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Blogs | INSIGHTS | November 2, 2012

iOS Security: Objective-C and nil Pointers

iOS devices are everywhere now. It seems that pretty much every other person has one…an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch – and they’re rivaled in popularity only by Android devices. If you do secure code review, chances are that with the explosion in the number of iOS apps, you may well have done a source code review of an iOS app, or at least played around with some Objective-C code. Objective-C can be a little strange at first for those of us who are used to plain C and C++…

Shaun Colley
Blogs | INSIGHTS | October 30, 2012

3S Software’s CoDeSys: Insecure by Design

My last project before joining IOActive was “breaking” 3S Software’s CoDeSys PLC runtime for Digital Bond. Before the assignment, I had a fellow security nut give me some tips on this project to get me off the ground, but unfortunately this person cannot be named. You know who you are, so thank you, mystery person. The PLC runtime is pretty cool, from a hacker perspective. CoDeSys is an unusual ladder logic runtime for a number of reasons.   Different vendors have different strategies for executing ladder logic. Some run ladder logic…

Reid Wightman
Blogs | INSIGHTS | October 24, 2012

The WECC / NERC Wash-up

Last week in San Diego, IOActive spoke at both the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) and NERC GridSec (GridSecCon) conferences. WECC is primarily an auditor audience and NERC-CIP is compliance-focused, while GridSecCon is the community and technical security authority for the electricity industry in the U.S. There was a great turnout for both conferences, with more than 200 attendees across three days per conference. IOActive security researcher Eireann Leverett presented “The Last Gasp of the Industrial Air-Gap…”at WECC and participated in a discussion…

Trevor Niblock
Blogs | INSIGHTS | October 11, 2012

SexyDefense Gets Real

As some of you know by now, the recent focus of my research has been defense. After years of dealing almost exclusively with offensive research, I realized that we have been doing an injustice to ourselves as professionals. After all, we eventually get to help organizations protect themselves (having the mindset that the best way to learn defense is to study the offensive techniques), but nevertheless, when examining how organizations practice defense one has a feeling of missing something. For far too long the practice (and art?) of defense has…

Ian Amit
Blogs | INSIGHTS | October 2, 2012

Impressions from Ekoparty

Another ekoparty took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and for a whole week, Latin America had the chance to meet and get in touch with the best researchers in this side of the world. A record-breaking number of 150 entries were received and analysed by the excellent academic committee formed by Cesar Cerrudo, Nico Waisman, Sebastian Muñiz, Gerardo Richarte, Juliano Rizzo. There were more than 1500 people who enjoyed of 20 talks without any interruption, except when the Mariachis played. Following last year’s ideas, when ekoparty became the last bastion…

Francisco Amato
Blogs | INSIGHTS | September 26, 2012

Completely Unnecessary Statistical Analysis: Phone Directory

Disclaimer: I am not a statistician.   A particular style of telephone company directory allows callers to “dial by name” to reach a person, after playing the matching contacts’ names.  In the example used here, input must be given as surname + given name with a minimum of three digits using the telephone keypad (e.g. Smith = 764). To cover all possible combinations, you’d calculate 8^3, or 512 combinations. With a directory that allowed repeated searches in the same call, it would take about seven hours of dialing to cover…

Ryan O'Horo
Blogs | INSIGHTS | September 11, 2012

Malware Doesn’t Care About Your Disclosure Policy, But You Better Have One Anyway

All over the world, things are changing in ICS security—we are now in the spotlight and the only way forward is, well, forward. Consequently, I’m doing more reading than ever to keep up with technical issues, global incidents, and frameworks and policies that will ensure the security of our future. From a security researcher’s perspective, one exciting development is that .gov is starting to understand the need for disclosure in some cases. They have found that by giving companies lead time to implement fixes, they often get stonewalled for months…

Eireann Leverett
Blogs | INSIGHTS | August 29, 2012

Stripe CTF 2.0 Write-Up

Hello, World! I had the opportunity to play and complete the 2012 Stripe CTF 2.0 this weekend. I would have to say this was one of the most enjoyable CTF’s I’ve played by far.  They did an excellent job. I wanted to share with you a detailed write-up of the levels, why they’re vulnerable, and how to exploit them. It’s interesting to see how multiple people take different routes on problems, so I’ve included some of the solutions by Michael Milvich (IOActive), Ryan O’Horo(IOActive), Ryan Linn(Spiderlabs), as well as my own (Joseph…

IOActive
Blogs | INSIGHTS | August 17, 2012

One Mail to Rule Them All

This small research project was conducted over a four-week period a while back, so current methods may differ as password restoration methods change. While writing this blog post, the Gizmodo writer Mat Honan’s account was hacked with some clever social engineering that ultimately brought numerous small bits and pieces of information together into one big chunk of usable data. The downfall in all this is that different services use different alternative methods to reset passwords: some have you enter the last four digits of your credit card and some would…

Lucas Lundgren

Commonalities in Vehicle Vulnerabilities

2022 Decade Examination Update | With the connected car now commonplace in the market, automotive cybersecurity has become the vanguard of importance as it relates to road user safety. IOActive has amassed over a decade of real-world vulnerability data illustrating the issues and potential solutions to cybersecurity threats today’s vehicles face.

This analysis is a major update and follow-up to the vehicle vulnerabilities report originally published in 2016 and updated in 2018. The goal of this 2022 update is to deliver current data and discuss how the state of automotive cybersecurity has progressed over the course of 10 years, making note of overall trends and their causes.

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