This Week in Security

240 Articles

This Week In Security: Recall, BadRAM, And OpenWRT

December 13, 2024 by 6 Comments

Microsoft’s Recall feature is back. You may remember our coverage of the new AI feature back in June, but for the uninitiated, it was a creepy security trainwreck. The idea is that Windows will take screenshots of whatever is on the screen every few seconds, and use AI to index the screenshots for easier searching. The only real security win at the time was that Microsoft managed to do all the processing on the local machine, instead of uploading them to the cloud. All the images and index data was available unencrypted on the hard drive, and there weren’t any protections for sensitive data.

Things are admittedly better now, but not perfect. The recall screenshots and database is no longer trivially opened by any user on the machine, and Windows prompts the user to set up and authenticate with Windows Hello before using Recall. [Avram] from Tom’s Hardware did some interesting testing on the sensitive information filter, and found that it worked… sometimes.

So, with the public preview of Recall, is it still creepy? Yes. Is it still a security trainwreck? It appears that the security issues are much improved. Time will tell if a researcher discovers a way to decrypt the Recall data outside of the Recall app.

Patch Tuesday

Since we’re talking about Microsoft, this week was Patch Tuesday, and we had seventy-one separate vulnerabilities fixed, with one of those being a zero-day that was used in real-world attacks. CVE-2024-49138 doesn’t seem to have a lot of information published yet. We know it’s a Heap-based Buffer Overflow in the Common Log File driver, and allows an escalation of privilege to SYSTEM on Windows machines. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Recall, BadRAM, And OpenWRT” →

This Week In Security: National Backdoors, Web3 Backdoors, And Nearest Neighbor WiFi

December 6, 2024 by 16 Comments

Maybe those backdoors weren’t such a great idea. Several US Telecom networks have been compromised by a foreign actor, likely China’s Salt Typhoon, and it looks like one of the vectors of compromise is the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) systems that allow for automatic wiretapping at government request.

[Jeff Greene], a government official with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), has advised that end-user encryption is the way to maintain safe communications. This moment should forever be the touchstone we call upon when discussing ideas like mandated encryption backdoors and even the entire idea of automated wiretapping systems like CALEA. He went on to make a rather startling statement:

I think it would be impossible for us to predict a time frame on when we’ll have full eviction

There are obviously lots of unanswered questions, but with statements like this from CISA, this seems to be an extremely serious compromise. CALEA has been extended to Internet data, and earlier reports suggest that attackers have access to Internet traffic as a result. This leaves the US telecom infrastructure in a precarious position where any given telephone call, text message, or data packet may be intercepted by an overseas attacker. And the FCC isn’t exactly inspiring us with confidence as to its “decisive steps” to fix things. Continue reading “This Week In Security: National Backdoors, Web3 Backdoors, And Nearest Neighbor WiFi” →

This Week In Security: Footguns, Bing Worms, And Gogs

November 22, 2024 by 5 Comments

The world of security research is no stranger to the phenomenon of not-a-vulnerability. That’s where a security researcher finds something interesting, reports it to the project, and it turns out that it’s something other than a real security vulnerability. There are times that this just means a researcher got over-zealous on reporting, and didn’t really understand what was found. There is at least one other case, the footgun.

A footgun is a feature in a language, library, or tool that too easily leads to catastrophic mistake — shooting ones self in the foot. The main difference between a footgun and a vulnerability is that a footgun is intentional, and a vulnerability is not. That line is sometimes blurred, so an undocumented footgun could also be a vulnerability, and one possible solution is to properly document the quirk. But sometimes the footgun should really just be eliminated. And that’s what the article linked above is about. [Alex Leahu] takes a look at a handful of examples, which are not only educational, but also a good exercise in thinking through how to improve them.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Footguns, Bing Worms, And Gogs” →

This Week In Security: Hardware Attacks, IoT Security, And More

November 15, 2024 by 9 Comments

This week starts off with examinations of a couple hardware attacks that you might have considered impractical. Take a Ball Grid Array (BGA) NAND removal attack, for instance. The idea is that a NAND chip might contain useful information in the form of firmware or hard-coded secrets.

The question is whether a BGA desolder job puts this sort of approach out of the reach of most attackers. Now, this is Hackaday. We regularly cover how our readers do BGA solder jobs, so it should come as no surprise to us that less than two-hundred Euro worth of tools, and a little know-how and bravery, was all it took to extract this chip. Plop it onto a pogo-pin equipped reader, use some sketchy Windows software, and boom you’ve got firmware.

What exactly to do with that firmware access is a little less straightforward. If the firmware is unencrypted and there’s not a cryptographic signature, then you can just modify the firmware. Many devices include signature checking at boot, so that limits the attack to finding vulnerabilities and searching for embedded secrets. And then worst case, some platforms use entirely encrypted firmware. That means there’s another challenge, of either recovering the key, or finding a weakness in the encryption scheme. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Hardware Attacks, IoT Security, And More” →

This Week In Security: Linux VMs, Real AI CVEs, And Backscatter TOR DoS

November 8, 2024 by 4 Comments

Steve Ballmer famously called Linux “viral”, with some not-entirely coherent complaints about the OS. In a hilarious instance of life imitating art, Windows machines are now getting attacked through malicious Linux VM images distributed through phishing emails.

This approach seems to be intended to fool any anti-malware software that may be running. The VM includes the chisel tool, described as “a fast TCP/UDP tunnel, transported over HTTP, secured via SSH”. Now that’s an interesting protocol stack. It’s an obvious advantage for an attacker to have a Linux VM right on a target network. As this sort of virtualization does require hardware virtualization, it might be worth disabling the virtualization extensions in BIOS if they aren’t needed on a particular machine.

AI Finds Real CVE

We’ve talked about some rather unfortunate use of AI, where aspiring security researchers asked an LLM to find vulnerabilities in a project like curl, and then completely wasted a maintainer’s time on those bogus reports. We happened to interview Daniel Stenberg on FLOSS Weekly this week, and after he recounted this story, we mused that there might be a real opportunity to use LLMs to find vulnerabilities, when used as a way to direct fuzzing, and when combined with a good test suite.

And now, we have Google Project Zero bringing news of their Big Sleep LLM project finding a real-world vulnerability in SQLite. This tool was previously called Project Naptime, and while it’s not strictly a fuzzer, it does share some similarities. The main one being that both tools take their educated guesses and run that data through the real program code, to positively verify that there is a problem. With this proof of concept demonstrated, it’s sure to be replicated. It seems inevitable that someone will next try to get an LLM to not only find the vulnerability, but also find an appropriate fix. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Linux VMs, Real AI CVEs, And Backscatter TOR DoS” →

This Week In Security: Playing Tag, Hacking Cameras, And More

November 1, 2024 by 3 Comments

Wired has a fascinating story this week, about the length Sophos has gone to for the last 5 years, to track down a group of malicious but clever security researchers that were continually discovering vulnerabilities and then using those findings to attack real-world targets. Sophos believes this adversary to be overlapping Chinese groups known as APT31, APT41, and Volt Typhoon.

The story is actually refreshing in its honesty, with Sophos freely admitting that their products, and security products from multiple other vendors have been caught in the crosshairs of these attacks. And indeed, we’ve covered stories about these vulnerabilities over the past weeks and months right here on this column. The sneaky truth is that many of these security products actually have pretty severe security problems.

The issues at Sophos started with an infection of an informational computer at a subsidiary office. They believe this was an information gathering exercise, that was a precursor to the widespread campaign. That campaign used multiple 0-days to crack “tens of thousands of firewalls around the world”. Sophos rolled out fixes for those 0-days, and included just a bit of extra logging as an undocumented feature. That logging paid off, as Sophos’ team of researchers soon identified an early signal among the telemetry. This wasn’t merely the first device to be attacked, but was actually a test device used to develop the attack. The game was on. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Playing Tag, Hacking Cameras, And More” →

This Week In Security: The Geopolitical Kernel, Roundcube, And The Archive

October 25, 2024 by 13 Comments

Leading off the week is the controversy around the Linux kernel and an unexpected change in maintainership. The exact change was that over a dozen developers with ties to or employment by Russian entities were removed as maintainers. The unfortunate thing about this patch was that it was merged without any discussion or real explanation, other than being “due to various compliance requirements”. We eventually got more answers, that this was due to US sanctions against certain Russian businesses, and that the Linux Foundation lawyers gave guidance that:

If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.

So that’s that. One might observe that it’s unfortunate that a single government has that much control over the kernel’s development process. There were some questions about why Russian entities were targeted and not sanctioned Chinese companies like Huawei. [Ted Ts’o] spoke to that, explaining that in the US there are exemptions and different rules for each country and business. This was all fairly standard compliance stuff, up until a very surprising statement from [James Bottomley], a very core Kernel maintainer:

We are hoping that this action alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in charge of sanctions and we won’t also have to remove any existing patches.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: The Geopolitical Kernel, Roundcube, And The Archive” →