RESOURCES

Thought leaders in information security, we conduct radical, world-changing research and deliver renowned presentations around the world.
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 | February 27, 2014

Beware Your RSA Mobile App Download

It’s been half a decade since Apple launched their iPhone campaign titled “There’s an app for that“. In the years following, the mobile app stores (from all the major players) have continued to blossom to the point that not only are there several thousand apps that help light your way (i.e. by keeping the flash running bright), but every company, cause, group, or notable event is expected to publish their own mobile application.    Today there are several hundred good “rapid development” kits that allow any newbie to craft…

Gunter Ollmann
Blogs | INSIGHTS | February 19, 2014

PCI DSS and Security Breaches

Every time an organization suffers a security breach and cardholder data is compromised, people question the effectiveness of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Blaming PCI DSS for the handful of companies that are breached every year shows a lack of understanding of the standard’s role.  Two major misconceptions are responsible for this.   First, PCI DSS is a compliance standard. An organization can be compliant today and not tomorrow. It can be compliant when an assessment is taking place and noncompliant the minute the assessment is…

Christian Moldes
Blogs | INSIGHTS | February 17, 2014

INTERNET-of-THREATS

At IOActive Labs, I have the privilege of being part of a great team with some of the world’s best hackers. I also have access to really cool research on different technologies that uncovers security problems affecting widely used hardware and software. This gives me a solid understanding of the state of security for many different software and hardware devices, not just opinions based on theories and real life experience.   Currently, the term Internet-of-Things (IoT) is becoming a buzzword used in the media, announcements from hardware device manufacturers, etc….

Cesar Cerrudo
Blogs | INSIGHTS | February 14, 2014

The password is irrelevant too

In this follow up to a blog post on the Scalance-X200 series switches, we look at an authentication bypass vulnerability. It isn’t particularly complicated, but it does allow us to download configuration files, log files, and a firmware image. It can also be used to upload configuration and firmware images, which causes the device to reboot.   The code can be found in IOActive Labs github repository.   If an attacker has access to a configuration file with a known password, they can use this code to update the…

Eireann Leverett
Blogs | INSIGHTS | February 6, 2014

An Equity Investor’s Due Diligence

Information technology companies constitute the core of many investment portfolios nowadays. With so many new startups popping up and some highly visible IPO’s and acquisitions by public companies egging things on, many investors are clamoring for a piece of the action and looking for new ways to rapidly qualify or disqualify an investment ; particularly so when it comes to hottest of hot investment areas – information security companies.  Over the years I’ve found myself working with a number of private equity investment firms – helping them to review the…

Gunter Ollmann
Blogs | INSIGHTS | January 13, 2014

The password is irrelevant

This story begins with a few merry and good hearted tweets from S4x13. These tweets in fact:     Notice the shared conviviality, and the jolly manner in which this discussion of vulnerabilities occurs.   It is with this same lightness in my heart that I thought I would explore the mysterious world of the.   So I waxed my moustache, rolled up my sleeves, and began to use the arcane powers of Quality Assurance.    Ok, how would an attacker who…

Eireann Leverett
Blogs | INSIGHTS | December 4, 2013

Practical and cheap cyberwar (cyber-warfare): Part II

Disclaimer: I did not perform any illegal attacks on the mentioned websites in order to get the information I present here. No vulnerability was exploited on the websites, and they are not known to be vulnerable.   Given that we live in an age of information leakage where government surveillance and espionage abound, I decided in this second part to focus on a simple technique for information gathering on human targets. If an attacker is targeting a specific country, members of the military and defense contractors would make good human…

Cesar Cerrudo
Blogs | INSIGHTS | November 27, 2013

A Short Tale About executable_stack in elf_read_implies_exec() in the Linux Kernel

This is a short and basic analysis I did when I was uncertain about code execution in the data memory segment. Later on, I describe what’s happening in the kernel side as well as what seems to be a small logic bug. I’m not a kernel hacker/developer/ninja; I’m just a Linux user trying to figure out the reason of this behavior by looking in key places such as the ELF loader and other related functions. So, if you see any mistakes or you realize that I approached this in a…

Alejandro Hernandez
Blogs | INSIGHTS | November 15, 2013

heapLib 2.0

Hi everyone, as promised I’m releasing my code for heapLib2. For those of you not familiar, I introduced methods to perform predictable and controllable allocations/deallocations of strings in IE9-IE11 using JavaScript and the DOM. Much of this work is based on Alex Sotirov’s research from quite a few years ago (http://www.phreedom.org/research/heap-feng-shui/).  The zip file contains:  heapLib2.js => The JavaScript library that needs to be imported to use heapLib2 heapLib2_test.html => Example usage of some of the functionality that is available in heapLib2 html_spray.py => A Python script…

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.

ACCESS THE WHITEPAPER


IOACTIVE CORPORATE OVERVIEW (PDF)


IOACTIVE SERVICES OVERVIEW (PDF)


IOACTIVE ARCHIVED WEBINARS (list)