A free Windows Vulnerability for the NSA
Some months ago at Black Hat USA 2011 I presented this interesting issue in the workshop “Easy and Quick Vulnerability Hunting in Windows,” and now I’m sharing it with all people a more detailed explanation in this blog post. In Windows 7 or Windows 2008, in the folder C:WindowsInstaller there are many installer files (from already installed applications) with what appear to be random names. When run, some of these installer files (like Microsoft Office Publisher MUI (English) 2007) will automatically elevate privileges and try to install when…
Common Coding Mistakes – Wide Character Arrays
This post contains a few of my thoughts on common coding mistakes we see during code reviews when developers deal with wide character arrays. Manipulating wide character strings is reasonably easy to get right, but there are plenty of “gotchas” still popping up. Coders should make sure they take care because a few things can slip your mind when dealing with these strings and result in mistakes. A little bit of background: The term wide character generally refers to character data types with a width larger than a…
Automating Social Engineering: Part Three
PHASE 2: Ruses Once we have enough information about the employees and company in question, we can begin to make some sense of the information and start crafting our ruses. It is worth noting that this stage currently does not have a lot of since it does require a lot of human intuition and information processing. Certainly as we continue developing the tool we will be able to automate more and create some decision making systems capable of creating useful ruses, but for now a key factor of…
Automating Social Engineering: Part Two
As with any other type of penetration test, we need to gather information. The only difference here is that instead of looking for operating system types, software versions, and vulnerabilities, we’re searching for information about the company, their employees, their social networking presence, et cetera. Given that we’re performing an assessment from a corporate perspective, there are some limitations with regard to privacy and employees’ private life, but the truth is that real attackers won’t abide by such limitations. So, you should assume that any…
Automating Social Engineering: Part One
since the original conceptualization of computer security, and perhaps even before, social engineering has been in existence. One could say that social engineering began when societies began, whether it was realized or not. It is now time to give some of this work to scripts and applications to make it a little more interesting… As the years passed in the computer security community, network penetration became more and more necessary, but computers were not the only thing getting compromised. Social engineering was part of the hacker subculture, but it was…
Windows Vulnerability Paradox
For those who read just the first few lines, this is not a critical vulnerability. It is low impact but interesting, so keep reading. This post describes the Windows vulnerability I showed during my Black Hat USA 2011 workshop “Easy and Quick Vulnerability Hunting in Windows”. The Windows security update for Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (MS11-025) is a security patch for a binary planting vulnerability. This kind of vulnerability occurs when someone opens or executes a file and this file (or the application used to…
Easy and Quick Vulnerability Hunting in Windows
I’m glad to start this new blog for IOA Labs by publishing the video demonstrations and updated slides of my Black Hat USA 2011 workshop. I hope you like it, please send me your feedback, questions, etc. We will continue posting cool materials from our researchers very soon, keep tuned!
Blackhat TPM Talk Follow-up
Since speaking at BlackHat DC 2009, there have been several inquiries in regards to the security of the SLE66PE series smartcard family. Here are some issues that should be pointed out: We have heard, “..it took 6 months to succeed..“ The reality is it took 4 months to tackle obsticles found in any <200nm device such as: Capitance/load of probe needles when chip is running.Powering the device inside the chamber of a FIB workstation.Level-shifting a 1.8v core voltage following what we learned in #1 above.Cutting out metal layers without creating electrical shorts.Other more…
Atmel ATMEGA2560 Analysis (Blackhat follow-up)
At this years Blackhat USA briefings, the ATMEGA2560 was shown as an example of an unsecure vs. secure device. We have received a few requests for more information on this research so here it goes… The device did not even need to be stripped down because of designer lazyness back at Atmel HQ. All we did was look for the metal plates we detailed back in our ATMEGA88 teardown last year and quickly deduced which outputs were the proper outputs in under 20 minutes. Atmel likes to cover the AVR…
Parallax Propeller P8X32A Quick Teardown
Parallax has a really neat 8 core 32 bit CPU called the ‘Propeller’. It’s been out for a few years but it is gaining popularity. There is no security with the device as it boots insecurely via a UART or I2C EEPROM. None the less, we thought it was interesting to see an 8 core CPU decapsulated! One can clearly see 8 columns that appear almost symmetric (except in the middle region). The upper 8 squares are each ‘cogs’ 512 * 32 SRAMs as described in the…