Security Hacks

1459 Articles

This Week In Security: Facebook Hacked Your Email, Cyber On The Power Grid, And A Nasty Zero-day

May 1, 2019 by 33 Comments

Ah, Facebook. Only you could mess up email verification this badly, and still get a million people to hand over their email address passwords. Yes, you read that right, Facebook’s email verification scheme was to ask users for their email address and email account password. During the verification, Facebook automatically downloaded the account’s contact list, with no warning and no way to opt out.

The amount of terrible here is mind-boggling, but perhaps we need a new security rule-of-thumb for these kind of situations. Don’t ever give an online service the password to a different service. In order to make use of a password in this case, it’s necessary to handle it in plain-text. It’s not certain how long Facebook stored these passwords, but they also recently disclosed that they have been storing millions of Facebook and Instagram passwords in plain-text internally.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has been called out for serious privacy shenanigans, either: In early 2018 it was revealed that the Facebook Android app had been uploading phone call records without informing users. Mark Zuckerberg has recently outlined his plan to give Facebook a new focus on privacy. Time will tell whether any real change will occur.

Cyber Can Mean Anything

Have you noticed that “cyber” has become a meaningless buzz-word, particularly when used by the usual suspects? The Department of Energy released a report that contained a vague but interesting sounding description of an event: “Cyber event that causes interruptions of electrical system operations.” This was noticed by news outlets, and people have been speculating ever since. What is frustrating about this is the wide range of meaning covered by the term “cyber event”. Was it an actual attack? Was Trinity shutting down the power stations, or did an intern trip over a power cord?
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Facebook Hacked Your Email, Cyber On The Power Grid, And A Nasty Zero-day” →

Raspberry Pi Becomes The Encrypted Password Keeper You Need

April 25, 2019 by 51 Comments

Unless you’re one of the cool people who uses the same password everywhere, you might be in need of a hardware device that keeps your usernames and passwords handy. The Passkeeper is a hardware password storage system built on a Raspberry Pi. It encrypts your passwords, and only through the magic of a special key fob will you ever get your passwords out of this device.

The hardware for this device is built around the Raspberry Pi Zero. You might be questioning the use of a Pi Zero, but given that it’s an entire Linux system for just a few bucks, it only makes sense. The rest of the hardware is a tiny OLED SPI display, an RFID card reader, a few LEDs, some wire, and some solder. A 3D printed case keeps everything together.

Of course, this build is all about the software, and for that, the Passkeeper device is built in Go, with a system that builds a web interface, builds the firmware, and writes everything to an SD card. Usage is simply plugging the Passkeeper into the USB port of your computer where it presents itself as a network interface. Everything is available by pinging an IP address, and after that the web UI will log your usernames and passwords. All this data is encrypted, and can only be unlocked if an RFID key fob is present. It’s an interesting idea and certinaly inexpensive. It’s not quite as polished as something like the Mooltipass, but if you have a Pi around and don’t have a password keeper, this is something to build this weekend.

Stealing DNA By Phone

April 24, 2019 by 8 Comments

Data exfiltration via side channel attacks can be a fascinating topic. It is easy to forget that there are so many different ways that electronic devices affect the physical world other than their intended purpose. And creative security researchers like to play around with these side-effects for ‘fun and profit’.

Engineers at the University of California have devised a way to analyse exactly what a DNA synthesizer is doing by recording the sound that the machine makes with a relatively low-budget microphone, such as the one on a smart phone. The recorded sound is then processed using algorithms trained to discern the different noises that a particular machine makes and translates the audio into the combination of DNA building blocks the synthesizer is generating.

Although they focused on a particular brand of DNA Synthesizers, in which the acoustics allowed them to spy on the building process, others might be vulnerable also.

In the case of the DNA synthesizer, acoustics revealed everything. Noises made by the machine differed depending on which DNA building block—the nucleotides Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C), or Thymine (T)—it was synthesizing. That made it easy for algorithms trained on that machine’s sound signatures to identify which nucleotides were being printed and in what order.

Acoustic snooping is not something new, several interesting techniques have been shown in the past that raise, arguably, more serious security concerns. Back in 2004, a neural network was used to analyse the sound produced by computer keyboards and keypads used on telephones and automated teller machines (ATMs) to recognize the keys being pressed.

You don’t have to rush and sound proof your DIY DNA Synthesizer room just yet as there are probably more practical ways to steal the genome of your alien-cat hybrid, but for multi-million dollar biotech companies with a equally well funded adversaries and a healthy paranoia about industrial espionage, this is an ear-opener.

We written about other data exfiltration methods and side channels and this one, realistic scenario or not, it’s another cool audio snooping proof of concept.

Shadowhammer, WPA3, And Alexa Is Listening: This Week In Computer Security

April 19, 2019 by 21 Comments

Let’s get caught up on computer security news! The big news is Shadowhammer — The Asus Live Update Utility prompted users to download an update that lacked any description or changelog. People thought it was odd, but the update was properly signed by Asus, and antivirus scans reported it as safe.

Nearly a year later, Kaspersky Labs announced they had confirmed this strange update was indeed a supply chain attack — one that attacks a target by way of another vendor. Another recent example is the backdoor added to CCleaner, when an unknown actor compromised the build system for CCleaner and used that backdoor to target other companies who were using CCleaner. Interestingly, the backdoor in CCleaner has some similarities to the backdoor in the Asus updater. Combined with the knowledge that Asus was one of the companies targeted by this earlier breach, the researchers at Kaspersky Lab suggest that the CCleaner attack might have been the avenue by which Asus was compromised.

Shadowhammer sits quietly on the vast majority of machines it infects. It’s specifically targeted at a pool of about 600 machines, identified by their network card’s MAC address. We’ve not seen any reporting yet on who was on the target list, but Kaspersky is hosting a service to check whether your MAC is on the list.

While we’re still waiting for the full technical paper, researchers gave a nearly 30 minute presentation about Shadowhammer, embedded below the break along with news about Dragonblood, Amazon listening to your conversations, and the NSA delivering on Ghidra source code. See you after the jump!
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Rooting Your Ride: Jailbreaking A Subaru QNX

April 16, 2019 by 18 Comments

A modern car still drives in the same way as the one you would have bought thirty years ago, it still has a steering wheel and all the other controls. What has changed in the cabin lies mostly beneath the dash, where enough computing power to launch several Moon shots takes care of everything from air-conditioning to entertainment. As you might expect these systems attract the curiosity of security researchers, and through their work we gain an insight into their operation.

[Scott Gayou] has a Subaru, a car that has an all-in-one entertainment system head unit that is typical of what you’d find across a host of manufacturers. His account of jailbreaking it is a lengthy essay and a fascinating read for anyone. He starts with a serial port, then an SSH prompt for a root password, and a bit of searching to find it was made by Harman and that it runs the closed-source realtime OS QNX. From there he finds an official Subaru update, from which he can slowly peel away the layers and deduce the security mechanism. The write-up lays bare his techniques, for example at one point isolating the ARM assembler for a particular function and transplanting it bodily into his own code for investigation.

Eventually he could penetrate the filesystem of the update, and from there he could find that while the root user had a password there were two other accounts that while heavily locked down, had none. The discovery came that files on USB drives plugged into the system were given user-level execute permissions, at which point under the locked-down user he could execute arbitrary code from USB drives. He could then create and modify copies of the device’s filesystem which he could flash onto it, and thus place a modified password validation function into it and gain root access.

Some Hackaday readers will be accomplished in security work such as this, but many of us are hardware specialists for whom it remains something of a dark art. A comprehensive and accessible write-up such as this one is therefore invaluable, because it gives us an insight into the techniques used and perhaps more importantly, into some of the security pitfalls a hardware engineer might unwittingly introduce into their creations.

QNX is a real-time operating system with a long history of appearances in industrial and automotive applications. Readers with long memories may recall their demo floppies from the 1990s which packed a fully functional GUI, Internet connectivity, and modern (for the time) web browser onto a single 1.44Mb floppy disk. We’ve talked about it in the past in a little detail, as when someone made a desktop OS using it.

Fooling Fingerprint Scanners With A Resin Printer

April 8, 2019 by 12 Comments

Biometrics have often been used as a form of access control. While this was initially limited to bank vaults in Hollywood movies, it’s now common to see such features on many laptops and smartphones. Despite the laundry list of reasons why this is a bad idea, the technology continues to grow in popularity. [darkshark] has shown us an easy exploit, using a 3D printer to fool the Galaxy S10’s fingerprint scanner.

The Galaxy S10 is interesting for its use of an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, which continues to push to hardware development of phones minimal-to-no bezels by placing the sensor below the screen. The sensor is looking for the depth of the ridges of your fingerprint, while the touchscreen verifies the capacitive presence of your meaty digit. This hack satisfies both of those checks.

[darkshark] starts with a photograph of a fingerprint on a wineglass. This is then manipulated in Photoshop, before being used to create geometry in 3DSMAX to replicate the original finger. After making the part on an AnyCubic Photon LCD resin printer, the faux-finger pad is able to successfully unlock the phone by placing the print on the glass and touching your finger on top of it.ster

[darkshark] notes that the fingerprint was harvested at close range, but a camera with the right lenses could capture similar detail at a distance. The other thing to note is that if your phone is stolen, it’s likely covered in greasy fingerprints anyway. As usual, it serves as an excellent reminder that fingerprints are not passwords, and should not be treated as such. If you need to brush up on the fundamentals, we’ve got a great primer on how fingerprint scanners work, and another on why using fingerprints for security is a bad plan.

[via reddit, thanks to TheEngineer for the tip!]

Hash And Roll Your Way To Secure Passwords

March 30, 2019 by 17 Comments

In the electronic battlefield that is 2019, the realm of password security is fraught with dangers. Websites from companies big and small leak like sieves, storing user data in completely unsecure ways. Just about the worst thing you can do is use the same password across several services, meaning that an attack on one gives entry to multiple accounts. The challenge is to generate a unique and secure password for each and every application, and [Ilia]’s way of doing that is called HashDice.

No, it’s not a password manager, or an app – it’s a simple method that can be readily applied by anyone with the right tools. A simple dice is used to create random numbers, which are used to select words from a list to form the basic secret phrase. This is then combined with the name of the service or application to be accessed, the date, and a salt, before hashing using the SHA256 algorithm. The final hash is then truncated to create the password. You can do it all on a device that’s airgapped from the world, ensuring your core secret is never exposed, thus maintaining security.

There are some pitfalls to this method, of course. Many websites make things harder by requiring special characters or enforcing length limits on passwords. [Ilia] helpfully suggests several workarounds for this, but admits that no system is perfect in the face of these obstacles.

If you’re now wondering if your current password is safe, there are ways to investigate that, too.