This is a weird story: Hernandez was able to evade capture for so long because he used Tails, a version of Linux designed for users at high risk of surveillance and which routes all inbound and outbound connections through the open-source Tor network to anonymize it. According to Vice, the FBI had tried to hack … Read More “Facebook Helped Develop a Tails Exploit” »
Category: vulnerabilities
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Remember Spectre and Meltdown? Back in early 2018, I wrote: Spectre and Meltdown are pretty catastrophic vulnerabilities, but they only affect the confidentiality of data. Now that they — and the research into the Intel ME vulnerability — have shown researchers where to look, more is coming — and what they’ll find will be worse … Read More “Another Intel Speculative Execution Vulnerability” »
New research: “Security Analysis of the Democracy Live Online Voting System“: Abstract: Democracy Live’s OmniBallot platform is a web-based system for blank ballot delivery, ballot marking, and (optionally) online voting. Three states — Delaware, West Virginia, and New Jersey — recently announced that they will allow certain voters to cast votes online using OmniBallot, but, … Read More “Security Analysis of the Democracy Live Online Voting System” »
Researcher Bhavuk Jain discovered a vulnerability in the “Sign in with Apple” feature, and received a $100,000 bug bounty from Apple. Basically, forged tokens could gain access to pretty much any account. It is fixed. EDITED TO ADD (6/2): Another story. Powered by WPeMatico
This is new research on a Bluetooth vulnerability (called BIAS) that allows someone to impersonate a trusted device: Abstract: Bluetooth (BR/EDR) is a pervasive technology for wireless communication used by billions of devices. The Bluetooth standard includes a legacy authentication procedure and a secure authentication procedure, allowing devices to authenticate to each other using a … Read More “Bluetooth Vulnerability: BIAS” »
The attack requires physical access to the computer, but it’s pretty devastating: On Thunderbolt-enabled Windows or Linux PCs manufactured before 2019, his technique can bypass the login screen of a sleeping or locked computer — and even its hard disk encryption — to gain full access to the computer’s data. And while his attack in … Read More “Attack Against PC Thunderbolt Port” »
This is a good explanation of an iOS bug that allowed someone to break out of the application sandbox. A summary: What a crazy bug, and Siguza’s explanation is very cogent. Basically, it comes down to this: XML is terrible. iOS uses XML for Plists, and Plists are used everywhere in iOS (and MacOS). iOS’s … Read More “iOS XML Bug” »
Microsoft is training a machine-learning system to find software bugs: At Microsoft, 47,000 developers generate nearly 30 thousand bugs a month. These items get stored across over 100 AzureDevOps and GitHub repositories. To better label and prioritize bugs at that scale, we couldn’t just apply more people to the problem. However, large volumes of semi-curated … Read More “Vulnerability Finding Using Machine Learning” »
Over the past few weeks, Zoom’s use has exploded since it became the video conferencing platform of choice in today’s COVID-19 world. (My own university, Harvard, uses it for all of its classes. Boris Johnson had a cabinet meeting over Zoom.) Over that same period, the company has been exposed for having both lousy privacy … Read More “Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom” »
SANS has made freely available its “Work-from-Home Awareness Kit.” When I think about how COVID-19’s security measures are affecting organizational networks, I see several interrelated problems: One, employees are working from their home networks and sometimes from their home computers. These systems are more likely to be out of date, unpatched, and unprotected. They are … Read More “Work-from-Home Security Advice” »