Ongoing slab hardening efforts

Recently, there have been multiple efforts to make the exploitation of slab memory corruptions harder.

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I started a couple of forest fires to heat my burrito and I'm surprised by the results! It was still frozen in the middle by the end of the experiment, so it's far from perfect, but I think forest fires have a lot of potential and will revolutionize the burrito heating industry!

If you plan to meet some hackers in Krakow this week check your e-mail, esp. your spam folder!

#AlligatorCon

@cynicalsecurity

IMO a major difference here is that TLS auth never meant to guarantee anything about the intentions of the other party, so crooks obtaining certs (for money or free) is not something to be fixed. This means, that communicating that lock==trust has been plain wrong (see also signed .exe==goodware).

In case of security keys attacks like the current one aren't supposed to happen and there is an incentive to fix/prevent such issues. This of course should not mean that we should blindly trust these devices (as you pointed out) but I'd argue that the concepts the industry communicates (separate your keys from your computer; prevent duplication...) are mostly right in this case ("save your keys in the cloud" is an obvious counter example).

@bgergely0 @dotstdy @whitequark

[RSS] Deep Dive into RCU Race Condition: Analysis of TCP-AO UAF (CVE-2024–27394)

https://blog.theori.io/deep-dive-into-rcu-race-condition-analysis-of-tcp-ao-uaf-cve-2024-27394-f40508b84c42?source=rss-4b564abdafa3------2

#linux

@whitequark incidentally, there is a beautiful parallel which I always make when discussing security and "1st papers about an attack": the so-called "nth country problem".

This is an issue in nuclear proliferation which, in a few words, says that the nth country to become a nuclear power has the benefit of knowing that it works, and what works (unlike the Manhattan Project which started on the basis of pure theory).

The "nth country problem" was actually tested by the USA by giving three Physics PhD students access to all open literature on nuclear weapons and asking them to design a weapon. They did and analysis by LANL weapons designers actually showed that it would go b00m.

Hence, even if the 1st paper is extremely unlikely (compare to the Trinity test of the Pu implosion device - there was quite a bit of uncertainty that it would work) it does not mean that it cannot be done.

@whitequark undeniably true. I'd also add that these attacks, while pretty niche, do attract the attention to a platform which was previously deemed "unbreakable".

In many ways this is similar to how work by people in the 90s (TESO, for example) drew my attention to µcode and John Heasman's work on ACPI to NIC firmware. Now look at the µcode panorama where you have an attack a day or firmware where there's an attack an hour (OK, sort of)

Nothing like breaking a myth.

I’ll reiterate what many others have said about the yubikey story - unless you’re the target of super sophisticated actors who do not want you to know they’ve stolen your yubikey*, this is a bit of a non-event and highlights the importance of keeping track of your yubikeys. Please don’t toss them, but do keep an eye out for further developments. Once an issue like this is identified, it attracts a lot of attention from many smart people and there may will be other findings in the future, but for now, yubikeys are good enough for most of us.

* I know there are a bunch of people convinced you’re being pursued by these advanced adversaries. I worry about you. For many reasons.

Tired of using debuggers and manually exploring the program's state space? Too annoying to find the inputs you need to trigger the bug? Ever wanted to interactively see what your static analysis tool was really thinking?

With my collaborators from the University of Tartu (Karoliine Holter, Juhan-Oskar Hennoste, Simmo Saan, Vesal Vojdani), we have an Onward! paper about abstract debugging, where you can "step through" the abstract state of the program, as computed by a static analysis tool.

To appear at Onward! 2024: "Abstract Debuggers: Exploring Program Behaviors Using Static Analysis Results".

https://patricklam.ca/papers/24.onward.abs-debug.pdf

And a special thanks to the SIGPLAN-M mentoring program for matching me with these collaborators!

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s/middleware/dark matter/

@lethalbit C->Pascal transpiler!

Absolute funniest TikTok trend in history went down this weekend. Someone posted about this “ATM glitch” they found. They went on to explained that you can deposit checks into ATMs and some of the money becomes available for withdrawal immediately, so you can write fake checks, deposit them, then withdraw the money before the check clears.

They made it sound like some kind of life hack and I guess most of TikTok is too young to know what check fraud is, so they had like hundreds of people uploading videos of themselves writing and depositing fraudulent checks into their own bank accounts tied to their real identities 💀

@mttaggart @Viss @siliconshecky people really have zero clue even after all this time how to layer and scale security solutions based on legitimate risks of threats. Susan in accounting might need a little more security than Joe in the mail room, but they dont need the full paranoid hardware token suite that the security / domain admins need. It blows my mind that "security professionals" cannot assess these risks and scale appropriately. Perfection is the enemy of good, and this industry is still tripping over its own feet....

@circuit_cat @capnhoppy "whoa! what instance do you live in?" this happens when you navigate away from your instance, typically in a webview e.g. by clicking a quoted post. in that case you navigate to another instance that has 0 info about your session or your home instance so it'll try to redirect you.

@soatok @duxsco @filippo @mbmcloughlin The flaw was fixed in firmware 5.7, which is also the firmware that added Ed25519 support to PIV. So the mitigation for vulnerable YubiKeys can't be Ed25519 for the PIV applet as it doesn't exist there.

Between that and explaining the difference between ECC and ECDSA to users, I'm not surprised they just say "use RSA".

Saying the quiet part out loud

https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-copyrighted-material-parliament

@jon "would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens" someone should tell these fuckers that literally no one asked for stochastic parrots, ever.

The YubiKey 5, the most widely used hardware token for two-factor authentication based on the FIDO standard, contains a cryptographic flaw that makes the finger-size device vulnerable to cloning when an attacker gains brief physical access to it, researchers said Tuesday.

The cryptographic flaw, known as a side channel, resides in a small microcontroller that’s used in a vast number of other authentication devices, including smartcards used in banking, electronic passports, and the accessing of secure areas. While the researchers have confirmed all YubiKey 5 series models can be cloned, they haven’t tested other devices using the microcontroller, which is SLE78 made by Infineon and successor microcontrollers known as the Infineon Optiga Trust M and the Infineon Optiga TPM. The researchers suspect that any device using any of these three microcontrollers and the Infineon cryptographic library contains the same vulnerability.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/yubikeys-are-vulnerable-to-cloning-attacks-thanks-to-newly-discovered-side-channel/

@dcoderlt Reminded me of this project: https://github.com/astrelsky/Ghidra-Cpp-Class-Analyzer - it seems I have to look into recent advances in C++ class analysis in #Ghidra...