Clubhouse

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This Week In Security: Pwn2own, Zoom Zero Day, Clubhouse Data, And An FBI Hacking Spree

April 16, 2021 by 11 Comments

Our first story this week comes courtesy of the Pwn2own contest. For anyone not familiar with it, this event is held twice a year, and features live demonstrations of exploits against up-to-date software. The one exception to this is when a researcher does a coordinated release with the vendor, and the update containing the fix drops just before the event. This time, the event was held virtually, and the attempts are all available on Youtube. There were 23 attacks attempted, and only two were outright failures. There were 5 partial successes and 16 full successes.

One of the interesting demonstrations was a zero-click RCE against Zoom. This was a trio of vulnerabilities chained into a single attack. The only caveat is that the attack must come from an accepted contact. Pwn2Own gives each exploit attempt twenty minutes total, and up to three attempts, each of which can last up to five minutes. Most complex exploits have an element of randomness, and exploits known to work sometimes don’t work every time. The Zoom demonstration didn’t work the first time, and the demonstration team took enough time to reset, they only had enough time for one more try.

BleedingTooth

We first covered BleedingTooth almost exactly six months ago. The details were sparse then, but enough time has gone by to get the full report. BleedingTooth is actually a trio of vulnerabilities, discovered by [Andy Nguyen]. The first is BadVibes, CVE-2020-24490. It’s a lack of a length check in the handling of incoming Bluetooth advertisement packets. This leads to a buffer overflow. The catch here is that the vulnerability is only possible over Bluetooth 5. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Pwn2own, Zoom Zero Day, Clubhouse Data, And An FBI Hacking Spree” →

This Week In Security: ISNs, Patch Tuesday, And Clubhouse

February 19, 2021 by 4 Comments

Let’s talk TCP. Specifically, how do the different TCP connections stay distinct, and how is a third party kept from interrupting a connection? One of the mechanisms that help accomplish this feat is the TCP sequence number. Each of the two endpoints of a TCP connection tracks an incrementing 32-bit number, corresponding to the bytes sent in the connection. It’s handy, because each side can use that value to track what parts of the data stream they have received. On missing packets, a message can be sent requesting bytes 7-15 to be resent, for instance.

Each side of the connection sets their own Initial Sequence Number (ISN), and it’s important that this number is unique, as collisions can cause stream confusion. That statement should make your security spidey sense tingle. If a collision can cause problems when it happens by chance, what can a hacker do with it intentionally? Potentially quite a bit. Knowing the current sequence number, as well as a couple other pieces of information, a third party can close a TCP stream or even inject data. The attack has been around for years, originally known as the Mitnick Attack. It was originally possible because TCP implementations used a simple counter to set the ISN. Once the security ramifications of this approach were understood, the major implementations moved to a random number generation for their ISNs.

Now to this week’s story: researchers at Forescout took the time to check 11 TCP/IP stacks for vulnerability to the old Mitnick Attack (PDF Whitepaper). Of the eleven embedded stacks texted, nine have serious weaknesses in their ISN generation. Most of the vulnerable implementations use a system time value as their ISN, while several use a predictable pseudorandom algorithm that can be easily reversed.

CVEs have been assigned, and vendors notified of “NUMBER:JACK”, Forescout’s name for the research. Most of the vulnerable software already has patches available. The problem with embedded systems is that they often never get security updates. The vulnerable network stacks are in devices like IP cameras, printers, and other “invisible” software. Time will tell if this attack shows up as part of a future IoT botnet.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: ISNs, Patch Tuesday, And Clubhouse” →