Andy Jassy talks about the benefits Amazon is seeing from their AI coding assistant. It’s widespread that devs are more productive with these tools.

The question is whether this is like accountants and Excel where it creates jobs or travel agents & the web where it kills them.

PageJack: A Powerful Exploit Technique With Page-Level UAF

A talk by @pkqzy888 et al. about overwriting slab objects containing a `struct page *` field to achieve arbitrary read/write in physical memory.

Slides: https://i.blackhat.com/BH-US-24/Presentations/US24-Qian-PageJack-A-Powerful-Exploit-Technique-With-Page-Level-UAF-Thursday.pdf

So I made a thing ☺️
Converted #phnt (Native API header files from the System Informer project) to #IDA TIL, IDC.

To import "phnt" types and function definitions to IDA and help with Reverse Engineering.
@hexrayssa @mrexodia

Introducing #IDA_PHNT_TYPES:
https://github.com/Dump-GUY/IDA_PHNT_TYPES

✍️ A free book on Linux kernel module programming

https://sysprog21.github.io/lkmpg/

Being a C programmer in 2024 is so ridiculous, look what I need to do! Every (!) evening I have to charge my sacrifice cats, complete the ritual and pray to the gods just to be as memory safes as Ru^\x00

Programm terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault

Happy Birthday, Linux!

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID:
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).

I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

@torvalds

#Linux #Birthday #CakeDay #HappyBirthday

Apropos Pavel Durov’s arrest, I wrote a short post about whether Telegram is an “encrypted messaging app”. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram-is-not-really-an-encrypted-messaging-app/

#Telegram is a tricky ecosystem from security perspective, because it’s quite diverse and complex:

1. Public groups and chats are widely used by both #Russia and #Ukraine. These include both publicly available and “private” (invite-only) chats neither can be really considered secret because…
2. …group chats can’t be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), so their contents are readable to at least Telegram operators, probably as easily as running a single SQL query.
3. Telegram bots don’t support E2EE either.

So here’s an important distinction: while Telegram is great and highly usable for disseminating public or semi-public information (unencrypted public or invite-only groups), it’s quite poor for highly confidential communications. Yet, especially the Russian side uses it a lot for just that - there are reports of “secret groups” used for front-line command or control, correction of fire or as a channel for communication with spies and collaborators in Ukraine. Except these “secret groups” really aren’t, at least not in OPSEC and cryptographic sense (groups can’t use E2EE in Telegram).

This is one purely marketing win for Telegram, because even mainstream journalists notoriously confuse these concepts.

Yes, it is technically possible that a Russian operator opens an actual “secret chat” with each of his collaborator, but it’s highly impractical and I doubt majority of them do it.

Which is further confirmed by the panic caused by detention of Durov in Russian military channels 🤷

In any case, France taking over Telegram infrastructure is still highly speculative - the main point of the arrest is almost complete lack of moderation in Telegram, even for the most severe CSAM (child abuse) content.

While in Russia arrest of Durov would likely lead to his genitals being connected to a field telephone in order to convince him to hand over the infrastructure (that’s why he ran away from Russia in the first place), in #France he will be likely just subject to a regular, boring law enforcement process that ends with a trial and suspended sentence, at best, if he agrees to improve content moderation. Part of the panic in Russia is that Russian routinely project the practices of their own law enforcement onto everyone else.

CSAM = child sexual abuse material. Telegram implicitly allows it in private groups and direct messages. Telegram won't work with the police even if it's found on public channels. https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/addressing-distribution-illicit-sexual-content-minors-online

According to @AFP, @durov was arrested at a 🇫🇷 airport a few hours ago. Sources say he will most likely be jailed.

He is basically being held responsible for all the illegal activities taking place on Telegram and failing to cooperate with law enforcement to make it stop.

Key takeaway for software companies: E2EE protects you just as much as it protects users.
Durov can only be accused of not cooperating insofar as he technically could, if he wanted to.

Like it or don't, this could never happen with Signal.

oh my fucking god. so i was having a problem when i enabled optimizations when compiling the doom port. memcpy ended up overwriting itself. so i looked into what was happening, and apparently memcpy just kept calling itself over and over. the reason? i was compiling my own version of memcpy, because i wasn't using the standard library, but i also didn't use the "-ffreestanding" flag, so gcc assumed i *did* have the standard library. so gcc, in its infinite wisdom, saw a memcpy-like pattern in my memcpy and turned it into another call to memcpy, resulting in a stack overflow.

New rants for today:
- PCRE2 and fun testing difficulties: https://secret.club/2024/08/23/ring-around-the-regex-2.html
- Ruminations on fuzzer evaluations: https://addisoncrump.info/research/thinking-about-fuzzer-evaluation/

"OpenSSH Backdoors" -- a few thoughts on supply-chain attacks against OpenSSH, and what we can learn from both historical and modern events. https://blog.isosceles.com/openssh-backdoors/

twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders ramsell painted 12,597 aquarelle paintings of blade runner, shot by shot, of the entire film edited down to ~35 minutes. it took two years of painstaking work, all done in his spare time after work each night.

the video circled around the web for a few years, and quietly disappeared from every single site it was hosted at.

a few months ago i spent a few hours digging for it, and finally found a copy of the original file.

i'm not sure how long it will last over at IA, so enjoy it while you can. it is a true achievement. 🙏

#filmPreservation #art #painting

https://archive.org/details/blade-runner-aquarelle-edition

Updated #defcon 32 main stage presentations have been uploaded to https://media.defcon.org Enjoy!

What the actual fuck?! Data brokers are scum.

"""
Another National Public Data company found hosting a file online that included the usernames and passwords for the back-end of its website, including for the site’s administrator.

The publicly-accessible file, which has now been taken offline, showed that all RecordsCheck users were given the same 6-character password with instructions to change that password. Which many failed to do.
"""

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2024/08/national-public-data-leaked-passwords-online

#NPD #DataBreach #DataBrokers

I know this dates me, but ... 80% of the problems I'm solving with jq are caused by using JSON at all ... when a simpler format would have been fine.

Repeating every verbose field name in each record, when the schema is flat, is often premature "schema might need to be variable someday" optimization.

When the Rapid7 DNS data was freely available, it was distributed as a one-line-per-stanza JSON file. The first thing I'd do after downloading it was convert it to CSV ... which cut its size by 60%.

It's like buying a ten-pound box of individually wrapped grains of rice.

Remember kids, if a product says it using "FIPS 197 certified encryption", all it means is that they are using a library which was certified to correctly implement the algorithm.

The product vendor might be using a hardcoded key in ECB mode but they are still technically using "certified" encryption.

When reversing c++, my eyes quickly glaze over when it comes to exceptions and i tend to just ignore them. It’s just house keeping code, for the most part. Right?

This hexrays feature to display wind/unwind blocks in a sane way looks immensely useful. Not only for getting hints about structure members and types , but because understanding object life times can be crucial for certain types of bug classes.
https://infosec.place/objects/44ae2d73-a400-417b-84f9-b03e99236d72