Modern video encoding standards such as H.264 are a marvel of hidden complexity. But with hidden complexity comes hidden security risk. Decoding video in practice means interacting with dedicated hardware accelerators and the proprietary, privileged software components used to drive them. The video decoder ecosystem is obscure, opaque, diverse, highly privileged, largely untested, and highly exposed—a dangerous combination.

We introduce and evaluate H26FORGE, domain-specific infrastructure for analyzing, generating, and manipulating syntactically correct but semantically spec-non-compliant video files. Using H26FORGE, we uncover insecurity in depth across the video decoder ecosystem, including kernel memory corruption bugs in iOS, memory corruption bugs in Firefox and VLC for Windows, and video accelerator and application processor kernel memory bugs in multiple Android devices.

https://github.com/h26forge/h26forge

ROP methods have become increasingly sophisticated
But we can identify system behaviours which only ROP code requires
We can contrast this to what Regular Control Flow code needs
And then, find behaviours to block

source: HN

The received wisdom suggests that Unix’s unusual combination of fork() and exec() for process creation was an inspired design. In this paper, we argue that fork was a clever hack for machines and programs of the 1970s that has long outlived its usefulness and is now a liability. We catalog the ways in which fork is a terrible abstraction for the modern programmer to use, describe how it compromises OS implementations, and propose alternatives.

source: L

We show that built-in sensors in commodity PCs, such as microphones, inadvertently capture electromagnetic side-channel leakage from ongoing computation. Moreover, this information is often conveyed by supposedly-benign channels such as audio recordings and common Voice-over-IP applications, even after lossy compression.

We analyze the computation-dependent leakage captured by internal microphones, and empirically demonstrate its efficacy for attacks. In one scenario, an attacker steals the secret ECDSA signing keys of the counterparty in a voice call. In another, the attacker detects what web page their counterparty is loading. In the third scenario, a player in the Counter-Strike online multiplayer game can detect a hidden opponent waiting in ambush, by analyzing how the 3D rendering done by the opponent’s computer induces faint but detectable signals into the opponent’s audio feed.

AMD “Zen3” processors feature a new technology called Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF). PSF is a hardware-based micro-architectural optimization designed to improve the performance of code execution by predicting dependencies between loads and stores. Like technologies such as branch prediction, with PSF the processor “guesses” what the result of a load is likely to be, and speculatively executes subsequent instructions. In the event that the processor incorrectly speculated on the result of the load, it is designed to detect this and flush the incorrect results from the CPU pipeline.

Security research in recent years has examined the security implications of incorrect CPU speculation and how in some cases it may lead to side channel attacks. For instance, conditional branch speculation, indirect branch speculation, and store bypass speculation have been demonstrated to have the potential to be used in side-channel attacks (e.g., Spectre v1, v2, and v4 respectively).

Nice disclosure.

source: R

We argue that the most important statistical ideas of the past half century are: counterfactual causal inference, bootstrapping and simulation-based inference, overparameterized models and regularization, multilevel models, generic computation algorithms, adaptive decision analysis, robust inference, and exploratory data analysis. We discuss common features of these ideas, how they relate to modern computing and big data, and how they might be developed and extended in future decades. The goal of this article is to provoke thought and discussion regarding the larger themes of research in statistics and data science.

source: danluu

The privacy threats of online tracking have garnered considerable attention in recent years from researchers and practitioners alike. This has resulted in users becoming more privacy-cautious and browser vendors gradually adopting countermeasures to mitigate certain forms of cookie-based and cookie-less tracking. Nonetheless, the complexity and feature-rich nature of modern browsers often lead to the deployment of seemingly innocuous functionality that can be readily abused by adversaries. In this paper we introduce a novel tracking mechanism that misuses a simple yet ubiquitous browser feature: favicons. In more detail, a website can track users across browsing sessions by storing a tracking identifier as a set of entries in the browser’s dedicated favicon cache, where each entry corresponds to a specific subdomain. In subsequent user visits the website can reconstruct the identifier by observing which favicons are requested by the browser while the user is automatically and rapidly redirected through a series of subdomains. More importantly, the caching of favicons in modern browsers exhibits several unique characteristics that render this tracking vector particularly powerful, as it is persistent (not affected by users clearing their browser data), non-destructive (reconstructing the identifier in subsequent visits does not alter the existing combination of cached entries), and even crosses the isolation of the incognito mode. We experimentally evaluate several aspects of our attack, and present a series of optimization techniques that render our attack practical. We find that combining our favicon-based tracking technique with immutable browser-fingerprinting attributes that do not change over time allows a website to reconstruct a 32-bit tracking identifier in 2 seconds. Furthermore, our attack works in all major browsers that use a favicon cache, including Chrome and Safari. Due to the severity of our attack we propose changes to browsers’ favicon caching behavior that can prevent this form of tracking, and have disclosed our findings to browser vendors who are currently exploring appropriate mitigation strategies.

source: grugq

Multiplayer symbioses are common in nature, but our understanding of the ecological dynamics occurring in complex symbioses is limited. The tripartite mutualism between fungus-growing ants, their fungal cultivars, and antibiotic-producing bacteria exemplifies symbiotic complexity. Here we reveal how black yeasts, newly described symbionts of the ant-microbe system, compromise the efficiency of bacteria-derived antibiotic defense in fungus-growing ants. We found that symbiotic black yeasts acquire nutrients from the ants’ bacterial mutualist, and suppress bacterial growth. Experimental manipulation of ant colonies and their symbionts shows that ants infected with black yeasts are significantly less effective at defending their fungus garden from Escovopsis, a prevalent and specialized pathogen. The reduction of mutualistic bacterial biomass on ants, likely caused by black yeast symbionts, apparently reduces the quantity of antibiotics available to inhibit the garden pathogen. Success of the ant-fungal mutualism is directly dependent on fungus garden health. Thus our finding that black yeasts compromise the ants’ ability to deal with the garden parasite indicates that it is an integral component of the symbiosis. This is further evidence that a full understanding of symbiotic associations requires examining the direct and indirect interactions of symbionts in their ecological community context.

One of many mistakes of my youth was writing a textbook in ordinary differential equations. It set me back several years in my career in mathematics. However, it had a redeeming feature: it led me to realize that I had no idea what a differential equation is. The more I teach differential equations, the less I understand the mystery of differential equations.

source: trivium

In this paper, we propose IJON, an annotation mechanism that a human analyst can use to guide the fuzzer. In contrast to the two aforementioned techniques, this approach allows a more systematic exploration of the program’s behavior based on the data representing the internal state of the program. As a consequence, using only a small (usually one line) annotation, a user can help the fuzzer to solve previously unsolvable challenges. We extended various AFL-based fuzzers with the ability to annotate the source code of the target application with guidance hints. Our evaluation demonstrates that such simple annotations are able to solve problems that—to the best of our knowledge—no other current fuzzer or symbolic execution based tool can overcome. For example, with our extension, a fuzzer is able to play and solve games such as Super Mario Bros. or resolve more complex patterns such as hash map lookups. To further demonstrate the capabilities of our annotations, we use AFL combined with IJON to uncover both novel security issues and issues that previously required a custom and comprehensive grammar to be uncovered. Lastly, we show that using IJON and AFL, one can solve many challenges from the CGC data set that resisted all fully automated and human guided attempts so far.

source: green

In this paper, we are the first to exploit the cache way predictor. We reverse-engineered AMD’s L1D cache way predictor in microarchitectures from 2011 to 2019, resulting in two new attack techniques. With Collide+Probe, an attacker can monitor a victim’s memory accesses without knowledge of physical addresses or shared memory when time-sharing a logical core. With Load+ Reload, we exploit the way predictor to obtain highly-accurate memory-access traces of victims on the same physical core. While Load+Reload relies on shared memory, it does not invalidate the cache line, allowing stealthier attacks that do not induce any last-level-cache evictions.

We evaluate our new side channel in different attack scenarios. We demonstrate a covert channel with up to 588.9 kB/s, which we also use in a Spectre attack to exfiltrate secret data from the kernel. Furthermore, we present a key-recovery attack from a vulnerable cryptographic implementation. We also show an entropy-reducing attack on ASLR of the kernel of a fully patched Linux system, the hypervisor, and our own address space from JavaScript. Finally, we propose countermeasures in software and hardware mitigating the presented attacks.

source: L

In this paper, we analyze the hardware-based Meltdown mitigations in recent Intel microarchitectures, revealing that illegally accessed data is only zeroed out. Hence, while non-present loads stall the CPU, illegal loads are still executed. We present EchoLoad, a novel technique to distinguish load stalls from transiently executed loads. EchoLoad allows detecting physically-backed addresses from unprivileged applications, breaking KASLR in 40 µs on the newest Meltdown- and MDS-resistant Cascade Lake microarchitecture. As EchoLoad only relies on memory loads, it runs in highly-restricted environments, e.g., SGX or JavaScript, making it the first JavaScript based KASLR break. Based on EchoLoad, we demonstrate the first proof-of-concept Meltdown attack from JavaScript on systems that are still broadly not patched against Meltdown, i.e., 32-bit x86 OSs.

source: L

Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) is a privacy mechanism implemented by Apple’s Safari browser, released in October 2017. ITP aims to reduce the cross-site tracking of web users by limiting the capabilities of cookies and other website data. As part of a routine security review, the Information Security Engineering team at Google has identified multiple security and privacy issues in Safari’s ITP design. These issues have a number of unexpected consequences, including the disclosure of the user’s web browsing habits, allowing persistent cross-site tracking, and enabling cross-site information leaks (including cross-site search). This report is a modestly expanded version of our original vulnerability submission to Apple (WebKit bug #201319), providing additional context and edited for clarity. A number of the issues discussed here have been addressed in Safari 13.0.4 and iOS 13.3, released in December 2019.

source: green

We show that many symmetric cryptography primitives would not be less safe with significantly fewer rounds. To support this claim, we review the cryptanalysis progress in the last 20 years, examine the reasons behind the current number of rounds, and analyze the risk of doing fewer rounds. Advocating a rational and scientific approach to round numbers selection, we propose revised number of rounds for AES, BLAKE2, ChaCha, and SHA-3, which offer more consistent security margins across primitives and make them much faster, without increasing the security risk.

source: L

The full Proceedings published by USENIX for the conference are available for download below. Individual papers can also be downloaded from the presentation page.

Game of Trees is a work-in-progress version control system which attempts to be appealing to OpenBSD developers.

https://gameoftrees.org/

We are pleased to submit the Final Report of the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force. As directed by you, the Task Force has completed a thorough investigation of the causes of the August 14, 2003 blackout and has recommended actions to minimize the likelihood and scope of similar events in the future.

The report makes clear that this blackout could have been prevented and that immediate actions must be taken in both the United States and Canada to ensure that our electric system is more reliable. First and foremost, compliance with reliability rules must be made mandatory with substantial penalties for non-compliance.

Trading of 0-day computer exploits between hackers has been taking place for as long as computer exploits have existed. A black market for these exploits has developed around their illegal use. Recently, a trend has developed toward buying and selling these exploits as a source of legitimate income for security researchers. However, this emerging “0-day market” has some unique aspects that make this particularly difficult to accomplish in a fair manner. These problems, along with possible solutions will be discussed. These issues will be illustrated by following two case studies of attempted sales of 0-day exploits.

May 6, 2007

The paper considers a network with many apparently-independent periodic processes and discusses one method by which these processes can inadvertently become synchronized. In particular, we study the synchronization of periodic routing messages, and offer guidelines on how to avoid inadvertent synchronization. Using simulations and analysis, we study the process of synchronization and show that the transition from unsynchronized to synchronized traffic is not one of gradual degradation but is instead a very abrupt ‘phase transition’: in general, the addition of a single router will convert a completely unsynchronized traffic stream into a completely synchronized one. We show that synchronization can be avoided by the addition of randomization to the traffic sources and quantify how much randomization is necessary. In addition, we argue that the inadvertent synchronization of periodic processes is likely to become an increasing problem in computer networks.

Two papers. Man-Computer Symbiosis and The Computer as a Communication Device.

The first argues for interactive systems. The computer can’t be an extension of our mind if it’s not responsive.

The second is a vision for networked communications. It sounds a lot like today, but more optimistic. Where did we go wrong?