Mismatch? CVSS, Vulnerability Management, and Organizational Risk
I’ll never forget a meeting I attended where a security engineer demanded IT remediate each of the 30,000 vulnerabilities he had discovered. I know that he wasn’t just dumping an unvetted pile of vulnerabilities on IT; he’d done his best to weed out false-positive results, other errors, and misses before presenting the findings. These were real issues, ranked using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). There can be no doubt that in that huge (and overwhelming) pile were some serious threats to the organization and its digital assets. The reaction…
10 Laws of Disclosure
In my 20+ years working in cyber security, I’ve reported more than 1000 vulnerabilities to a wide variety of companies, most found by our team at IOActive as well as some found by me. In reporting these vulnerabilities to many different vendors, the response (or lack thereof) I got is also very different, depending on vendor security maturity. When I think that I have seen everything related to vulnerability disclosures, I’ll have new experiences – usually bad ones – but in general, I keep seeing the same problems over and…
Do You Blindly Trust LoRaWAN Networks for IoT?
Do you blindly trust that your IoT devices are being secured by the encryption methods employed by LoRaWAN? If so, you’re not alone. Long Range Wide Area Networking (LoRaWAN) is a protocol designed to allow low-power devices to communicate with Internet-connected applications over long-range wireless connections. It’s being adopted by major organizations across the world because of its promising capabilities. For example, a single gateway (antenna) can cover an entire city, hundreds of square miles. With more than 100 million LoRaWAN-connected devices in use across the globe, many cellular carriers…
Eight Steps to Improving Your Supply Chain Security Program
A few key steps you can take today to build a supply chain security program – and protect your network, systems, and products from threats.
Supply Chain Risks Go Beyond Cyber: Focus on Operational Resilience
In this first, of a two-part blog series on supply chain, I’ll discuss the security and operational risk in today’s supply chain. In the past 20 years, we’ve seen the globalization of the supply chain and a significant movement to disperse supply chains outside national borders. With this globalization comes many supply chain risks — risks that go beyond just cyber attacks and demonstrate a need for stronger operational resilience. Most organizations want to take advantage of tariff treaties and overall cost savings by outsourcing the…
Internet of Planes: Hacking Millionaires’ Jet Cabins
The push to incorporate remote management capabilities into products has swept across a number of industries. A good example of this is the famous Internet of Things (IoT), where modern home devices from crockpots to thermostats can be managed remotely from a tablet or smartphone. One of the biggest problems associated with this new feature is a lack of security. Unfortunately, nobody is surprised when a new, widespread vulnerability appears in the IoT world. However, the situation becomes a bit more concerning when similar technologies appear in the aviation sector….
RSA Conference Requires Changes
For many years, IOActive has been hosting our IOAsis event as a refuge from the madness of crowds and marketing pitches. This was a hugely successful event and we appreciate everyone’s support and participation over the years to make it a high-quality “hallway con” in an upscale environment. Last year, we noticed a reduction in the quality of attendance at our event even though there was an increase in overall RSA Conference (RSAC) attendance. We discovered in talking to our clients, friends and peers in the industry that many of…
Bypassing Chrome’s CSP with Link Preloading
In this post I’m going talk about a bug I found a while back in Google’s Chrome browser that allows attackers to bypass the Content Security Policy (CSP). Besides breaking the CSP, the bug also allows attackers a means to ex-filtrate information from inside an SSL/TLS connection. The bug was reported a couple of years back and we got word that the fix is in, so I decided to dust off this blog post and update it so you folks can learn about it. The CSP is a configuration setting…
Extracting Bluetooth Metadata in an Object’s Memory Using Frida
Here’s a script I wrote to extract information from the Bluetooth metadata in an object’s memory. The script makes use of the Frida instrumentation framework, and I’ll take a little time to explain a simple scripting methodology/thought framework for solving problems with Frida. What you will need: Frida Server for your device https://www.frida.re/docs/installation/ Frida script to run https://github.com/IOActive/BlueCrawl Target Android phone (preferably with root permissions) Getting Started: Your first Script Frida forwards APIs that wrap Java objects and introduce means to inspect them, modify…
Secure Design? Help!
“So, Brook, in your last post you pointed to the necessity, underlined a requirement for “secure design”. But what does that mean, and how do I proceed?” It’s a fair question that I get asked regularly: How does one get security architecture started? Where can I learn more, and grow towards mastery? It used to be that the usual teaching method was to “shadow” (follow) a seasoned or master practitioner as she or he went about their daily duties. That’s how I learned (way back in…