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Blogs | RESEARCH | March 16, 2022

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In accordance with our Responsible Disclosure Policy1, we are sharing this previously unpublished, original cybersecurity research, since the manufacturer of the affected products in the Wideye brand, Addvalue Technologies Ltd., has been non-responsive for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…

Ethan Shackelford
Research | INSIGHTS, RESEARCH | February 8, 2022

Biometric Hacking: Face Authentication Systems

In our Biometric Testing Facility, we have conducted a large number of security assessment of both 2D and 3D-IR Based face authentication algorithms. In this post, we introduce our Face Recognition Research whitepaper where we analyzed a number 2D-based algorithms used in commercially available mobiles phones. We successfully bypassed the facial authentication security mechanism on all tested devices for at least one of the participating subjects. If you want to have a better understanding of the environment and type of tests performed to achieve these results, please refer…

Alejo Moles & Gabriel Gonzalez
Library | WHITEPAPER | February 7, 2022

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…

Launch PDF
Gabriel Gonzalez & Alejo Moles
Research | INSIGHTS, RESEARCH | January 22, 2022

How we hacked your billion-dollar company for forty-two bucks

subvert (v) : 3. To cause to serve a purpose other than the original or established one; commandeer or redirect: – freedictionary.com Why did one straw break the camel’s back?Here’s the secretThe million other straws underneath it– Mos Def, Mathematics The basic idea of this blog post is that 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…

Jamie Riden
Research | INSIGHTS, RESEARCH | December 6, 2021

Cracking the Snapcode

A Brief Introduction to Barcodes Barcodes are used everywhere: trains, planes, passports, post offices… you name it. And just as numerous as their applications are the systems themselves. Everybody’s seen a UPC barcode like this one: [1] But what about one like this on a package from UPS?  [2] This is a MaxiCode matrix, and though it looks quite different from the UPC barcode, it turns out that these systems use many common techniques for storing and reading data. Both consist of…

Daniel Moder
Blogs | EDITORIAL | August 3, 2021

Counterproliferation: Doing Our Part

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.

John Sheehy
Research | INSIGHTS, RESEARCH | July 30, 2021

Breaking Protocol (Buffers): Reverse Engineering gRPC Binaries

The Basics gRPC is an open-source RPC framework from Google which leverages automatic code generation to allow easy integration to a number of languages. Architecturally, it follows the standard seen in many other RPC frameworks: services are defined which determine the available RPCs. It uses HTTP version 2 as its transport, and supports plain HTTP as well as HTTPS for secure communication. Services and messages, which act as the structures passed to and returned by defined RPCs, are defined as protocol buffers. Protocol buffers are a common serialization solution, also…

Ethan Shackelford