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25 Articles

This Week In Security: Another Record Patch Tuesday, LAME Is More Secure, Secure Boot Is Less Secure, And Milk Malware

July 17, 2026 by 16 Comments

Following the reports last week using the Windows Global Device ID (GDID) in tracking a malware operators behavior, here is a comprehensive write-up about what goes into the GDID and how it is used. It’s worth noting that the GDID itself was not used to catch the malware operator, however once a suspect was identified, the GDID was used to correlate behavior across various Microsoft products on the Internet.

The GDID is generated and assigned during a Windows install, but a re-install of Windows will generate a new GDID. Developer [SmtimesIWndr] tracks the generation and tracking of the GDID through the various Windows libraries and services, identifying where it appears to be created and how it is passed to other services like Azure.

Worth noting is your GDID is a unique, personally identifiable piece of information; if you go exploring and extract it from your Windows install, be sure to keep it private!

LAME mp3 updates

Those of us who were around for the dawn of MP3 files may remember the LAME encoder and library. After almost 10 years, there is a new LAME release.

Notably, this includes two security fixes, one for a stack buffer overflow based on malicious input to the Blade encoder, and an integer underflow in the AIFF header parser. Both of the fixed bugs feel very old-school, which seems appropriate given the age of the library and most of the related code.

Buffer overflows impacting the stack are some of the simplest and most direct forms of vulnerabilities, where it is possible to write past the end of a buffer and control how the function returns and instead execute arbitrary code. Integer under-flows, similarly, impact memory management; usually caused by allowing a variable that stores the size of a buffer to go negative. Since sizes are typically unsigned positive numbers, a negative is interpreted as an enormous positive number, writing past the proper buffer length.

Despite the new findings, the LAME codebase has been extremely resilient over the years, and considering the number of programs that likely still use LAME under the covers to process audio, seeing the project wake up with security fixes is great news.

Recovering Passwords from BIOS

Researchers have found a vulnerability in Dell BIOS code that allows extraction of the administrator password from the BIOS flash chips, either with physical access via a flash programmer, or via administrator or root level access to the operating system and reading the contents of the flash chip.

Dell used a 20 byte key to encrypt a 32 byte password field: for any admin password of 12 characters or fewer, the password is stored in completely plaintext. For longer passwords, characters beyond the first 12 are encrypted – but the random bytes are computed from the first character of the password mixed with fixed device data, yielding only 256 possible encryption seeds for the remaining bytes.

Using the BIOS admin password for evil requires local access, so the attack surface is small, however as the researchers note it controls the boot order and may allow an attacker with physical access to then boot an unsigned OS or bypass full-disk encryption, so it’s serious.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Another Record Patch Tuesday, LAME Is More Secure, Secure Boot Is Less Secure, And Milk Malware” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 765: That Ship Sailed… And Sank

January 9, 2024 by 5 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb talk with Randal Schwartz, the longest running host of FLOSS Weekly, Perl’s biggest cheerleader, and now Dart and Flutter expert. What’s new with Randal since his last FLOSS Weekly episode in May 2020? Why should you look at Dart and Flutter? And how do you avoid becoming a security martyr?

Randal has been busy since handing over the reigns of FLOSS Weekly, adding to his Perl credentials a solid claim to being a Dart Flutter expert. The Dart language has some real appeal, taking the best features from JIT languages like JavaScript, and also offering binary compilation like a real systems language should. Then the Flutter framework lets you write your code once, and literally run it on any screen. Sure, there have been some growing pains along the way, and listen to the episode to hear Randal describe the “45-degree turns” the language/framework duo has taken through the years.

Then as almost a bonus at the end of the episode, Randal quickly covered his now-expunged conviction for “doing his job with too much enthusiasm”, and covered some basic pointers to keep other security researchers out of trouble. This week is a nostalgia trip for long-time listeners, as well as a real treat for everyone else.

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Linux Fu: Mixing Bash And Python

May 4, 2021 by 24 Comments

Although bash scripts are regularly maligned, they do have a certain simplicity and ease of creation that makes them hard to resist. But sometimes you really need to do some heavy lifting in another language. I’ll talk about Python, but actually, you can use many different languages with this technique, although you might need a little adaptation, depending on your language of choice.

Of course, you don’t have to do anything special to call another program from a bash script. After all, that’s what it’s mainly used for: calling other programs. However, it isn’t very handy to have your script spread out over multiple files. They can get out of sync and if you want to send it to someone or another machine, you have to remember what to get. It is nicer to have everything in one file.

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This Week In Security: Perl.com, The Great Suspender, And Google’s Solution

February 5, 2021 by 46 Comments

Perl has been stolen. Well, perl.com, at least. The perl.com domain was transferred to a different registrar on January 27, without the permission of the rightful owner. The first to notice the hack seems to have been [xtaran], who raised the alarm on a Reddit thread. The proper people quickly noticed, and started the process of getting control of the domain again. It seems that several other unrelated domains were also stolen in the same attack.

I’ve seen a couple of theories tossed around about how the domains were stolen. With multiple domains being moved, it initially seemed that the registrar had been compromised in some way. One of the other victims was told that a set of official looking documents had been supplied, “proving” that the attacker was the rightful owner of the domain. In any case, the damage is slowly being unwound. Perl.com is once again in the proper hands, evidenced by the proper SSL certificate issued back in December.

The Great Suspender, Suspended

I was greeted by a particularly nasty surprise on Thursday of this week. One of the Chrome extensions I’ve come to rely on was removed by Google for containing malware. The Great Suspender automatically hibernates unused tabs, saving ram and processor cycles that would otherwise be spent on those 150 open tabs that should really be bookmarks. What happened here?

I’ll point out that I’m extremely careful about installing extensions. It’s code written by a third party, often very difficult to inspect, and can view and modify the sites you visit. You can manage what sites an extension has access to, but for a tool like the Suspender, it essentially needs access to all of them. The solution is to use open source extensions, right? “Well yes, but actually no.” Suspender is open source, after all. The link above goes to the project’s Github page. In that repo you’ll find an announcement from last year, that the founding developer is finished with the project, and is selling the rights to an unknown third party, who took over maintainership. If this sounds familiar, there are echoes of the event-stream debacle.

It’s not clear exactly what malicious behavior Google found that led to the extension being pulled, but a more careful look at the project reveals that there were potential problems as early as October of 2020. An addition to the extension introduced execution of code from a remote server, never a good idea. For what it’s worth, the original maintainer has made a statement, defending the new owners, and suggesting that this was all an innocent mistake.

The lesson here? It’s not enough to confirm that an extension checks the “open source” box. Make sure there is an active community, and that there isn’t a 6 month old bug report detailing potentially malicious activity.

Libgcrypt

It’s not everyday you see a developer sending out a notice that everyone should stop using his latest release. That’s exactly what happened with Libgcrypt 1.9.0. Our friends over at Google’s Project Zero discovered an extremely nasty vulnerability in the code. It’s a buffer overflow that happens during the decryption process, before even signature verification. Since libgcrypt is used in many PGP implementations, the ramifications could be nasty. Receive an encrypted email, and as soon as your client decrypts it, code is executing. Thankfully, an update that fixes the issue has already been released.

Android Botnet

A new botnet is targeting Android devices in a peculiar way — looking for open ADB debug ports exposed to the Internet. Google makes it very clear that ADB over the network is insecure, and should only be used for development purposes, and on controlled networks. It’s astounding that so many vendors ship hardware with this service exposed. Beyond that, it’s surprising that so many people give their Android devices public IP addresses (or IPv6 addresses that aren’t behind a firewall). The botnet, named Matryosh, has another unique feature, as it uses Tor for command and control functions, making it harder to track.

Google Solution to Open-Source Security

Google published a post on their open source blog, giving an overview for their new framework for the security of open source projects. “Know, Prevent, Fix” is their name for the new effort, and it must have been written by management, because it’s full of buzzwords. The most interesting elements are their goals for critical software. They identify problems like the ability of a single maintainer to push bad code into a project, and how anonymous maintainers is probably a bad idea. It will be interesting to see how these ideas develop, and how Google will help open source communities implement them.

Microsoft in My Pi

And finally, I was amused by an article lamenting the inclusion of the VSCode repository in the default Raspberry Pi OS images. He does raise a couple legitimate points. Amont them, you do send a ping to Microsoft’s servers every time you check for new updates.

The larger point is that the official VSCode binaries have telemetry code added to them — code that isn’t in the open source repository. What is it doing? You don’t know. But it probably violates European law.

Want to use VSCode, but not interested in shipping info off to Microsoft? VSCodium is a thing.

What’s In A Name? Tales Of Python, Perl, And The GIMP

September 18, 2019 by 58 Comments

In the older days of open source software, major projects tended to have their Benevolent Dictators For Life who made all the final decisions, and some mature projects still operate that way. Guido van Rossum famously called his language “Python” because he liked the British comics of the same name. That’s the sort of thing that only a single developer can get away with.

However, in these modern times of GitHub, GitLab, and other collaboration platforms, community-driven decision making has become a more and more common phenomenon, shifting software development towards democracy. People begin to think of themselves as “Python programmers” or “GIMP users” and the name of the project fuses irrevocably with their identity.

What happens when software projects fork, develop apart, or otherwise change significantly? Obviously, to prevent confusion, they get a new name, and all of those “Perl Monks” need to become “Raku Monks”.  Needless to say, what should be a trivial detail — what we’ve all decided to call this pile of ones and zeros or language constructs — can become a big deal. Don’t believe us? Here are the stories of renaming Python, Perl, and the GIMP.

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3D Printering: The Past And Future Of Prusa’s Slicer

May 24, 2019 by 41 Comments

If you own a desktop 3D printer, you’re almost certainly familiar with Slic3r. Even if the name doesn’t ring a bell, there’s an excellent chance that a program you’ve used to convert STLs into the G-code your printer can understand was using Slic3r behind the scenes in some capacity. While there have been the occasional challengers, Slic3r has remained one of the most widely used open source slicers for the better part of a decade. While some might argue that proprietary slicers have pulled ahead in some respects, it’s hard to beat free.

So when Josef Prusa announced his team’s fork of Slic3r back in 2016, it wasn’t exactly a shock. The company wanted to offer a slicer optimized for their line of 3D printers, and being big proponents of open source, it made sense they would lean heavily on what was already available in the community. The result was the aptly named “Slic3r Prusa Edition”, or as it came to be known, Slic3r PE.

Ostensibly the fork enabled Prusa to fine tune print parameters for their particular machines and implement support for products such as their Multi-Material Upgrade, but it didn’t take long for Prusa’s developers to start fixing and improving core Slic3r functionality. As both projects were released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, any and all of these improvements could be backported to the original Slic3r; but doing so would take considerable time and effort, something that’s always in short supply with community developed projects.

Since Slic3r PE still produced standard G-code that any 3D printer could use, soon people started using it with their non-Prusa printers simply because it had more features. But this served only to further blur the line between the two projects, especially for new users. When issues arose, it could be hard to determine who should take responsibility for it. All the while, the gap between the two projects continued to widen.

With a new release on the horizon that promised to bring massive changes to Slic3r PE, Josef Prusa decided things had reached a tipping point. In a recent blog post, he announced that as of version 2.0, their slicer would henceforth be known as PrusaSlicer. Let’s take a look at this new slicer, and find out what it took to finally separate these two projects.

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3D Printering: Non-Planar Layer FDM

July 27, 2016 by 40 Comments

Non-planar layer Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is any form of fused deposition modeling where the 3D printed layers aren’t flat or of uniform thickness. For example, if you’re using mesh bed leveling on your 3D printer, you are already using non-planar layer FDM. But why stop at compensating for curved build plates? Non-planar layer FDM has more applications and there are quite a few projects out there exploring the possibilities. In this article, we are going to have a look at what the trick yields for us.

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