Collaborate Disseminate
Since taking its first product to Kickstarter eight years ago, Australian startup Orbitkey hasn’t been afraid to float some fresh ideas around how we carry our keys, and its latest offering continues on with this theme. The company’s Ring v2 is a regul… Continue reading Orbitkey’s quick-release keyring aims to save your fingernails
Nice work:
Radio relay attacks are technically complicated to execute, but conceptually easy to understand: attackers simply extend the range of your existing key using what is essentially a high-tech walkie-talkie. One thief stands near you while you’re in the grocery store, intercepting your key’s transmitted signal with a radio transceiver. Another stands near your car, with another transceiver, taking the signal from their friend and passing it on to the car. Since the car and the key can now talk, through the thieves’ range extenders, the car has no reason to suspect the key isn’t inside—and fires right up…
There are certain design aesthetics from every era that manage to survive the fads of their time and live throughout history. Ancient Greek architecture is still drawn upon for design …read more Continue reading Custom Calculator Brings Us Back To The 70s
This is a dumb crypto mistake I had not previously encountered:
A developer says it was possible to run their own software on the car infotainment hardware after discovering the vehicle’s manufacturer had secured its system using keys that were not only publicly known but had been lifted from programming examples.
[…]
“Turns out the [AES] encryption key in that script is the first AES 128-bit CBC example key listed in the NIST document SP800-38A [PDF]”.
[…]
Luck held out, in a way. “Greenluigi1” found within the firmware image the RSA public key used by the updater, and searched online for a portion of that key. The search results pointed to a common public key that shows up in online tutorials like “…
Continue reading Hyundai Uses Example Keys for Encryption System
My personal definition of a brilliant idea is one that is immediately obvious once it’s explained, but no one has thought of it before. I can’t believe that no one has described this taxonomy of access control before Ittay Eyal laid it out in this paper. The paper is about cryptocurrency wallet design, but the ideas are more general. Ittay points out that a key—or an account, or anything similar—can be in one of four states:
safe Only the user has access,
loss No one has access,
leak Both the user and the adversary have access, or
theft Only the adversary has access…
Honda vehicles from 2021 to 2022 are vulnerable to this attack:
On Thursday, a security researcher who goes by Kevin2600 published a technical report and videos on a vulnerability that he claims allows anyone armed with a simple hardware device to steal the code to unlock Honda vehicles. Kevin2600, who works for cybersecurity firm Star-V Lab, dubbed the attack RollingPWN.
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In a phone call, Kevin2600 explained that the attack relies on a weakness that allows someone using a software defined radio—such as HackRF—to capture the code that the car owner uses to open the car, and then replay it so that the hacker can open the car as well. In some cases, he said, the attack can be performed from 30 meters (approximately 98 feet) away…
Continue reading Security Vulnerabilities in Honda’s Keyless Entry System
Hertzbleed is a new side-channel attack that works against a variety of microprocressors. Deducing cryptographic keys by analyzing power consumption has long been an attack, but it’s not generally viable because measuring power consumption is often hard. This new attack measures power consumption by measuring time, making it easier to exploit.
The team discovered that dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS)—a power and thermal management feature added to every modern CPU—allows attackers to deduce the changes in power consumption by monitoring the time it takes for a server to respond to specific carefully made queries. The discovery greatly reduces what’s required. With an understanding of how the DVFS feature works, power side-channel attacks become much simpler timing attacks that can be done remotely…
Interesting vulnerability in Tesla’s NFC key cards:
Martin Herfurt, a security researcher in Austria, quickly noticed something odd about the new feature: Not only did it allow the car to automatically start within 130 seconds of being unlocked with the NFC card, but it also put the car in a state to accept entirely new keys—with no authentication required and zero indication given by the in-car display.
“The authorization given in the 130-second interval is too general… [it’s] not only for drive,” Herfurt said in an online interview. “This timer has been introduced by Tesla…in order to make the use of the NFC card as a primary means of using the car more convenient. What should happen is that the car can be started and driven without the user having to use the key card a second time. The problem: within the 130-second period, not only the driving of the car is authorized, but also the [enrolling] of a new key.”…
Basically, the SafeZone library doesn’t sufficiently randomize the two prime numbers it used to generate RSA keys. They’re too close to each other, which makes them vulnerable to recovery.
There aren’t many weak keys out there, but there are some:
So far, Böck has identified only a handful of keys in the wild that are vulnerable to the factorization attack. Some of the keys are from printers from two manufacturers, Canon and Fujifilm (originally branded as Fuji Xerox). Printer users can use the keys to generate a Certificate Signing Request. The creation date for the all the weak keys was 2020 or later. The weak Canon keys are tracked as CVE-2022-26351…
Continue reading Breaking RSA through Insufficiently Random Primes
It’s not yet very accurate or practical, but under ideal conditions it is possible to figure out the shape of a house key by listening to it being used.
Listen to Your Key: Towards Acoustics-based Physical Key Inference
Abstract: Physical locks are on… Continue reading Determining Key Shape from Sound