> But data breach notifications have become an all-too-regular exercise in crisis communications. These notices increasingly try to deflect blame, obfuscate important details and omit important facts. After all, it’s in a company’s best interest to keep the stock markets happy, investors satisfied and regulators off their backs. Why would it want to say anything to the contrary?

source: white

> Recently, I was tipped off about certain sites performing localhost port scans against visitors, presumably as part of a user fingerprinting and tracking or bot detection. This didn’t sit well with me, so I went about investigating the practice, and it seems many sites are port scanning visitors for dubious reasons.

source: HN

> In 2005, three vulnerabilities were discovered in qmail but were never fixed because they were believed to be unexploitable in a default installation. We recently re-discovered these vulnerabilities and were able to exploit one of them remotely in a default installation.

source: solar

> A hands-on beginner’s guide to what CSRF attacks are and how to prevent them.

source: R

> If you tried to intercept requests from the Facebook app on iOS using a proxy, you will be hitting by their message alert The operation couldn’t be completed. That’s because of their SSL Certificate Pinning protection which must be bypassed to be able to intercept requests and responses from their server. In this blog, We will go through their iOS app trying to bypass their SSL Pinning.

And the same for instagram: https://www.cyclon3.com/bypass-instagram-ssl-certificate-pinning-for-ios

source: R

> Yesterday Apple released iOS 13.5 beta 3 (seemingly renaming iOS 13.4.5 to 13.5 there), and that killed one of my bugs. It wasn’t just any bug though, it was the first 0day I had ever found. And it was probably also the best one. Not necessarily for how much it gives you, but certainly for how much I’ve used it for, and also for how ridiculously simple it is. So simple, in fact, that the PoC I tweeted out looks like an absolute joke. But it’s 100% real.

> I dubbed it “psychic paper” because, just like the item by that name that Doctor Who likes to carry, it allows you get past security checks and make others believe you have a wide range of credentials that you shouldn’t have.

source: grugq

> This document provides a gentle introduction to the data structures and formats that define the certificates used in HTTPS. It should be accessible to anyone with a little bit of computer science experience and a bit of familiarity with certificates.

“Gentle.”

source: L

> As the test procedures in the TEMPEST standards are rudely made unavailable to us as they are considered “classified” we have to do the next best thing and make up our own. This article aims to make barely acceptable analogies about how radios work and show that you really don’t need that much in terms of know-how and equipment to find and take advantage of leaky radio signals. Towards the end, we will apply what we have learned to find a signal that can exfiltrate data out of a radio-less and air-gapped desktop workstation through a wall and 50ft away.

> When I first learned about Elligator, I sought the reference implementation so I could get a feel of what was going on. There were none, though. Even SUPERCOP limited itself to a Curve448goldilocks instantiation, there was nothing for Curve25519. Oh well, at least there’s no harm in looking at the paper for now.

And then the murders began.

source: L

> This talk shows how two bugs involving somewhat narrow-looking race windows (https://crbug.com/project-zero/1695 in the Linux kernel, https://crbug.com/project-zero/1741 in Android userspace code) can be stretched wide enough to win the race conditions on a Google Pixel 2 phone, running a Linux 4.4 kernel, by making use of the unprivileged sched_*() syscalls.

source: grugq

> During my years doing vulnerability research and my time in Project Zero, I frequently encountered proposals for new security mitigations. Some of these were great, some of these - were not so great.

I think Halvar is at times too dismissive of “raising the bar”, but he’s also the expert here, and these are not bad guidelines.

source: grugq

> VM escape has become a popular topic of discussion over the last few years. A good amount of research on this topic has been published for various hypervisors like VMware, QEMU, VirtualBox, Xen and Hyper-V. Bhyve is a hypervisor for FreeBSD supporting hardware-assisted virtualization. This paper details the exploitation of two bugs in bhyve - FreeBSD-SA-16:32.bhyve [1] (VGA emulation heap overflow) and CVE-2018-17160 [21] (Firmware Configuration device bss buffer overflow) and some generic techniques which could be used for exploiting other bhyve bugs. Further, the paper also discusses sandbox escapes using PCI device passthrough, and Control-Flow Integrity bypasses in HardenedBSD 12-CURRENT

source: grugq

> The story of how I gained unauthorized Camera access on iOS and macOS

> We are beginning to form the attack plan - if we can somehow trick Safari into thinking our evil website is in the “secure context” of a trusted website, we can leverage Safari’s camera permission to access the webcam via the mediaDevices API.

> So you tell me: Was this somebody carrying out an elaborate prank or somebody who simply didn’t understand what they were doing?

> Whether it was intended as such or not, this ended up being an effective denial-of-service attack against me personally, since I ended up spending quite a bit of time watching the videos closely, then reverse-engineering what the finder believed the vulnerability to be, and then studying the videos again to find out where they went wrong.

I was feeling frustrated just reading the story.

> In January 2018, the world learned about Spectre and Meltdown, a new class of issues that affects virtually all modern CPUs via nearly imperceptible changes to their micro-architectural states and can result in full access to physical RAM or leaking of state between threads, processes, or guests. In this session, we examine one of these side-channel attacks in detail and explore the implications for multi-tenant computing. We discuss AWS design decisions and what AWS does to protect your instances, containers, and function invocations. Finally, we discuss what the future looks like in the presence of this new class of issue.

This is a good recap. Specific defenses starts around 42:00.

> The logic responsible for handling ->exit_signal has been changed a few times and the current logic is locked down since Linux kernel 3.3.5. However, it is not fully robust and it’s still possible for the malicious user to bypass it. Basically, it’s possible to send arbitrary signals to a privileged (suidroot) parent process (Problem I.). Nevertheless, it’s not trivial and more limited comparing to the CVE-2009-1337.

source: solar

> In this paper I present an analysis of 1,976 unsolicited answers received from the targets of a malicious email campaign, who were mostly unaware that they were not contacting the real sender of the malicious messages. I received the messages because the spammers, whom I had described previously on my blog, decided to take revenge by putting my email address in the ‘reply-to’ field of a malicious email campaign. Many of the victims were unaware that the message they had received was fake and contained malware. Some even asked me to resend the malware as it had been blocked by their anti-virus product. I have read those 1,976 messages, analysed and classified victims’ answers, and present them here. The key takeaway is that we need to train users, but at the same time we should not count on them to react properly to Internet threats. Despite dealing with cybercrime victims daily for the last seven years I was surprised by most of the reactions and realized how little we, as the security industry, know about the average Internet user’s ability (or rather inability) to identify threats online. We need to build solutions that will protect users, without their knowledge, sometimes against their will, from their ability to harm themselves.

> The fifth group is actually the most worrying. I call this group ‘MY ANTI-VIRUS WORKED, PLEASE SEND AGAIN’, as these are recipients who mention that their security product (mostly anti-virus) warned them against an infected file, but they wanted the file to be resent because they could not open it. The group consisted of 44 individuals (2.35%).

source: grugq

> In the end, this random number generator was quickly removed, and that was that. But one can still wonder—is this generator secure but unanalyzed, or would it have been broken just to prove a point?

source: R

> The goal of this talk is to broaden the awareness of the how and why container escapes work, starting from a brief intro to what makes a process a container, and then spanning the gamut of escape techniques, covering exposed orchestrators, access to the Docker socket, exposed mount points, /proc, all the way down to overwriting/exploiting the kernel structures to leave the confines of the container.

source: white

> There is one last question that comes up a lot: given that Tailscale creates a mesh “overlay” network (a VPN that parallels a company’s internal physical network), does a company have to switch to it all at once? Many BeyondCorp and zero-trust style products work that way. Or can it be deployed incrementally, starting with a small proof of concept?

> Tailscale is uniquely suited to incremental deployments. Since you don’t need to install any hardware or any servers at all, you can get started in two minutes: just install the Tailscale node software onto two devices (Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS), login to both devices with the same user account or auth domain, and that’s it! They’re securely connected, no matter how the devices move around. Tailscale runs on top of your existing network, so you can safely deploy it without disrupting your existing infrastructure and security settings.

source: L