> Qualys contacted by e-mail to tell me they found a vulnerability in OpenSMTPD and would send me the encrypted draft for advisory. Receiving this kind of e-mail when working on a daemon that can’t revoke completely privileges is not a thing you want to read, particularly when you know how efficient they are at spotting a small bug and leveraging into a full-fledged clusterfuck.

Legacy code bad, even when it’s freshly written legacy code.

> This post is a quick day one recap of what we know so far about CVE-2020-0601, what Microsoft has dubbed the Windows CryptoAPI Spoofing Vulnerability. I haven’t heard a catchy name yet, so I vote for Chain of Fools with a dutiful nod to the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin. The analyses presented (my own included) are only as good as the information we have on hand, which so far is still fairly thin on technical details. This is by no means intended to be exhaustive or authoritative, just a curated selection of information sources from people who are technically credible or experts in the field.

Also: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2020/01/16/exploiting-the-windows-cryptoapi-vulnerability/

https://whosecurve.com/

https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2020/01/15/cve-2020-0601-the-chainoffools-attack-explained-with-poc/

https://medium.com/zengo/win10-crypto-vulnerability-cheating-in-elliptic-curve-billiards-2-69b45f2dcab6

source: green

> The central irony (‘combination of circumstances, the result of which is the direct opposite of what might be expected’) referred to in this paper is that the more we automate, and the more sophisticated we make that automation, the more we become dependent on a highly skilled human operator.

> GitHub’s forgot password feature could be compromised because the system lowercased the provided email address and compared it to the email address stored in the user database. If there was a match, GitHub would send the reset password link to the email address provided by the attacker- which was technically speaking, not the same email address.

This is beautiful.

source: HN

> Let’s benchmark toupper implementations.

> Actually, I don’t really care about toupper much at all, but I was writing a different post and needed a peg to hang my narrative hat on, and hey toupper seems like a nice harmless benchmark. Despite my effort to choose something which should be totally straightforward and not sidetrack me, this weird thing popped out.

source: L

> Problems often appear just because we put some pieces together in the first place.

source: HN

> What happens if we send an authenticated HEAD request to https://github.com/login/oauth/authorize? We’ve concluded that the router will treat it like a GET request, so it will get sent to the controller. But once it’s there, the controller will realize that it’s not a GET request, and so the request will be handled by the controller as if it was an authenticated POST request. As a result, GitHub will find the OAuth app specified in the request, and grant it access to the authenticated user’s data.

Help me, framework!

source: HN

> Parsing is hard, even when a file format is well specified. But when the specification is ambiguous, it leads to unintended and strange parser and interpreter behaviors that make file formats susceptible to security vulnerabilities. What if we could automatically generate a “safe” subset of any file format, along with an associated, verified parser? That’s our collective goal in Dr. Sergey Bratus’s DARPA SafeDocs program.

> We’ve developed two new tools that take the pain out of parsing and make file formats safer:
> PolyFile: A polyglot-aware file identification utility with manually instrumented parsers that can semantically label the bytes of a file hierarchically; and
> PolyTracker: An automated instrumentation framework that efficiently tracks input file taint through the execution of a program.

source: grugq

> Alexis Beingessner’s Text Rendering Hates You, published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart.

> Back in 2017, I was building a rich text editor in the browser. Unsatisfied with existing libraries that used ContentEditable, I thought to myself “hey, I’ll just reimplement text selection myself! How difficult could it possibly be?” I was young. Naive. I estimated it would take two weeks. In reality, attempting to solve this problem would consume several years of my life, and even landed me a full time job for a year implementing text editing for a new operating system.

source: L

Winner: a tiny turtle!

source: K

> Browsers are complicated enough to have attack surface beyond memory safety issues. This talk will look into injection flaws in the user interface of Mozilla Firefox, which is implemented in JS, HTML, and an XML-dialect called XUL. With an Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) in the user interface attackers can execute arbitrary code in the context of the main browser application process. This allows for cross-platform exploits of high reliability. The talk discusses past vulnerabilities and will also suggest mitigations that benefit Single Page Applications and other platforms that may suffer from DOM-based XSS, like Electron.

source: L

> Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.

I lost it at multicolored ligatures.

source: L

> This paper is a study of Android apps in the wild that leak permission protected data (identifiers which can be used for tracking, and location information), where those apps should not have been able to see such data due to a lack of granted permissions. By detecting such leakage and analysing the responsible apps, the authors uncover a number of covert and side channels in real-world use.

> 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.

> Netflix has discovered several resource exhaustion vectors affecting a variety of third-party HTTP/2 implementations. These attack vectors can be used to launch DoS attacks against servers that support HTTP/2 communication.

Son of Slowloris returns!

> While this added complexity enables some exciting new features, it also raises implementation questions.

Here comes trouble...

> The Security Considerations section of RFC 7540 (see Section 10.5) addresses some of this in a general way. However, unlike the expected “normal” behavior—which is well-documented and which implementations seem to follow very closely—the algorithms and mechanisms for detecting and mitigating “abnormal” behavior are significantly more vague and left as an exercise for the implementer. From a review of various software packages, it appears that this has led to a variety of implementations with a variety of good ideas, but also some weaknesses.

source: HN

> HTTP requests are traditionally viewed as isolated, standalone entities. In this paper, I’ll explore forgotten techniques for remote, unauthenticated attackers to smash through this isolation and splice their requests into others, through which I was able to play puppeteer with the web infrastructure of numerous commercial and military systems, rain exploits on their visitors, and harvest over $70k in bug bounties.

> The protocol is extremely simple - HTTP requests are simply placed back to back, and the server parses headers to work out where each one ends and the next one starts. This is often confused with HTTP pipelining, which is a rarer subtype that’s not required for the attacks described in this paper. By itself, this is harmless. However, modern websites are composed of chains of systems, all talking over HTTP. This multi-tiered architecture takes HTTP requests from multiple different users and routes them over a single TCP/TLS connection:

Also: https://regilero.github.io/english/security/2019/10/17/security_apache_traffic_server_http_smuggling/

source: grugq

> We investigated the remote attack surface of the iPhone, and reviewed SMS, MMS, VVM, Email and iMessage. Several tools which can be used to further test these attack surfaces were released. We reported a total of 10 vulnerabilities, all of which have since been fixed. The majority of vulnerabilities occurred in iMessage due to its broad and difficult to enumerate attack surface. Most of this attack surface is not part of normal use, and does not have any benefit to users. Visual Voicemail also had a large and unintuitive attack surface that likely led to a single serious vulnerability being reported in it. Overall, the number and severity of the remote vulnerabilities we found was substantial. Reducing the remote attack surface of the iPhone would likely improve its security.

Also: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-many-possibilities-of-cve-2019-8646.html

This covers a lot of ground. I liked this quote, even though there’s much more to the post.

> Canonicalization is a quagnet, which is a term of art in vulnerability research meaning quagmire and vulnerability magnet. You can tell it’s bad just by how hard it is to type ‘canonicalization’.

source: HN

> Basically as of now the entropy file saved as /var/lib/systemd/random-seed will not - drumroll - add entropy to the random pool when played back during boot. Actually it will. It will just not be accounted for. So Linux doesn’t know. And continues blocking getrandom(). This is obviously different from SysVinit times2 when /var/lib/urandom/random-seed (that you still have lying around on updated systems) made sure the system carried enough entropy over reboot to continue working right after enough of the system was booted.

And then... it just kinda keeps getting worse. The problem is understandable, the inability to resolve it less so.

> Let’s talk about files! Most developers seem to think that files are easy.

> In this talk, we’re going to look at how file systems differ from each other and other issues we might encounter when writing to files. We’re going to look at the file “stack”, starting at the top with the file API, moving down to the filesystem, and then moving down to disk.

source: danluu