In October 1983, 40 years ago this week, Ken Thompson chose supply chain security as the topic for his Turing award lecture, although the specific term wasn’t used back then. (The field of computer science was still young and small enough that the ACM conference where Ken spoke was the “Annual Conference on Computers.”) Ken’s lecture was later published in Communications of the ACM under the title “Reflections on Trusting Trust.” It is a classic paper, and a short one (3 pages); if you haven’t read it yet, you should. This post will still be here when you get back.

In the lecture, Ken explains in three steps how to modify a C compiler binary to insert a backdoor when compiling the “login” program, leaving no trace in the source code. In this post, we will run the backdoored compiler using Ken’s actual code. But first, a brief summary of the important parts of the lecture.

source: L

This paper reflects work done in late 2022 and 2023 to audit for vulnerabilities in terminal emulators, with a focus on open source software. The results of this work were 10 CVEs against terminal emulators that could result in Remote Code Execution (RCE), in addition various other bugs and hardening opportunities were found. The exact context and severity of these vulnerabilities varied, but some form of code execution was found to be possible on several common terminal emulators across the main client platforms of today.

source: HN

In this post I’ll exploit CVE-2023-4069, a type confusion vulnerability that I reported in July 2023. The vulnerability—which allows remote code execution (RCE) in the renderer sandbox of Chrome by a single visit to a malicious site—is found in v8, the Javascript engine of Chrome. It was filed as bug 1465326 and subsequently fixed in version 115.0.5790.170/.171.

In this document we outline how WebGPU works through the mind of an attacker, our vulnerability research methodologies, and our thought processes in some of the more difficult research areas. There are many interesting portions of Chrome graphics that we omitted from review to keep scope manageable. While our primary focus was WebGPU, we did explore a few attack surfaces shared by other graphics features. We will interleave background information on WebGPU with descriptions of the important bugs we found. We hope this report will give the security community a deeper understanding of the shape of vulnerabilities we may come to expect with the addition of WebGPU, along with a lens into the vulnerabilities we might encounter in the future.

source: HN

In this post, I’ll exploit CVE-2023-3420, a type confusion in Chrome that allows remote code execution (RCE) in the renderer sandbox of Chrome by a single visit to a malicious site.

source: R

This means that someone, somewhere, had been caught using an exploit for this vulnerability. But who discovered the vulnerability and how was it being used? How does the vulnerability work? Why wasn’t it discovered earlier? And what sort of impact does an exploit like this have?

There are still a lot of details that are missing, but this post attempts to explain what we know about the unusual circumstances of this bug, and provides a new technical analysis and proof-of-concept trigger for CVE-2023-4863 (“the WebP 0day“).

Avoiding bad dependencies can be hard without appropriate information on what the dependency’s code actually does, and reviewing every line of that code is an immense task. Every dependency also brings its own dependencies, compounding the need for review across an expanding web of transitive dependencies. But what if there was an easy way to know the capabilities–the privileged operations accessed by the code–of your dependencies?

source: L

I have discovered a number of security vulnerabilities in Bluesky and atproto. Each time I’ve found something new, I’ve chosen to report it to Bluesky at security@bsky.app, as requested at https://bsky.app/.well-known/security.txt, and provide them with details. Bluesky has responded to only one of these reports, one time, 4 days after submission, saying “We appreciate the report, and we’ll be taking a closer look at the issue.”. They did not follow up on that report and they have not responded to any of my other reports.

This report gives a detailed description of the components of the worm program—data and functions. It is based on study of two completely independent reverse-compilations of the worm and a version disassembled to VAX assembly language. Almost no source code is given in the paper because of current concerns about the state of the ‘‘immune system’’ of Internet hosts, but the description should be detailed enough to allow the reader to understand the behavior of the program.

And some modern commentary: https://infosec.exchange/@hovav/110950949212380779

HTTP request processing isn’t atomic - any endpoint might be sending an application through invisible sub-states. This means that with race conditions, everything is multi-step. The single-packet attack solves network jitter, making it as though every attack is on a local system. This exposes vulnerabilities that were previously near-impossible to detect or exploit.

source: L

It’s 3am. Paul, the head of PayPal database administration carefully enters his elaborate passphrase at a keyboard in a darkened cubicle of 1840 Embarcadero Road in East Palo Alto, for the fifth time. He hits Return. The green-on-black console window instantly displays one line of text: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.”

This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.)

Today, should you try to read up the programmer’s manual (AKA the man page) on getpass, you will find it has been long declared obsolete and replaced with a more intelligent alternative in nearly all flavors of modern Unix.

source: Dfly

What should happen if the processor speculatively executed a vzeroupper, but then discovers that there was a branch misprediction? Well, we will have to revert that operation and put things back the way they were… maybe we can just unset that z-bit?

If we return to the analogy of malloc and free, you can see that it can’t be that simple - that would be like calling free() on a pointer, and then changing your mind!

That would be a use-after-free vulnerability, but there is no such thing as a use-after-free in a CPU… or is there?

source: L

While browsing through ssh-agent’s source code, we noticed that a remote attacker, who has access to the remote server where Alice’s ssh-agent is forwarded to, can load (dlopen()) and immediately unload (dlclose()) any shared library in /usr/lib on Alice’s workstation (via her forwarded ssh-agent, if it is compiled with ENABLE_PKCS11, which is the default).

Surprisingly, by chaining four common side effects of shared libraries from official distribution packages, we were able to transform this very limited primitive (the dlopen() and dlclose() of shared libraries from /usr/lib) into a reliable, one-shot remote code execution in ssh-agent (despite ASLR, PIE, and NX). Our best proofs of concept so far exploit default installations of Ubuntu Desktop plus three extra packages from Ubuntu’s “universe” repository. We believe that even better results can be achieved (i.e., some operating systems might be exploitable in their default installation):

source: HN

Now it became immediately obvious to my why HiCA only supports acme.sh. They are not conforming to ACME at all! (Bugs the heck outa me that they’re using the official ACME logo on their site even though they don’t implement the ACME standard.)

Instead, HiCA is stealthily crafting curl commands and piping the output to bash. acme.sh is (being tricked into?) running arbitrary code from a remote server.

source: HN

This page performs a live, annotated https: request for its own source. It’s inspired by The Illustrated TLS 1.3 Connection and Julia Evans’ toy TLS 1.3.

source: L

The purpose of the <keygen/> element was to allow a web browser to generate a private/public keypair upon submitting a form, in a way that allowed a web browser to be enrolled in a new client certificate.

source: L

Go 1.20.2 fixed a small vulnerability in the crypto/elliptic package. The impact was minor, to the point that I don’t think any application was impacted, but the issue was interesting to look at as a near-miss, and to learn from.

source: L

This is a detective story about how a car was stolen - and how it uncovered an epidemic of high-tech car theft.

Now that people know how a relay attack works generally possible to defeat it: car owners keep their keys in a metal box (blocking the radio message from the car) and some car makers now supply keys that go to sleep if motionless for a few minutes (and so won’t receive the radio message from the car). Faced with this defeat but being unwilling to give up a lucrative activity, thieves moved to a new way around the security: by-passing the entire smart key system. They do this with a new attack: CAN Injection.

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