Author Archives: Pedro Umbelino

Practical Public Key Cryptography

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Encryption is one of the pillars of modern-day communications. You have devices that use encryption all the time, even if you are not aware of it. There are so many applications and systems using it that it’s hard to begin enumerating them. Ranging from satellite television to your mobile phone, from smart power meters to your car keys, from your wireless router to your browser, and from your Visa to your Bitcoins — the list is endless.

One of the great breakthroughs in the history of encryption was the invention of public key cryptography or asymmetrical cryptography in the 70’s. …read more

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Microsoft Bug Tracking Hacked

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It seems that the database containing descriptions of critical and unfixed bugs and/or vulnerabilities in some of the most widely used software in the world, including the Windows operating system, has hacked back in 2013. This database is basically gold for any security researcher, regardless of the color of their hat. To know which programs fail and the preconditions for that to happen is half an exploit right there.

Microsoft discovered the database breach in early 2013 after the highly skilled hacking group Morpho a.k.a. Butterfly a.k.a. Wild Neutron broke into computers at a number of major tech companies, including …read more

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Bad RSA Library Leaves Millions of Keys Vulnerable

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So, erm… good news everyone! A vulnerability has been found in a software library responsible for generating RSA key pairs used in hardware chips manufactured by Infineon Technologies AG. The vulnerability, dubbed ROCA, allows for an attacker, via a Coppersmith’s attack, to compute the private key starting with nothing more than the public key, which pretty much defeats the purpose of asymmetric encryption altogether.

Affected hardware includes cryptographic smart cards, security tokens, and other secure hardware chips produced by Infineon Technologies AG. The library with the vulnerability is also integrated in authentication, signature, and encryption tokens of other vendors and …read more

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Homemade 6 GHz Radar, v3

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The third version of [Henrik Forstén] 6 GHz frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar is online and looks pretty awesome. A FMCW radar is a type of radar that works by transmitting a chirp which frequency changes linearly with time. Simple continuous wave (CW) radar devices without frequency modulation cannot determine target range because they lack the timing mark necessary for accurately time the transmit and receive cycle in order to convert this information to range. Having a transmission signal modulated in frequency allows for the radar to have both a very high accuracy of range and also to measure simultaneously …read more

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Screwdriving

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Screwdriving! It’s like wardriving but instead of discovering WiFi networks, the aim is to discover Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)  devices of a special kind: adult toys. Yes, everything’s going to be connected, even vibrators. Welcome to the 21st century.

Security researcher [Alex Lomas] recently found that a lot of BLE-enabled adult toys are completely vulnerable to malicious attacks. In fact, they are basically wide open to anyone by design.

“Adult toys lend themselves to being great testbeds for IoT research: they’re BLE, they’re relatively cheap, they’re accessible and have companion apps for the full spectrum of testing.”

Yes… great test …read more

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Refurbishing an old P3Steel

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In the aftermath of the London Unconference, after the usual beer drinking networking at the pub, I meet Javier Varela, one of our many readers that were present. It turns out my fellow Iberic friend is involved in some interesting hardware projects, one of them being the OVM20 Lite board. I was looking for an excuse to mess around with my old Prusa and this was the perfect one. The P3Steel 3D printer was just getting dusty on my basement and it printed just fine in the past. Until one day…

Based on Arduino Mega 2560 with the RAMPS 1.4, …read more

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OLED hacked power bank

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In a feat of over-engineering, [Everett Bradford] hacked his power bank to add power monitor via an OLED display to show live current, voltage, temperature, and capacity information. The idea came when he learned about the INA219 chip. The INA219 is a current shunt and power monitor IC with an I²C or SMBUS compatible interface. The device is able to monitor both shunt voltage drop and bus supply voltage, with programmable conversion times and filtering. A programmable calibration value, combined with an internal multiplier, enables direct readouts of current in amperes. An additional multiplying register calculates power in watts.

With …read more

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OLED hacked power bank

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In a feat of over-engineering, [Everett Bradford] hacked his power bank to add power monitor via an OLED display to show live current, voltage, temperature, and capacity information. The idea came when he learned about the INA219 chip. The INA219 is a current shunt and power monitor IC with an I²C or SMBUS compatible interface. The device is able to monitor both shunt voltage drop and bus supply voltage, with programmable conversion times and filtering. A programmable calibration value, combined with an internal multiplier, enables direct readouts of current in amperes. An additional multiplying register calculates power in watts.

With …read more

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OptionsBleed – Apache bleeds in uncommon configuration

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[Hanno Böck] recently uncovered a vulnerability in Apache webserver, affecting Apache HTTP Server 2.2.x through 2.2.34 and 2.4.x through 2.4.27. This bug only affects Apache servers with a certain configuration in .htaccess file. Dubbed Optionsbleed, this vulnerability is a use after free error in Apache HTTP that causes a corrupted Allow header to be replied by the webserver in response to HTTP OPTIONS requests. This can leak pieces of arbitrary memory from the server process that may contain sensitive information. The memory pieces change after multiple requests, so for a vulnerable host an arbitrary number of memory chunks can be …read more

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Bluetooth Vulnerability Affects All Major OS

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Security researchers from Armis Labs recently published a whitepaper unveiling eight critical 0-day Bluetooth-related vulnerabilities, affecting Linux, Windows, Android and iOS operating systems. These vulnerabilities alone or combined can lead to privileged code execution on a target device. The only requirement is: Bluetooth turned on. No user interaction is necessary to successfully exploit the flaws, the attacker does not need to pair with a target device nor the target device must be paired with some other device.

The research paper, dubbed BlueBorne (what’s a vulnerability, or a bunch, without a cool name nowadays?), details each vulnerability and how it was …read more

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