future downfall. BadUSB is another great example, and the USB Wrapper is a great way to get a charge if you’re stuck using an untrusted port.
Voja Antonic designed this fantastic retrocomputing badge for Hackaday Belgrade in 2018, and it was so much fun that we wanted to bring it stateside to the Supercon essentially unaltered. And that meant that Voja had some free time to devote to a new hardware giveaway: the Cube. So while his talk at Supercon in November was ostensibly about the badge, he just couldn’t help but tell us about his newer love, and some of the extremely clever features hidden within.
It’s funny how the hardware we design can sometimes reflect so much on the creator. Voja designed then-Yugoslavia’s first widely used home computer (and published the DIY plans in a magazine!). Thousands were built from their kits. The Galaksija was a Z80-based design with a custom BASIC that was just barely squeezed into the available 4K of ROM. So you shouldn’t be shocked that the retro-badge has a working keyboard and a nice BASIC on board.
But let’s jump ahead to the Cube, because that’s even more of a passion project. On the outside, they’re very simple devices, with only a USB port and a sweet diffused LED ring visible. Aesthetic? Minimalistic? Beautiful, honestly.
Continue reading “Voja Antonic: Designing The Cube”
