Category Archives: Ghidra

How an NSA researcher plans to allow everyone to guard against firmware attacks

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A years-long project from researchers at the National Security Agency that could better protect machines from firmware attacks will soon be available to the public, the lead NSA researcher on the project tells CyberScoop. The project will increase security in machines essentially by placing a machine’s firmware in a container to isolate it from would-be attackers. A layer of protection is being added to the System Management Interrupt (SMI) handler — code that allows a machine to make adjustments on the hardware level — as part of the open source firmware platform Coreboot. Eugene Myers, who works in the National Security Agency’s Trusted Systems Research Group, told CyberScoop that the end product — known as an SMI Transfer Monitor with protected execution (STM-PE) — will work with x86 processors that run Coreboot. Attackers are increasingly targeting firmware in order to run malicious attacks. Just last year, the first-ever documented UEFI rootkit was deployed in the wild, according […]

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NSA’s reverse-engineering malware tool, Ghidra, to get new features to save time, boost accuracy

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Just five months ago at the RSA conference, the NSA released Ghidra, a piece of open source software for reverse-engineering malware. It was an unusual move for the spy agency, and it’s sticking to its plan for regular updates — including some based on requests from the public. In the coming months, Ghidra will get support for Android binaries, according to Brian Knighton, a senior researcher for the NSA, and Chris Delikat, a cyber team lead in its Research Directorate, who previewed details of the upcoming release with CyberScoop. Knighton and Delikat are discussing their plans at a session of the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas Thursday. Before the Android support arrives, a version 9.1 will include new features intended to save time for users and boost accuracy in reverse-engineering malware — enhancements that will come from features such as processor modules, new support for system calls and the ability to conduct additional editing, known as sleigh editing, in the Eclipse […]

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Shadowhammer, WPA3, and Alexa is Listening: This Week in Computer Security

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Let’s get caught up on computer security news! The big news is Shadowhammer — The Asus Live Update Utility prompted users to download an update that lacked any description or changelog. People thought it was odd, but the update was properly signed by Asus, and antivirus scans reported it as …read more

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Pano Logic FGPA Hacking Just Got Easier

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When Pano Logic went out of business in 2012, their line of unique FPGA-based thin clients suddenly became a burden that IT departments didn’t want anything to do with. New and used units flooded the second-hand market, and for a while you could pick these interesting gadgets up for not …read more

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Financial Apps are Ripe for Exploit via Reverse Engineering

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White hat hacker reverse engineers financial apps and finds a treasure trove of security issues. Continue reading Financial Apps are Ripe for Exploit via Reverse Engineering→

Flaw in NSA’s GHIDRA leads to remote code execution attacks

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By Waqas
GHIDRA is NSA’s reverse engineering tool released earlier this month. Earlier this month, Hackread.com posted about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) publicly releasing its decompiler and disassembler tool GHIDRA and make it open-sour… Continue reading Flaw in NSA’s GHIDRA leads to remote code execution attacks→

Spoiler, Use-After-Free, and Ghidra: This Week in Computer Security

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The past few days have been busy if you’re trying to keep up with the pace of computer security news. Between a serious Chromium bug that’s actively being exploited on Windows 7 systems, the NSA releasing one of their tools as an open source project, and a new Spectre-like speculative …read more

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NSA might shut down phone snooping program, whatever that means

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We’ve heard this tale before. This time, it was mentioned by a congressional aide. Also, the NSA released Ghidra, a free reverse-engineering tool. Continue reading NSA might shut down phone snooping program, whatever that means→