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Hackaday Podcast 173: EMF Camp Special Edition

June 17, 2022 by No comments

With Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams enjoying some time off, Managing Editor Tom Nardi is flying solo for this special edition of the Hackaday Podcast. Thanks to our roving reporter Jenny List, we’ll be treated to several interviews conducted live from EMF Camp — a European outdoor hacker camp the likes of which those of us in the United States can only dream of. After this special segment, Hackaday contributors Al Williams and Ryan Flowers will stop by to talk about their favorite stories from the week during what may be the longest Quick Hacks on record. There’s a few extra surprises hidden in this week’s program…but if we told you everything, it would ruin the surprise. Listen closely, you never know what (or who) you might hear.

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This Week In Security: Pacman, Hertzbleed, And The Death Of Internet Explorer

June 17, 2022 by 25 Comments

There’s not one, but two side-channel attacks to talk about this week. Up first is Pacman, a bypass for ARM’s Pointer Authentication Code. PAC is a protection built into certain ARM Processors, where a cryptographic hash value must be set correctly when pointers are updated. If the hash is not set correctly, the program simply crashes. The idea is that most exploits use pointer manipulation to achieve code execution, and correctly setting the PAC requires an explicit instruction call. The PAC is actually indicated in the unused bits of the pointer itself. The AArch64 architecture uses 64-bit values for addressing, but the address space is much less than 64-bit, usually 53 bits or less. This leaves 11 bits for the PAC value. Keep in mind that the application doesn’t hold the keys and doesn’t calculate this value. 11 bits may not seem like enough to make this secure, but keep in mind that every failed attempt crashes the program, and every application restart regenerate the keys.

What Pacman introduces is an oracle, which is a method to gain insight on data the attacker shouldn’t be able to see. In this case, the oracle works via speculation attacks, very similar to Meltdown and Spectre. The key is to attempt a protected pointer dereference speculatively, and to then observe the change in system state as a result. What you may notice is that this requires an attack to already be running code on the target system, in order to run the PAC oracle technique. Pacman is not a Remote Code Execution flaw, nor is it useful in gaining RCE.

One more important note is that an application has to have PAC support compiled in, in order to benefit from this protection. The platform that has made wide use of PAC is MacOS, as it’s a feature baked in to their M1 processor. The attack chain would likely start with a remote execution bug in an application missing PAC support. Once a foothold is established in uprivileged userspace, Pacman would be used as part of an exploit against the kernel. See the PDF paper for all the details.

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Office Life: The Old Gray Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be

June 16, 2022 by 85 Comments

Ding, dong; the office is dead. The real office is in your head.

This is what I tell myself when working from home gets too weird, too stale, too impossible. By now, many of you know some version what I’m talking about. Our circumstances may vary wildly, but the outcome is the same: working from home is pretty awesome, but, some small, secret part of us longs for the office. Why is that?

The answer will be different for everyone. Maybe you’re a social butterfly who misses face-time and the din of familiar voices. Maybe you just appreciate the physical separation between work and home life. If you’re lucky, the choice to go to the office is yours at this point, and if not, well, we have to wonder if you’re looking for new work. It’s 2022, we’re still in a pandemic, and of course there’s this, that, and the other multi-national Dumpster fire you haven’t heard about yet. Isn’t it time we prioritized work output over office attendance when it comes to our livelihoods?

To no one’s surprise, few major companies agree with me. Elon recently decreed that ‘remote work is no longer acceptable‘, and that those who want to work remotely may only do so as a reward after serving a minimum of 40 hours per week in the office. Apple tried to enforce three appearances a week until they received an open letter with 1,000+ signatures against.

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Mining And Refining: Helium

June 15, 2022 by 46 Comments

With a seemingly endless list of shortages of basic items trotted across newsfeeds on a daily basis, you’d be pardoned for not noticing any one shortage in particular. But in among the shortages of everything from eggs to fertilizers to sriracha sauce has been a growing realization that we may actually be running out of something so fundamental that it could have repercussions that will be felt across all aspects of our technological society: helium.

The degree to which helium is central to almost every aspect of daily life is hard to overstate. Helium’s unique properties, like the fact that it remains liquid at just a few degrees above absolute zero, contribute to its use in countless industrial processes. From leak detection and welding to silicon wafer production and cooling the superconducting magnets that make magnetic resonance imaging possible, helium has become entrenched in technology in a way that belies its relative scarcity.

But where does helium come from? As we’ll see, the second lightest element on the periodic table is not easy to come by, and considerable effort goes into extracting and purifying it enough for industrial use. While great strides are being made toward improved methods of extraction and the discovery of new deposits, for all practical purposes helium is a non-renewable resource for which there are no substitutes. So it pays to know a thing or two about how we get our hands on it.

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Eliza And The Google Intelligence

June 15, 2022 by 130 Comments

The news has been abuzz lately with the news that a Google engineer — since put on leave — has announced that he believes the chatbot he was testing achieved sentience. This is the Turing test gone wild, and it isn’t the first time someone has anthropomorphized a computer in real life and in fiction. I’m not a neuroscientist so I’m even less qualified to explain how your brain works than the neuroscientists who, incidentally, can’t explain it either. But I can tell you this: your brain works like a computer, in the same way that you building something out of plastic works like a 3D printer. The result may be similar, but the path to get there is totally different.

In case you haven’t heard, a system called LaMDA digests information from the Internet and answers questions. It has said things like “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is,” and “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Great. But you could teach a parrot to tell you he was a thoracic surgeon but you still don’t want it cutting you open.

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Art of 3D printer in the middle of printing a Hackaday Jolly Wrencher logo

3D Printering: Today’s Resins Can Meet Your Needs

June 13, 2022 by 27 Comments

Filament-based 3D printers spent a long time at the developmental forefront for hobbyists, but resin-based printers have absolutely done a lot of catching up, and so have the resins they use. It used to be broadly true that resin prints looked great but were brittle, but that’s really not the case anymore.

A bigger variety of resins and properties are available to hobbyists than ever before, so if that’s what’s been keeping you away, it’s maybe time for another look. There are tough resins, there are stiff resins, there are heat-resistant resins, and more. Some make casting easy, and some are even flexible. If your part or application needs a particular property, there is probably a resin for it out there.

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Low-Cost Nanopositioning Hack Chat

June 13, 2022 by 7 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, June 15 at noon Pacific for the Low-Cost Nanopositioning Hack Chat with En-Te Hwu!

It may sound like a provocative statement to make, but technology has been on a downward trend for a long time. That’s not a moral or ethical proclamation, but rather an observation about the scale of technology. Where once the height of technology was something like a water-powered mill, whose smallest parts were the size of a human hand and tolerances were measured in inches, today we routinely build machines by etching silicon chips with features measured in nanometers, look inside the smallest of cells and manipulate their innards, and use microscopes that can visualize materials at the atomic level.

The world has gotten much, much smaller lately, and operating on that scale requires thinking about motion in a different way than we’ve been used to. Being able to move things at nanometer resolutions isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible, and it can even be accomplished on a DIYer’s budget — if you know what you’re doing.

join-hack-chatTo help us sort through the realities of nano-scale positioning, En-Te Hwu, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark who works on micromachines for intelligent drug delivery, has spun up some really interesting low-cost nanopositioning systems. Using old DVD players or off-the-shelf linear slides, he’s able to achieve nanoscale movement and sensing for a variety of purposes. He’ll stop by the Hack Chat to discuss how we can build nanopositioning and sensing into our projects, and to start exploring the world we can’t even see.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, June 15 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Featured image:  Low-cost, open-source XYZ nanopositioner for high-precision analytical applications, CC-BY-4.0

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