security

460 Articles

Google Discovers Google+ Servers Are Still Running

October 9, 2018 by 70 Comments

Google is pulling the plug on their social network, Google+. Users still have the better part of a year to say their goodbyes, but if the fledgling social network was a ghost town before, news of its imminent shutdown isn’t likely to liven the place up. A quick check of the site as of this writing reveals many users are already posting their farewell messages, and while there’s some rallying behind petitions to keep the lights on, the majority realize that once Google has fallen out of love with a project there’s little chance of a reprieve.

To say that this is a surprise would be disingenuous. We’d wager a lot of you already thought it was gone, honestly. It’s no secret that Google’s attempt at a “Facebook Killer” was anything but, and while there was a group of dedicated users to be sure, it never attained anywhere near the success of its competition.

According to a blog post from Google, the network’s anemic user base isn’t the only reason they’ve decided to wind down the service. A previously undisclosed security vulnerability also hastened its demise, a revelation which will particularly sting those who joined for the privacy-first design Google touted. While this fairly transparent postmortem allows us to answer what ended Google’s grand experiment in social networking, there’s still one questions left unanswered. Where are the soon to be orphaned Google+ users supposed to go?

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Exploring An Abandoned Toys “R” Us

September 17, 2018 by 113 Comments

If someone asked me to make a list of things I didn’t expect to ever hear again, the question “Do you want to go to a Toys “R” Us?” would be pretty near the top spot. After all of their stores (at least in the United States) closed at the end of June 2018, the House of Geoffrey seemed destined to join Radio Shack as being little more than a memory for those past a certain age. A relic from the days when people had to leave their house to purchase goods.

But much to my surprise, a friend of mine recently invited me to join him on a trip to the now defunct toy store. His wife’s company purchased one of the buildings for its ideal location near a main highway, and before the scrappers came through to clean everything out, he thought I might like a chance to see what was left. Apparently his wife reported there was still “Computers and stuff” still in the building, and as I’m the member of our friend group who gets called in when tangles of wires and sufficiently blinking LEDs are involved, he thought I’d want to check it out. He wasn’t wrong.

Readers may recall that Toys “R” Us, like Radio Shack before it, had a massive liquidation sale in the final months of operations. After the inventory was taken care of, there was an auction where the store’s furnishings and equipment were up for grabs. I was told that this location was no different, and yet a good deal of material remained. In some cases there were no bidders, and in others, the people who won the auction never came back to pick the stuff up.

So on a rainy Sunday evening in September, armed with flashlight, camera, and curiosity, I entered a Toys “R” Us for last time in my life. I found not only a stark example of what the changing times have done to retail in general, but a very surprising look at what get’s left behind when the money runs out and the employees simply give up.

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FOSSCON 2018: Developing The FreedomBox

September 3, 2018 by 11 Comments

The modern Internet can be a dangerous place, especially for those who might not have the technical wherewithal to navigate its pitfalls. Whether it’s malware delivered to your browser through a “drive-by” or online services selling your data to the highest bidder, its gotten a lot harder over the last decade or so to use the Internet as an effective means of communication and information gathering without putting yourself at risk.

But those are just the passive threats that we all have to contend with. What if you’re being actively targeted? Perhaps your government has shut down access to the Internet, or the authorities are looking to prevent you from organizing peaceful protests. What if you’re personal information is worth enough to some entity that they’ll subpoena it from your service providers?

It’s precisely for these sort of situations that the FreedomBox was developed. As demonstrated by Danny Haidar at FOSSCON 2018 in Philadelphia, the FreedomBox promises to help anyone deploy a secure and anonymous Internet access point in minutes with minimal user interaction.

It’s a concept privacy advocates have been talking about for years, but with the relatively recent advent of low-cost ARM Linux boards, may finally be practical enough to go mainstream. While there’s still work to be done, the project is already being used to provide Internet gateways in rural India.

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Foreshadow: The Sky Is Falling Again For Intel Chips

August 14, 2018 by 46 Comments

It’s been at least a month or two since the last vulnerability in Intel CPUs was released, but this time it’s serious. Foreshadow is the latest speculative execution attack that allows balaclava-wearing hackers to steal your sensitive information. You know it’s a real 0-day because it already has a domain, a logo, and this time, there’s a video explaining in simple terms anyone can understand why the sky is falling. The video uses ukuleles in the sound track, meaning it’s very well produced.

The Foreshadow attack relies on Intel’s Software Guard Extension (SGX) instructions that allow user code to allocate private regions of memory. These private regions of memory, or enclaves, were designed for VMs and DRM.

How Foreshadow Works

The Foreshadow attack utilizes speculative execution, a feature of modern CPUs most recently in the news thanks to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. The Foreshadow attack reads the contents of memory protected by SGX, allowing an attacker to copy and read back private keys and other personal information. There is a second Foreshadow attack, called Foreshadow-NG, that is capable of reading anything inside a CPU’s L1 cache (effectively anything in memory with a little bit of work), and might also be used to read information stored in other virtual machines running on a third-party cloud. In the worst case scenario, running your own code on an AWS or Azure box could expose data that isn’t yours on the same AWS or Azure box. Additionally, countermeasures to Meltdown and Spectre attacks might be insufficient to protect from Foreshadown-NG

The researchers behind the Foreshadow attacks have talked with Intel, and the manufacturer has confirmed Foreshadow affects all SGX-enabled Skylake and Kaby Lake Core processors. Atom processors with SGX support remain unaffected. For the Foreshadow-NG attack, many more processors are affected, including second through eighth generation Core processors, and most Xeons. This is a significant percentage of all Intel CPUs currently deployed. Intel has released a security advisory detailing all the affected CPUs.

Cracking The Case Of Capcom’s CPS2 Security

June 6, 2018 by 19 Comments

We love a good deep-dive on a specialized piece of technology, the more obscure the better. You’re getting a sneak peek into a world that, by rights, you were never meant to know even existed. A handful of people developed the system, and as far as they knew, nobody would ever come through to analyze and investigate it to find out how it all went together. But they didn’t anticipate the tenacity of a curious hacker with time on their hands.

[Eduardo Cruz] has done a phenomenal job of documenting one such system, the anti-piracy mechanisms present in the Capcom CPS2 arcade board. He recently wrote in to tell us he’s posted his third and final entry on the system, this time focusing on figuring out what a mysterious six pin header on the CPS2 board did. Hearing from others that fiddling with this header occasionally caused the CPS2 board to automatically delete the game, he knew it must be something important. Hackaday Protip: If there’s a self-destruct mechanism attached to it, that’s probably the cool part.

He followed the traces from the header connector, identified on the silkscreen as C9, back to a custom Capcom IC labeled DL-1827. After decapping the DL-1827 and putting it under the microscope, [Eduardo] made a pretty surprising discovery: it wasn’t actually doing anything with the signals from the header at all. Once the chip is powered up, it simply acts as a pass-through for those signals, which are redirected to another chip: the DL-1525.

[Eduardo] notes that this deliberate attempt at obfuscating which chips are actually connected to different headers on the board is a classic trick that companies like Capcom would use to try to make it harder to hack into their boards. Once he figured out DL-1525 was what he was really after, he was able to use the information he gleaned from his earlier work to piece together the puzzle.

This particular CPS2 hacking journey only started last March, but [Eduardo] has been investigating the copy protection systems on arcade boards since 2014.

[Thanks to Arduino Enigma for the tip.]

Linux Fu: Counter Rotate Keys!

June 1, 2018 by 22 Comments

If you’ve done anything with a modern Linux system — including most variants for the Raspberry Pi — you probably know about sudo. This typically allows an authorized user to elevate themselves to superuser status to do things.

However, there is a problem. If you have sudo access, you can do anything — at least, anything the sudoers file allows you to do. But what about extremely critical operations? We’ve all seen the movies where launching the nuclear missile requires two keys counter-rotated at the same time and third firing key. Is there an equivalent for Linux systems?

It isn’t exactly a counter-rotating key, but the sudo_pair project — a prelease open-source project from Square — gives you something similar. The project is a plugin for sudo that allows you to have another user authorize a sudo request. Not only do they authorize it, but they get to see what is happening, and even abort it if something bad is happening.

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