OBD-II Dongle Attack: Stopping A Moving Car Via Bluetooth

April 14, 2017 by Pedro Umbelino 30 Comments

Researchers from the Argus Research Team found a way to hack into the Bosch Drivelog ODB-II dongle and inject any kind of malicious packets into the CAN bus. This allowed them to, among other things, stop the engine of a moving vehicle by connecting to the dongle via Bluetooth.

Drivelog is Bosch’s smart device for collecting and managing your vehicle’s operating data. It allows a user to connect via Bluetooth to track fuel consumption and to be alerted when service is necessary. It was compromised in a two stage attack. The first vulnerability, an information leak in the authentication process, between the dongle and the smart phone application allowed them to quickly brute-force the secret PIN offline and connect to the dongle via Bluetooth. After being connected, security holes in the message filter of the dongle allowed them to inject malicious messages into the CAN bus.

The Bluetooth pairing mechanism, called “Just Works”, has been fixed by Bosh by activating a two-step verification for additional users to be registered to a device. The second issue, the ability for a maliciously modified mobile application to possibly send unwanted CAN messages, will be mitigated with an update to the dongle firmware to further limit the allowed commands that the dongle is able to place on the CAN bus.

Bosch downplays the issue a bit in their statement:

It is important to note that scalability of a potential malicious attack is limited by the fact that such an attack requires physical proximity to the dongle. This means that the attacking device needs to be within Bluetooth range of the vehicle.

The problem is that physical proximity does not equal Bluetooth range. Standard Bluetooth range is about 10m, which is very arguable physical proximity, but it is pretty easy to buy or even modify a Bluetooth dongle with 10x and 100x more range. When adding a wireless connection to the CAN bus of an automobile, the manufacturer has an obligation to ensure the data system is not compromised. This near-proximity example is still technically a remote hack, and it’s an example of the worst kind of vulnerability.

BrickerBot Takes Down Your IoT Devices Permanently

April 8, 2017 by Adam Fabio 69 Comments

There is a new class of virii in town, specifically targeting Internet of Things (IoT) devices. BrickerBot and its variants do exactly as their name says, turning your smart devices into bricks. Someone out there has gotten tired of all the IoT security flaws and has undertaken extreme (and illegal) measures to fix the problem. Some of the early reports have come in from a security company called Radware, who isolated two variants of the virii in their honeypots.

In a nutshell, BrickerBot gains access to insecure Linux-based systems by using brute force. It tries to telnet in using common default root username/password pairs. Once inside it uses shell commands (often provided by BusyBox) to write random data to any mounted drives. It’s as easy as

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1

With the secondary storage wiped, the device is effectively useless. There is already a name for this: a Permanent Denial-of-Service (PDoS) attack.

Now any card carrying Hackaday reader will know that a system taken down like this can be recovered by re-flashing through USB, JTAG, SD, other methods. However, we’re not BrickerBot’s intended audience. We’ve all changed our devices default passwords, right? RIGHT?

For more IoT security, check out Elliot’s excellent article about botnets earlier this year, and its follow-up.

Is My Password Safe? Practices For People Who Know Better

April 7, 2017 by Pedro Umbelino 75 Comments

A couple of weeks back a report came out where [Tavis Ormandy], a widely known security researcher for Google Project-Zero, showed how it was possible to abuse Lastpass RPC commands and steal user passwords. Irony is… Lastpass is a software designed to keep all your passwords safe and it’s designed in a way that even they can’t access your passwords, the passwords are stored locally using strong cryptography, only you can access them via a master-key. Storing all your passwords in only place has its downfalls. By the way, there is no proof or suggestion that this bug was abused by anyone, so if you use Lastpass don’t worry just yet.

But it got me thinking, how worried and how paranoid should a regular Internet user should be about his password? How many of us have their account details exposed somewhere online? If you’ve been around long enough, odds are you have at least a couple of accounts on some major Internet-based companies. Don’t go rushing into the Dark Web and try to find if your account details are being sold. The easiest way to get your paranoia started is to visit Have I Been Pwned. For those who never heard about it, it’s a website created by [Troy Hunt], a well-known security professional. It keeps track of all known public security breaches he can get his hands on and provides an answer to a simple question: “Was my account in any major data leak?” Let’s take a look.

Continue reading “Is My Password Safe? Practices For People Who Know Better” →

Friday Hack Chat: Breaking Security With Samy Kamkar

April 5, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

[Samy Kamkar] is a hardware hacker extraordinaire. This week, he’s joining us on Hackaday.io for this week’s Hack Chat.

Every week, we find someone interesting that makes or breaks the electronic paraphernalia all around us. We sit them down, and get them to spill the beans on how this stuff works, and how we can get our tools and toys to work for everyone. This is the Hack Chat, and it’s happening this Friday, April 7, at noon PDT (20:0 UTC).

Over the years, [Samy] has demonstrated some incredible skills and brought us some incredible hacks. He defeated chip and pin security on a debit card with a coil of wire, exploited locked computers with a USB gadget, and has more skills than the entire DEF CON CFP review board combined. If you want to know about security, [Samy] is the guy you want to talk to.

Here’s How To Take Part:

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging.

Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Upcoming Hack Chats

We’ve got a lot on the table when it comes to our Hack Chats. On April 14th we’ll be talking custom silicon with SiFive and on April 21st, we’re going to be talking magnets with Nanomagnetics. Making magnets, collecting magnets, playing with magnets, it’ll all be over on the Hack Chat.

2017: The Year Of The Dishwasher Security Patch

March 28, 2017 by Lewin Day 101 Comments

As if Windows Update wasn’t bad enough, one has to deal with a plethora of attention-hungry programs and utilities all begging for a continual stream of patches from the Internet. It’s exhausting, but unfortunately also par for the course. Many of these updates are to close security vulnerabilities that could otherwise expose your computer to undesirables. The Internet of Things will only expand the amount of hardware and software you need to keep updated and protected on a daily basis. Now, it’s your dishwasher that’s under attack.

The Register reports that Jens Regel discovered the bug in a Miele dishwasher with a webserver. It’s a basic directory traversal attack that can net the intruder the shadow password file. Armed with this, it’s simple to take over the embedded Linux system and wreak havoc on your local network.

It’s not particularly surprising – we’ve talked about IoT security and its pitfalls before. The problem is, a dishwasher is not a computer. Unlike Microsoft, or Google, or even the people behind VLC, Miele don’t have infrastructure in place to push out an update to dishwashers worldwide. This means that as it stands, your only real solutions are to either disconnect the dishwasher from your network, or lock it behind a highly restrictive firewall. Both are likely to impede functionality. Of course, as always, many will ask why a dishwasher needs to be connected to the Internet at all. Why indeed.

A Red Teamer’s Guide To Pivoting

March 25, 2017 by Elliot Williams 22 Comments

What is hacking and what is network engineering? We’re not sure where exactly to draw the lines, but [Artem]’s writeup of pivoting is distinctly written from the (paid) hacker’s perspective.

Once you’re inside a network, the question is what to do next. “Pivoting” is how you get from where you are currently to where you want to be, or even just find out what’s available. And that means using all of the networking tricks available. These aren’t just useful for breaking into other people’s networks, though. We’ve used half of these tools at one time or another just running things at home. The other half? Getting to know them would make a rainy-day project.

Is there anything that ssh and socat can’t do? Maybe not, but there are other tools (3proxy and Rpivot) that will let you do it easier. You know how clients behind a NAT firewall can reach out, but can’t be reached from outside? ssh -D will forward a port to the inside of the network. Need to get data out? There’s the old standby iodine to route arbitrary data over DNS queries, but [Artem] says dnscat2 works without root permissions. (And this code does the same on an ESP8266.)

Once you’ve set up proxies inside, the tremendously useful proxychains will let you tunnel whatever you’d like across them. Python’s pty shell makes things easier to use, and tsh will get you a small shell on the inside, complete with file-transfer capabilities.

Again, this writeup is geared toward the pen-testing professional, but you might find any one of these tools useful in your own home network. We used to stream MP3s from home to work with some (ab)use of netcat and ssh. We keep our home IoT devices inside our own network, and launching reverse-proxies lets us check up on things from far away without permanently leaving the doors open. One hacker’s encrypted tunnel is another man’s VPN. Once you know the tools, you’ll find plenty of uses for them. What’s your favorite?

Thanks [nootrope] for the indirect tip!

From XP To 10, DoubleAgent Pwns All Your Windows?

March 22, 2017 by Pedro Umbelino 39 Comments

The Cybellum team published a new 0-day technique for injecting code and maintaining persistency on a target computer, baptized DoubleAgent. This technique uses a feature that all Windows versions since XP provide, that allows for an Application Verifier Provider DLL to be installed for any executable. The verifier-provider DLL is just a DLL that is loaded into the process and is supposedly responsible for performing run-time verifications for the application. However, its internal behaviour can be whatever an attacker wants, since he can provide the DLL himself.

Microsoft describes it as:

Application Verifier is a runtime verification tool for unmanaged code. Application Verifier assists developers in quickly finding subtle programming errors that can be extremely difficult to identify with normal application testing. Using Application Verifier in Visual Studio makes it easier to create reliable applications by identifying errors caused by heap corruption, incorrect handle and critical section usage. (…)

The code injection occurs extremely early during the victim’s process initialization, giving the attacker full control over the process and no way for the process to actually detect what’s going on. Once a DLL has been registered as a verifier provider DLL for a process, it would permanently be injected by the Windows Loader into the process every time the process starts, even after reboots, updates, reinstalls, or patches.

So it’s all over for Windows right? Well… no. The thing is, to register this DLL, the registered process has to have administrator rights so it can write the proper key to the Windows Registry. Without these permissions, there is no way for this attack to work. You know, the kind of permissions that allow you to install software for all users or format your own hard-drive. So, although this technique has its merit and can present challenges to processes that absolutely must maintain their integrity (such as the Cybellum team points out in the Anti-Virus software case), some other security flaw had to occur first so you can register this sort of ‘debugging DLL’.

If you already have administrator permissions you can do pretty much what you want, including DLL injection to fool anti-virus software. (Though it might be easy just to disable or remove it.) This new tool has the advantage of being stealthy, but is a 0-day that requires root a 0-day?

[via The Hacker News]