Reverse Engineering of DAL-A Certified Avionics: Collins’ Pro Line Fusion—AFD-3700
Ruben Santamarta, IOActive Security Researcher, presents a highly technical and detailed look into reverse engineering the DAL-A Certified Avionics: Collins’ Pro Line Fusion—AFD-3700. Modern avionic systems are designed according to the Integrated Modular Avionics concept. Under this paradigm, safety-certified avionic applications and non-critical airborne software share the same computing platform but are running at different partitions. In this context the underlying safety-critical certified RTOS provides the logical isolation, which should prevent unintended interactions between software with different criticalities. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the architecture and vulnerabilities found…
Satellite (in)security: Vulnerability Analysis of Wideye SATCOM Terminals
Ethan Shackelford, IOActive Security Consultant, revisits the long-standing IOActive SATCOM security research with the introduction of the latest whitepaper detailing the original research into two SATCOM terminals manufactured by Addvalue Technologies, Ltd.: the Wideye iSavi and Wideye SABRE Ranger 5000. He further provides current insight to the numerous identified serious security vulnerabilities in both devices, including broken or backdoored authentication mechanisms, rudimentary data parsing errors allowing for complete device compromise over the network, completely inadequate firmware security, and sensitive information disclosure, including the leaking of terminal GPS…
Cyberattacks on SATCOM: Understanding the Threat
In 2014, Ruben Santamarta, Principal Security Consultant with IOActive, published a whitepaper titled “A Wake-up Call for SATCOM Security.” It detailed the discovery of an exceptionally weak security posture across a number of SATCOM terminals from a range of manufacturers. Four years later in 2018, Ruben published a follow up titled “Last Call for SATCOM Security” which detailed a thorough investigation into the security of SATCOM equipment across the Aviation, Maritime, and Military industries. In light of the cyberattacks at the start of the war…
Missed Calls for SATCOM Cybersecurity: SATCOM Terminal Cyberattacks Open the War in Ukraine
Unfortunately, IOActive was right. IOActive presciently foresaw the use of cyberattacks against commercial satellite communication (SATCOM) terminals and has worked tirelessly to warn the industry for the last nine years. There have been several credible reports of destructive exploitation of vulnerabilities in commercial SATCOM terminals during the opening hours of the War in Ukraine by Russian elements to prepare the battlefield.[1],[2],[3] I’m disappointed that more industry members didn’t heed our warning, which provided ample time to act and mitigate the realization of these threats….
Batteries Not Included: Reverse Engineering Obscure Architectures
Ethan Shackelford, IOActive Security Consultant, explores reverse engineering the Analog Devices’ Blackfin architecture – going from zero knowledge to full decompilation and advanced analysis, using Binary Ninja. While common instruction set architectures (ISAs – x86, ARM) dominate the markets, there is a wide variety of obscure and uncommon architectures also available – many featuring specialized architectures, such as PIC (commonly found in ICS equipment) and various Digital Signal Processing (DSP) focused architectures; various techniques and methodologies for understanding new, obscure architectures and the surrounding infrastructure which may be poorly documented…
Responding to a Changing Threatscape: Sharing More
IOActive’s mission is to make the world a safer and more secure place. In the past, we’ve worked to innovate in the responsible disclosure process.
Wideye Security Advisory and Current Concerns on SATCOM Security
In accordance with our Responsible Disclosure Policy1, we are sharing this previously unpublished, original cybersecurity research, since the manufacturer of the affected products in the Wideye brand, Addvalue Technologies Ltd., has been non-responsive for more than 3-years after our initial disclosure and we have seen similar vulnerabilities exploited in the wild during the War in Ukraine.2 IOActive disclosed the results of the research back in 2019 and successfully connected with AddValue Technologies Ltd, the vulnerable vendor. Unfortunately, we have not received any feedback from the manufacturer…
Biometric Hacking: Facial Authentication Systems
Gabriel Gonzalez, Director of Hardware Security, and Alejo Moles, Security Consultant, explore various techniques to bypass facial recognition algorithms in this IOActive Labs blog. The use of facial recognition systems has become pervasive and ubiquitous on mobile phones and making significant inroads in other sectors as way to authenticate end users. These technologies rely on models created from an image or facial scan, selecting specific features that will be checked in a live environment against the actual user or an attacker. The algorithms need be accurate enough to detect a…
Facial Recognition Security Research
IOActive, Inc. (IOActive) has conducted extensive research and testing of facial recognition systems on commercial mobile devices. Our testing lab includes testing setups for 2D- and 3D-based algorithms, including technologies using stereo IR cameras. For each of the different technologies, we first try to understand the underlying algorithms and then come up with creative and innovative setups to bypass them. Once an unlock is achieved, we calculate the Spoof Acceptance Rate (SAR), as described in the Measuring Biometric Unlock Security” section of the Android Compatibility Definition Document.1 This metric allows…
How We Hacked Your Billion-dollar Company for Forty-two Bucks
Jamie Riden, IOActive Security Consultant/CREST-CHECK Lead, explores the weaknesses in outward-facing services most enterprises employ. Most organizations’ Internet perimeters are permeable. Weaknesses in outward-facing services are rarely independent of one another, and leveraging several together can often result in some sort of user-level access to internal systems. A lot of traffic goes in and out of a normal company’s Internet perimeter: email comes in and goes out, web traffic from customers or potential customers comes in, web traffic for internal users goes out, and lots of necessary services create traffic,…