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Blogs | RESEARCH | July 2, 2015

Hacking Wireless Ghosts Vulnerable For Years

Is the risk associated to a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in an industrial plant the same when it affects the human life? When calculating risk, certain variables and metrics are combined into equations that are rendered as static numbers, so that risk remediation efforts can be prioritized. But such calculations sometimes ignore the environmental metrics and rely exclusively on exploitability and impact. The practice of scoring vulnerabilities without auditing the potential for collateral damage could underestimate a cyber attack that affects human safety in an industrial plant and leads to…

Lucas Apa
Blogs | RESEARCH | November 18, 2014

Die Laughing from a Billion Laughs

Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way, and that’s what the XML Entity Expansion (XEE)[1] is about: a small string is referenced a huge number of times. Technology standards sometimes include features that affect the security of applications. Amit Klein found in 2002 that XML entities could be used to make parsers consume an unlimited amount of resources and then crash, which is called a billion laughs attack. When the XML parser tries to resolve, the external entities that are included cause the application to start…

Fernando Arnaboldi
Blogs | INSIGHTS | November 6, 2014

ELF Parsing Bugs by Example with Melkor Fuzzer

Too often the development community continues to blindly trust the metadata in Executable and Linking Format (ELF) files. In this paper, Alejandro Hernández walks you through the testing process for seven applications and reveals the bugs that he found. He performed the tests using Melkor, a file format fuzzer he wrote specifically for ELF files.   Introduction The ELF file format, like any other file format, is an array of bits and bytes interconnected through data structures. When interpreted by an ELF parser, an ELF file makes sense, depending upon…

Alejandro Hernandez
Blogs | RESEARCH | October 23, 2014

Bad Crypto 101

This post is part of a series about bad cryptography usage . We all rely heavily on cryptographic algorithms for data confidentiality and integrity, and although most commonly used algorithms are secure, they need to be used carefully and correctly. Just as holding a hammer backwards won’t yield the expected result, using cryptography badly won’t yield the expected results either.   To refresh my Android skillset, I decided to take apart a few Android applications that offer to encrypt personal files and protect them from prying eyes. I headed off…

Yvan Janssens
Blogs | RESEARCH | October 17, 2014

Vicious POODLE Finally Kills SSL

The poodle must be the most vicious dog, because it has killed SSL.   POODLE is the latest in a rather lengthy string of vulnerabilities in SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and a more recent protocol, TLS (Transport layer Security). Both protocols secure data that is being sent between applications to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and message forgery. POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption) rings the death knell for our 18-year-old friend SSL version 3.0 (SSLv3), because at this point, there is no truly safe way to continue using it.

Robert Zigweid
Blogs | RESEARCH | September 10, 2014

Killing the Rootkit

Cross-platform, cross-architecture DKOM detection To know if your system is compromised, you need to find everything that could run or otherwise change state on your system and verify its integrity (that is, check that the state is what you expect it to be).   “Finding everything” is a bold statement, particularly in the realm of computer security, rootkits, and advanced threats. Is it possible to find everything? Sadly, the short answer is no, it’s not. Strangely, the long answer is yes, it is. By defining the execution environment at…

Shane Macaulay
Blogs | INSIGHTS | May 7, 2014

Glass Reflections in Pictures + OSINT = More Accurate Location

By Alejandro Hernández – @nitr0usmx Disclaimer: The aim of this article is to help people to be more careful when taking pictures through windows because they might reveal their location inadvertently. The technique presented here might be used for many different purposes, such as to track down the location of the bad guys, to simply know in which hotel is that nice room or by some people, to follow the tracks of their favorite artist. All of the pictures presented here were posted by the owners on…

Alejandro Hernandez
Blogs | INSIGHTS | April 23, 2014

Hacking the Java Debug Wire Protocol – or – “How I met your Java debugger”

By Christophe Alladoum – @_hugsy_   TL;DR: turn any open JDWP service into reliable remote code execution (exploit inside)   <plagiarism> Kids, I’m gonna tell you an incredible story. </plagiarism> This is the story of how I came across an interesting protocol during a recent engagement for IOActive and turned it into a reliable way to execute remote code. In this post, I will explain the Java Debug Wire Protocol (JDWP) and why it is interesting from a pentester’s point of view. I will cover some JDWP internals and…

Christophe Alladoum
Blogs | INSIGHTS | April 10, 2014

Bleeding Hearts

The Internet is ablaze with talk of the “heartbleed” OpenSSL vulnerability disclosed yesterday (April 7, 2014) here: https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20140407.txt   While the bug itself is a simple “missing bounds check,” it affects quite a number of high-volume, big business websites.   Make no mistake, this bug is BAD. It’s sort of a perfect storm: the bug is in a library used to encrypt sensitive data (OpenSSL), and it allows attackers a peak into a server’s memory, potentially revealing that same sensitive data in the clear.   Initially, it was reported…

Robert Erbes
Blogs | INSIGHTS | April 8, 2014

Car Hacking 2: The Content

Does everyone remember when those two handsome young gentlemen controlled automobiles with CAN message injection (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqe6S6m73Zw)? I sure do. However, what if you don’t have the resources to purchase a car, pay for insurance, repairs to the car, and so on?    Fear not Internet!    Chris and Charlie to the rescue. Last week we presented our new automotive research at Syscan 2014. To make a long story short, we provided the blueprints to setup a small automotive network outside the vehicle so security researchers could start investigating Autosec…

Chris Valasek

Arm IDA and Cross Check: Reversing the 787’s Core Network

IOActive has documented detailed attack paths and component vulnerabilities to describe the first plausible, detailed public attack paths to effectively reach the avionics network on a 787, commercial airplane from either non-critical domains, such as Passenger Information and Entertainment Services, or even external networks.

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