BackTrack 4 Beta Released

February 10, 2009 by Eliot 101 Comments

backtrack

The Remote Exploit Development Team has just announced BackTrack 4 Beta. BackTrack is a Linux based LiveCD intended for security testing and we’ve been watching the project since the very early days. They say this new beta is both stable and usable. They’ve moved towards behaving like an actual distribution: it’s based on Debian core, they use Ubuntu software, and they’re running their own BackTrack repositories for future updates. There are a lot of new features, but the one we’re most interested in is the built in Pico card support. You can use the FPGAs to generate rainbow tables and do lookups for things like WPA, GSM, and Bluetooth cracking. BackTrack ISO and VMWare images are available here.

TEMPEST: A Signal Problem

January 25, 2009 by Eliot 12 Comments

TEMPEST is the covername used by the NSA and other agencies to talk about emissions from computing machinery that can divulge what the equipment is processing. We’ve covered a few projects in the past that specifically intercept EM radiation. TEMPEST for Eliza can transmit via AM using a CRT monitor, and just last Fall a group showed how to monitor USB keyboards remotely. Through the Freedom of Information Act, an interesting article from 1972 has been released. TEMPEST: A Signal Problem (PDF link dead, try Internet Archive version) covers the early history of how this phenomenon was discovered. Uncovered by Bell Labs in WWII, it affected a piece of encryption gear they were supplying to the military. The plaintext could be read over that air and also by monitoring spikes on the powerlines. Their new, heavily shielded and line filtered version of the device was rejected by the military who simply told commanders to monitor a 100 feet around their post to prevent eavesdropping. It’s an interesting read and also covers acoustic monitoring. This is just the US history of TEMPEST though, but from the anecdotes it sounds like their enemies were not just keeping pace but were also better informed.

[via Schneier]

Manual Protocol Analysis

January 24, 2009 by Eliot 2 Comments

packetfu

As a followup to last week’s post on automated protocol analysis, [Tod Beardsley] has written up how to start analyzing a protocol manually. He walks through several examples to show how to pull out the interesting bits in binary protocols. His first step was sending 10 identical select statements and capturing the outbound packets. He used the Ruby library PacketFu to help with the identification. It compared the ten packets and highlighted one byte that was incrementing by four with each packet, probably a counter. Looking at the response indicated a few other bytes that were also incrementing at the same rate, but at different values. Running the same query on two different days turned up what could be a timestamp. Using two different queries helped identify which byte was responsible for the statement length. While you may not find yourself buried in HEX on a daily basis, the post provides good coverage of how to think critically about it.

Dismantling The Storm Worm Botnet

January 16, 2009 by Eliot 26 Comments

malware

Zero Day has an interview with German researchers who have found a way to take down the Storm Worm botnet. Their program, Stormfucker, takes advantage of flaws in Storm’s command network: Nodes that are NAT‘d only use a four-byte XOR challenge. Nodes that aren’t NAT’d are only using a trivial 64bit RSA signature. Their solution can clean infected machines and also distribute to other nodes. Unfortunately, installing software without the user’s consent is the exact same behavior as malware. Don’t expect to see this in any sort of widespread use. The researchers did point out that some ISPs have moved to shutting off service for infected customers until their machines are cleaned.

Surviving A Hacker Conference

December 25, 2008 by Eliot 14 Comments

concrowd

With another hacker conference looming in front of us, it’s time to start thinking about hardware security. Hacker conventions have the most hostile network you’ll ever encounter. [Security4all] points out that 25C3 already has an extensive page on securing your hardware. It starts from the ground up with physical security, BIOS passwords, and locking down bootloaders. There’s a section on securing your actual OS and session. Finally, they cover network usage. It mentions using SSH for dynamic forwarding, which we feel is a skill everyone should have. We’ve used it not just for security, but for bypassing brainless bandwidth restrictions too. There’s also the more trick transparent version. Every piece of data you bring with you, you risk losing, so they actually recommend just wiping your iPhone and other devices before attending. It’s important to remember that it’s not just your own data at risk, but everyone/thing you communicate with as well.

MBTA Drops Lawsuit Against MIT Subway Hackers

December 23, 2008 by Eliot 8 Comments

The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) has dropped its federal case against three MIT researchers, “the subway hackers”. This happened in October and now the EFF brings news that the students will be working with the MBTA to improve their system. The overall goal is to raise security while keeping expenses minimal.

This whole mess started in August when a gag order was issued against the students’ presentation at Defcon. It’s a shame no one ever saw it because it covers a lot of interesting ground. A PDF of the banned slides is still online. They performed several attacks against both the subway’s fare system and physical security. Our favorites by far were using GNU Radio to sniff the RFID card’s transaction and bruteforcing Mifare Classic with an FPGA.

Securing Your Data

December 20, 2008 by Eliot 6 Comments

Lifehacker has published an overview of some of the many ways you can secure your data. The post was prompted by recently released browser vulnerabilities: first IE, then Firefox. They cover techniques far beyond just browser security, like how to properly wipe your iPhone. They mention disk encryption go-to TrueCrypt along with password management tools like KeePass. They also suggest using temporary credit cards to mitigate the impact of fraud.

[photo: Rija 2.0]