CVEs

9 Articles

This Week In Security: Roundcube, Unified Threat Naming, And AI Chat Logs

June 6, 2025 by 4 Comments

Up first, if you’re running a Roundcube install prior to 1.5.10 or 1.6.11, it’s time to update. We have an authenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) in the Roundcube Webmail client. And while that’s not quite the level of chaos that an unauthenticated RCE would cause, it’s still to be taken seriously. Mainly because for the majority of the 53 million Roundcube installs out there, the users aren’t entirely trusted.

The magic at play in this vulnerability is the Roundcube user session code, and specifically the session deserialization scheme. There’s a weird code snippet in the unserialize function:
if ($str[$p] == '!') {
$p++;
$has_value = false;

The exclamation mark makes the code skip a character, and then assume that what comes next has no value. But if it does actually have a value, well then you’ve got a slightly corrupted deserialization, resulting in a slightly corrupted session. This really comes into force when combined with the file upload function, as the uploaded filename serves as a payload delivery mechanism. Use the errant exclamation mark handling to throw off deserialization, and the filename can contain arbitrary session key/value pairs. A GPG class from the PEAR library allows running an arbitrary command, and this can be hijacked with the session manipulation. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Roundcube, Unified Threat Naming, And AI Chat Logs” →

This Week In Security: CIA Star Wars, Git* Prompt Injection And More

May 30, 2025 by 3 Comments

The CIA ran a series of web sites in the 2000s. Most of them were about news, finance, and other relatively boring topics, and they spanned 29 languages. And they all had a bit of a hidden feature: Those normal-looking websites had a secret login and hosted CIA cover communications with assets in foreign countries. A password typed in to a search field on each site would trigger a Java Applet or Flash application, allowing the spy to report back. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but what’s captured the Internet’s imagination this week is the report by [Ciro Santilli] about how to find those sites, and the fact that a Star Wars fansite was part of the network.

This particular CIA tool was intended for short-term use, and was apparently so effective, it was dragged way beyond it’s intended lifespan, right up to the point it was discovered and started getting people killed. And in retrospect, the tradecraft is abysmal. The sites were hosted on a small handful of IP blocks, with the individual domains hosted on sequential IP addresses. Once one foreign intelligence agency discovered one of these sites, the rest were fairly easily identified.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: CIA Star Wars, Git* Prompt Injection And More” →

This Week In Security: Signal DRM, Modern Phone Phreaking, And The Impossible SSH RCE

May 23, 2025 by No comments

Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been the bane of users since it was first introduced. Who remembers the battle it was getting Netflix running on Linux machines, or the literal legal fight over the DVD DRM decryption key? So the news from Signal, that DRM is finally being put to use to protect users is ironic.

The reason for this is Microsoft Recall — the AI powered feature that takes a snapshot of everything on the user’s desktop every few seconds. For whatever reason, you might want to exempt some windows from Recall’s memory window. It doesn’t speak well for Microsoft’s implementation that the easiest way for an application to opt out of the feature is to mark its window as containing DRM content. Signal, the private communications platform, is using this to hide from Recall and other screenshotting applications.

The Signal blogs warns that this may be just the start of agentic AI being rolled out with insufficient controls and permissions. The issue here isn’t the singularity or AI reaching sentience, it’s the same old security and privacy problems we’ve always had: Too much information being collected, data being shared without permission, and an untrusted actor having access to way more than it should. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Signal DRM, Modern Phone Phreaking, And The Impossible SSH RCE” →

This Week In Security: Lingering Spectre, Deep Fakes, And CoreAudio

May 16, 2025 by 5 Comments

Spectre lives. We’ve got two separate pieces of research, each finding new processor primitives that allow Spectre-style memory leaks. Before we dive into the details of the new techniques, let’s quickly remind ourselves what Spectre is. Modern CPUs use a variety of clever tricks to execute code faster, and one of the stumbling blocks is memory latency. When a program reaches a branch in execution, the program will proceed in one of two possible directions, and it’s often a value from memory that determines which branch is taken. Rather than wait for the memory to be fetched, modern CPUs will predict which branch execution will take, and speculatively execute the code down that branch. Once the memory is fetched and the branch is properly evaluated, the speculatively executed code is rewound if the guess was wrong, or made authoritative if the guess was correct. Spectre is the realization that incorrect branch prediction can change the contents of the CPU cache, and those changes can be detected through cache timing measurements. The end result is that arbitrary system memory can be leaked from a low privileged or even sandboxed user process.

In response to Spectre, OS developers and CPU designers have added domain isolation protections, that prevent branch prediction poisoning in an attack process from affecting the branch prediction in the kernel or another process. Training Solo is the clever idea from VUSec that branch prediction poisoning could just be done from within the kernel space, and avoid any domain switching at all. That can be done through cBPF, the classic Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) kernel VM. By default, all users on a Linux system can run cBPF code, throwing the doors back open for Spectre shenanigans. There’s also an address collision attack where an unrelated branch can be used to train a target branch. Researchers also discovered a pair of CVEs in Intel’s CPUs, where prediction training was broken in specific cases, allowing for a wild 17 kB/sec memory leak.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Lingering Spectre, Deep Fakes, And CoreAudio” →

This Week In Security: Encrypted Messaging, NSO’s Judgement, And AI CVE DDoS

May 9, 2025 by 3 Comments

Cryptographic messaging has been in the news a lot recently. Like the formal audit of WhatsApp (the actual PDF). And the results are good. There are some minor potential problems that the audit highlights, but they are of questionable real-world impact. The most consequential is how easy it is to add additional members to a group chat. Or to put it another way, there are no cryptographic guarantees associated with adding a new user to a group.

The good news is that WhatsApp groups don’t allow new members to read previous messages. So a user getting added to a group doesn’t reveal historic messages. But a user added without being noticed can snoop on future messages. There’s an obvious question, as to how this is a weakness. Isn’t it redundant, since anyone with the permission to add someone to a group, can already read the messages from that group?

That’s where the lack of cryptography comes in. To put it simply, the WhatsApp servers could add users to groups, even if none of the existing users actually requested the addition. It’s not a vulnerability per se, but definitely a design choice to keep in mind. Keep an eye on the members in your groups, just in case. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Encrypted Messaging, NSO’s Judgement, And AI CVE DDoS” →

This Week In Security: AirBorne, EvilNotify, And Revoked RDP

May 2, 2025 by 2 Comments

This week, Oligo has announced the AirBorne series of vulnerabilities in the Apple Airdrop protocol and SDK. This is a particularly serious set of issues, and notably affects MacOS desktops and laptops, the iOS and iPadOS mobile devices, and many IoT devices that use the Apple SDK to provide AirPlay support. It’s a group of 16 CVEs based on 23 total reported issues, with the ramifications ranging from an authentication bypass, to local file reads, all the way to Remote Code Execution (RCE).

AirPlay is a WiFi based peer-to-peer protocol, used to share or stream media between devices. It uses port 7000, and a custom protocol that has elements of both HTTP and RTSP. This scheme makes heavy use of property lists (“plists”) for transferring serialized information. And as we well know, serialization and data parsing interfaces are great places to look for vulnerabilities. Oligo provides an example, where a plist is expected to contain a dictionary object, but was actually constructed with a simple string. De-serializing that plist results in a malformed dictionary, and attempting to access it will crash the process.

Another demo is using AirPlay to achieve an arbitrary memory write against a MacOS device. Because it’s such a powerful primative, this can be used for zero-click exploitation, though the actual demo uses the music app, and launches with a user click. Prior to the patch, this affected any MacOS device with AirPlay enabled, and set to either “Anyone on the same network” or “Everyone”. Because of the zero-click nature, this could be made into a wormable exploit. Continue reading “This Week In Security: AirBorne, EvilNotify, And Revoked RDP” →

This Week In Security: XRP Poisoned, MCP Bypassed, And More

April 25, 2025 by 7 Comments

Researchers at Aikido run the Aikido Intel system, an LLM security monitor that ingests the feeds from public package repositories, and looks for anything unusual. In this case, the unusual activity was five rapid-fire releases of the xrpl package on NPM. That package is the XRP Ledger SDK from Ripple, used to manage keys and build crypto wallets. While quick point releases happen to the best of developers, these were odd, in that there were no matching releases in the source GitHub repository. What changed in the first of those fresh releases?

The most obvious change is the checkValidityOfSeed() function added to index.ts. That function takes a string, and sends a request to a rather odd URL, using the supplied string as the ad-referral header for the HTML request. The name of the function is intended to blend in, but knowing that the string parameter is sent to a remote web server is terrifying. The seed is usually the root of trust for an individual’s cryptocurrency wallet. Looking at the actual usage of the function confirms, that this code is stealing credentials and keys.

The releases were made by a Ripple developer’s account. It’s not clear exactly how the attack happened, though credential compromise of some sort is the most likely explanation. Each of those five releases added another bit of malicious code, demonstrating that there was someone with hands on keyboard, watching what data was coming in.

The good news is that the malicious releases only managed a total of 452 downloads for the few hours they were available. A legitimate update to the library, version 4.2.5, has been released. If you’re one of the unfortunate 452 downloads, it’s time to do an audit, and rotate the possibly affected keys. Continue reading “This Week In Security: XRP Poisoned, MCP Bypassed, And More” →