LibSSH Vuln: You Don’t Need To See My Authentication

October 16, 2018 by Jonathan Bennett 19 Comments

Another day, another CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). Getting a CVE number assigned to a vulnerability is a stamp of authenticity that you have a real problem on your hands. CVE-2018-10933 is a worst case scenario for libssh. With a single response, an attacker can completely bypass authentication, giving full access to a system.

Before you panic and yank the power cord on your server, know that libssh is not part of OpenSSH. Your Linux box almost certainly uses OpenSSH as the SSH daemon, and that daemon is not vulnerable to this particular problem. Libssh does show up in a few important places, the most notable is probably Github and their security team already announced their implementation was not vulnerable.

Libssh has released a new version that fixes the problem. Stick around for the details after the break.

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Keep It Close: A Private Git Server Crash Course

June 27, 2018 by Tom Nardi 65 Comments

At this point, everyone has already heard that Microsoft is buying GitHub. Acquisitions of this scale take time, but most expect everything to be official by 2019. The general opinion online seems to be one of unease, and rightfully so. Even if we ignore Microsoft’s history of shady practices, there’s always an element of unease when somebody new takes over something you love. Sometimes it ends up being beneficial, the beginning of a new and better era. But sometimes…

Let’s not dwell on what might become of GitHub. While GitHub is the most popular web-based interface for Git, it’s not the only one. For example GitLab, a fully open source competitor to GitHub, is reporting record numbers of new repositories being created after word of the Microsoft buyout was confirmed. But even GitLab, while certainly worth checking out in these uncertain times, might be more than you strictly need.

Let’s be realistic. Most of the software projects hackers work on don’t need even half the features that GitHub/GitLab offer. Whether you’ve simply got a private project you want to maintain revisions of, or you’re working with a small group collaboratively in a hackerspace setting, you don’t need anything that isn’t already provided by the core Git software.

Let’s take a look at how quickly and easily you can setup a private Git server for you and your colleagues without having to worry about Microsoft (or anyone else) having their fingers around your code.

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Harmony Hub Hacked And Patched

May 7, 2018 by Al Williams 15 Comments

When we say “hack” here we most often mean either modifying something to do something different or building something out of parts. But as we build more Internet-connected things, it is worthwhile to think about the other kind of hack where people gain unauthorized access to a system. For example, you wouldn’t think a remote control would be a big deal for hackers. But the Logitech Harmony Hub connects to the Internet and runs Linux. What’s more is it can control smart devices like door locks and thermostats, so hacking it could cause problems. FireEye’s Mandian Red Team set out to hack the Harmony and found it had a lot of huge security problems.

The remote didn’t check Logitech’s SSL certificate for validity. It didn’t have a secure update process. There were developer tools (an SSH server) left inactive in the production firmware and — surprisingly — the root password was blank! The team shared their findings with Logitech before publishing the report and the latest patch from the company fixes these problems. But it is instructive to think about how your Raspberry Pi project would fare under the same scrutiny.

In fact, that’s the most interesting part of the story is the blow-by-blow description of the attack. We won’t spoil the details, but the approach was to feed the device a fake update package that turned on a dormant ssh server. Although they started by trying to solder wires to a serial port, that wasn’t productive and the final attack didn’t require any of that.

We’ve looked at some ways to harden Linux systems like the Raspberry Pi before, but honestly, it is an ongoing battle. We’ve seen plenty of devices with cybersecurity holes in them — some not found by good guy hackers first.

Remotely Get Root On Most Smart TVs With Radio Signals

April 6, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 58 Comments

[Rafael Scheel] a security consultant has found that hacking smart TVs takes nothing much more than an inexpensive DVB-T transmitter, The transmitter has to be in range of the target TV and some malicious signals. The hack works by exploiting hybrid broadcast broadband TV signals and widely known about bugs in web browsers commonly run on smart TVs, which seem run in the background almost all the time.

Scheel was commissioned by Cyber security company Oneconsult, to create the exploit which once deployed, gave full root privileges enabling the attacker to setup and SSH into the TV taking complete control of the device from anywhere in the world. Once exploited the rogue code is even unaffected by device reboots and factory resets.

Once a hacker has control over the TV of an end user, he can harm the user in a variety of ways, Among many others, the TV could be used to attack further devices in the home network or to spy on the user with the TV’s camera and microphone. – Rafael Scheel

Smart TV’s seem to be suffering from IoT security problems. Turning your TV into an all-seeing, all-hearing surveillance device reporting back to it’s master is straight out of 1984.

A video of a talk about the exploit along with all the details is embedded below.
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Linux-Fu: Applications On The Web

March 31, 2017 by Al Williams 38 Comments

Did you know you can run remote Linux GUI programs in a browser with HTML5 support? It’s even secure because you can use SSH tunneling and that little trick means you don’t even need to open additional ports. If this sounds like gibberish, read on, it’s actually pretty easy to get up and running.

I recently was a guest on a Houston-based podcast, and the hosts asked me if the best thing about writing for Hackaday was getting to work with the other Hackaday staff. I told them that was really good, but what I like best was interacting with people (well, most people) in the comments. That sometimes you’d post an article and someone would bring a topic up in comments that would really knock your socks off. This is how I wound up with this nearly ideal remote access solution, that requires nothing on the remote side but a web browser.

A while back I posted about keeping programs running after log off on a Linux box. The post was mostly about non-GUI programs but you could use NX or VNC to handle it. In the comments, someone mentioned how unhappy they’d been with recent copies of NX and another commenter called [Screen for X11] posted about a tool called xpra.

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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!

Giving Linux The Remote Boot

February 14, 2017 by Al Williams 11 Comments

A lot of embedded systems are running Linux on platforms like Raspberry Pi. Since Linux is fully functional from a command line and fully network-capable, it is possible to run servers that you’ve never had physical access to.

There are a few problems, though. Sometimes you really need to reboot the box physically. You also need to be at the console to do things like totally install a new operating system. Or do you? Over on GitHub, user [marcan] has a C program and a shell script that allows you to take over a running system without using any software on the root filesystem. It starts an ssh server and you can remotely unmount the main drive, do any maintenance you want and –presumably–reboot into a new operating system.

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