A journey into defeating regulated electronic cigarette protections
TL;DR: This blog post does not encourage smoking nor vaping. The main focus of this blog will be defeating the protections of a regulated electronic cigarette to assess the ability of it being weaponized via a remote attacker by modifying its firmware and delivering it through a malware which waits for electronic cigarettes to be connected over USB or discovered over Bluetooth. The electronic cigarette market continues to grow. According to statistics presented by the market research company EuroMonitor, the number of people who vape will reach almost 55 million…
Password Cracking: Some Further Techniques
To begin at the beginning. A password hash is a transformation of a password using what we call a “one-way” function. So, for example, ROT-13 (rotate by half the alphabet) would be a very, very bad password hash function and would give fairly recognizable results like “Cnffjbeq123!”. The one-way property means it must be essentially impossible to construct the inverse function and recover the original, and functions like MD5 or SHA1 certainly meet that particular criterion. Iterated encryption functions like DES have also been used (for example LAN Manager hashes),…
Uncovering Unencrypted Car Data in BMW Connected App
TL; DR: Modern mobile OSes encrypt data by default, nevertheless, the defense-in-depth paradigm dictates that developers must encrypt sensitive data regardless of the protections offered by the underlying OS. This is yet another case study of data stored unencrypted, and most importantly, a reminder to developers not to leave their apps’ data unencrypted. In this case study, physical access to an unlocked phone, trusted computer or unencrypted backups of an iPhone is required to exfiltrate the data, which in turn does not include authentication data and cannot be used to control or…
No buffers harmed: Rooting Sierra Wireless AirLink devices through logic bugs
There are not many occasions when you can build a chain of exploits and not harm a single buffer, so it is interesting when you find yourself in one of those rare situations. As the title clearly indicates, this blog post will comprehensively describe the entire process that would allow a malicious actor to root Sierra Wireless AirLink® devices. Let’s do this! A couple of years ago the guys at Talos did a great job and killed many bugs in AirLink devices. As usual, before buying a device…
Cybersecurity Vigilance for a Historic Election
November 3rd is Election Day in the United States. Every election is important, but this election is particularly crucial. It is one of the most important elections in our lifetime—the 2020 election will determine the course of the United States for the next 10 years or more. With so much on the line, every vote counts—but the security and integrity of, and voter confidence in, the election itself are also at risk. The Senate Intelligence Committee determined that Russia influenced and interfered with the 2016 election, and US intelligence agencies…
Security Makes Cents: Perspectives on Security from a Finance Leader
Recently, it feels like the Internet is filled with stories of cyber-breaches and security breakdowns. As the world is more interconnected than ever, these stories are becoming all too familiar. In fact, there is a malicious web-based hacking event every 39 seconds, and 43% of them target small businesses. While a breach can occur in any area of a business, a corporate finance department is often uniquely positioned, with touch-points extending further outside the company than other groups. With touch-points up and down the supply chain,…
WSL 2.0 dxgkrnl Driver Memory Corruption
The year 2020 has been a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifices, dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria and reporting Linux kernel bugs to Microsoft!? I thought I would write up a quick blog post explaining the following tweet and walk through a memory corruption flaw reported to MSRC that was recently fixed. Back in May, before Alex…
IOActive Labs Blog
Reclaiming Hallway Con We have several exciting things happening with our blog content. Like many, we’ve been working to replace the value lost with the loss of face-to-face gatherings at meetings, conventions, and informal get-togethers. Many veterans of the conference circuit will tell you that by far the most valuable part of a typical conference is the hallway con, which refers to the informal discussions, networking, and often serendipitous meetings that happen outside the formal conference agenda. IOActive is helping reclaim hallway con by making some of that valuable content…
Breaking Electronic Baggage Tags – Lufthansa vs British Airways
If you are reading this article, I will venture to guess that you have already had the ‘pleasure’ of queuing to check a bag at an airport. In order to improve the checking procedure, Electronic Baggage Tag (EBT) solutions are being introduced on the market that leverage the new technologies most travellers have access to nowadays. This time I will take a look at the security posture of two of the most prominent EBT solutions: British Airways’ TAG and Lufthansa’s BAGTAG. First of all, IATA provides an implementation guide for…
Principles of the IOActive Guest Blog Series
IOActive has recently begun to post a series of guest blogs. Our first post was an excellent contribution from Urban Jonson, who leads the Heavy Vehicle Cyber Security (HVCS) working group at NMFTA, focusing on emerging threats in intermodal transportation. Our organization has embarked upon this series because we think it provides additional value to our readers. This is one more thing we’re doing to give back to the security community and help those starting out to gain a broader understanding of cybersecurity. We have…