IOActive Blog

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33233827 More interesting, a root cause analysis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33239443 https://ioactive.com/reverse-engineers-perspective-on-the-boeing-787-5… The 47 bit timestamp at 32MHz would explain the duration (Though not why it isn't 33MHz?).

The 787 is full fly by wire. Was there actually a failure of the flight control system? So far, there's not much info. Overview of 787 control system.[1] [1] https://ioactive.com/reverse-engineers-perspective-on-the-boeing-787-5…

Cryptography Engineering is less advanced than Serious Cryptography (but it's "take-y-er"; there's a lot of opinion / best practices stuff in it, and a lot of that is good). I'd say that if you've read and grokked Serious Cryptography, and you don't want to write code, something like _IMC_ (Silverman, above) is an interesting next step, in that you'll mostly be reasoning about math, and you'll be working at a much lower level than the basic RSA formulae. It also depends on what aspects of cryptography are interesting to you. If you want, for instance, to get a much better grip on how bulk cryptography works, as opposed to signatures and key exchanges, your best next step might be papers. For instance, a good next step on block cipher cryptography would be the Heys tutorial: https://ioactive.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ldc_tutorial.pdf

Man, this paper is a classic. I love traffic analysis attacks like this. I did something myself six years back albeit with a somewhat contrived example figuring out what someone is looking at on Google Maps via request and response sizes. Example video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skQNwd9Jij4 and https://ioactive.com/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-google-maps/. I am speculating that nice traffic analysis attacks can be done on mosh (which is a great tool btw) to, similar to the paper that is in this thread. It's been sort of on my "todo/research" list but haven't been able to sit down for a few days and mess around with it. And I'm sure that QUIC (HTTP/3) will open up some interesting avenues of attack here too.

I'm not sure I can add much over http://www.ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_Remote_Car_Hacking.pdf - I'm a bit jealous. I'd love to get paid to pull firmware apart like that.

Exactly. I mentioned on another submission, that got killed, that it would be a great tribute to the man if one of his friends/associates that new his work well could fill in and give his presentation at the conference. With so little time, I now think that might be unreasonable. Maybe use the time slot to hand out the slides, raise a toast and share some stories. The subject of his talk is incredibly important and should be distributed. After minor digging, here is his blog about medical device hacking vs. the hollywood version: http://blog.ioactive.com/2013/02/broken-hearts-how-plausible-was.html Interesting tidbit from the blog-The CEO's father has a pacemaker.

Original source: https://ioactive.com/event/def-con-talk-amd-sinkclose-universal-ring-2…

Thank you for commenting about it. There are _always_ bugs in software. Your assertion that it's pure fantasy to pivot from the flight entertainment system goes against there near infinite space of sidechannel attacks and demonstrated attacks on even airgapped systems; it's almost a law of physics that you are wrong. The "self promotion" angle was brought up last time this was discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657965 and it's an obviously pointless rebuttal. Boeing: Please post the code. Lets read it. It's already out there: https://ioactive.com/arm-ida-and-cross-check-reversing-the-787s-core-n…

> One might say "But what about hackers?", luckily unlike Alexa or Google Home, it's hard for hackers to tinker with one these devices and find remotely-triggerable exploits. Yes, very hard for people with skills, indeed. https://thehackernews.com/2016/12/hacking-in-flight-system.html https://www.wired.com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-commandeered-… https://ioactive.com/in-flight-hacking-system/

This was also reported in the 2014 conference app so perhaps they just don't care? http://blog.ioactive.com/2014/02/beware-your-rsa-mobile-app-download.h…

Reminds me tricks people used to crash debuggers. E.g. https://reverse.put.as/2012/01/31/anti-debug-trick-1-abusing-mach-o-to… http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/12/striking-back-gdb-and-ida-debuggers.h… and https://xorl.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/more-gdb-anti-debugging/

Sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEYCU62yeYk and the mentioned paper i assume is https://ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_Remote_Car_Hacking.pdf

I'm glad places like IOActive exist. Reading up on their procedure (http://www.ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_Advisory_SimpliSafe-Replay.pdf), they gave the vendor 5 months to even respond before posting this. All and all a much better process than a "hacker" posting it to his blog because a company didn't respond to his email the day before. There's no such thing as perfect security via alarm. However, if a company refuses to even respond to someone reporting a vulnerability, then the public should be informed. As a simplisafe customer, I will be contacting them and demanding a fix to this vulnerability or full refund.

There is an article[1] about finding out what location at google maps user is looking at, based on observing TLS packets and nothing else. If task at hand is to match encrypted connection to a smaller number of alternative (say identify accesses to popular place, like gmail/facebook login page, etc), same technique of observing packet size distribution over time should probably work quite reliably, and cgiproxy will do nothing to hide it. [1] http://www.ioactive.com/pdfs/SSLTrafficAnalysisOnGoogleMaps.pdf

Here's an article describing how to find out what someone is watching on Google Maps by analyzing the encrypted traffic. http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-google-maps.h…

> "Nothing is recorded or sent across the network. Peace of mind, without giving up on privacy." Devices like this still make me uncomfortable, given the track record of even large companies making extremely insecure devices[1]. [1]: http://www.ioactive.com/news-events/IOActive_advisory_belkinwemo_2014.…

> You are implying something fundamental: that the encrypted traffic could be adequately analysed for insight without the need for decryption. > Yet to do so would be to defeat SSL itself, or at least to declare it as insufficient to adequately protect secrets. This is possible through HTTPS traffic analysis, see [0] and [1] for starters. Of course, it's much easier for Cloudflare to do analysis for DDoS protection if they have access to plaintext. Whether this means that SSL is, as you say, "insufficient to adequately protect secrets" is an interesting discussion to have. [0] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.0297.pdf [1] http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-google-maps.h…

Ridiculous article.. Here's the actual blog post, and the 25-page whitepaper. http://blog.ioactive.com/2014/04/a-wake-up-call-for-satcom-security.ht… http://www.ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_SATCOM_Security_WhitePaper.pdf On a side note, what's with all the similar press photos of this guy in front of graffiti? https://imgur.com/a/nOuff

Perhaps it could be something related to: http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-google-maps.h… Or some other implementation flaw(s) in TLS. The point being, there are more ways to break crypto systems than attacking just the algorithm.

I wonder how much DBus (the Inter-Process-Communication (IPC) standard Linux desktops have been based around) is baked into QNX & instrumental to it! Maybe I can find out now? https://ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_Remote_Car_Hacking.pdf or https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/vehicle-cybersecurity-the-jeep-hack-… That was such a time. It's sad that it was a security panic, to me, because there was incredible promise there... All of the cars infotainment, windows, interior lighting, HVAC, all these things are just DBus services hosted on QNX? And I can just connect to my car & modify them, in some cases even over the air? QNX & DBus could have been a huge selling point, could have been such an awesome way to debundle the car from its infotainment. If only. Really interested to see if DBus really does underpin much of QNX, or whether this was just a time & place. Seeing how monolithic versus networked QNX is in general would be fascinating; is there one or two QNX hosts & lots of devices, or so the story more distributed that that?

Massive fan of age and congrats on its success!! On size padding, I know you've patiently listened to me before on this, but I'll always take a chance to advocate for an approach like PURBs ( https://petsymposium.org/2019/files/papers/issue4/popets-2019-0056.pdf ). Let's say you're in a country that suppresses certain material, like copies of the Bible, or the Hacker Manifesto, or whatever; if the authorities find an encrypted file that closely matches the size of that material; that could do you in. But maybe a more realistic case is how the size of maps tiles alone is enough to figure out where you are looking on a map (https://ioactive.com/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-google-maps/), or the size of streaming video segments (https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/shmat_usenix17.pdf) gives away what you are watching. Both real-world examples of size side-channels. It's not un-imaginable that someone could use a tool like age to build bigger systems like that, where the leaks creep in.

I took a quick look at the source code. It's providing end-to-end encryption with libsodium, using crypto_box [1], crypto_secretbox[2], and crypto_pwhash for password-based key derivation [3]. The public key model appears to be TOFU [4]. It's doing a distinct crypto_box per notification [5]. It doesn't use an authenticated key exchange or offer key rotation or forward secrecy, but that's probably fine for this use case. Not too long ago, I wrote a guide to end-to-end encryption [6], and I would classify the "end-to-end encryption" here as meeting the minimum definition (data is encrypted between devices, rather than in a client-server architecture where the server has access to plaintext), even if it's not suitable for more sensitive threat models. One thing I didn't see was message padding of location data prior to encryption, to prevent side-channel attacks via ciphertext length. [7] I don't know if I missed this, or if it was omitted. [1] https://github.com/zood/george/blob/52ddae2b5f65d324e1785c2d1a8fca51fb… [2] https://github.com/zood/george/blob/52ddae2b5f65d324e1785c2d1a8fca51fb… [3] https://github.com/zood/george/blob/52ddae2b5f65d324e1785c2d1a8fca51fb… [4] https://github.com/zood/george/blob/52ddae2b5f65d324e1785c2d1a8fca51fb… [5]…

> If I'm watching a show, I don't necessarily want every single router along the way knowing what show i'm watching. Unless Netflix has also started padding their compressed video segments to a deterministic size, TLS doesn't really help with the "I don't want people to know what video I'm watching" problem, as the encrypted media segments are first compressed using a variable bitrate encoding that causes a unique pattern in their resulting chunk sizes; and so, with a little database of signatures--apparently even just at the TCP level, without caring at all about the HTTP and TLS layers... which surprised even me, and I'm quite cynical about this stuff--you can pretty rapidly fingerprint what movie someone is watching from a passive traffic dump. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3029806.3029821 > Identifying HTTPS-Protected Netflix Videos in Real-Time (2017) > After more than a year of research and development, Netflix recently upgraded their infrastructure to provide HTTPS encryption of video streams in order to protect the privacy of their viewers. Despite this upgrade, we demonstrate that it is possible to accurately identify Netflix videos from passive traffic capture in real-time with very limited hardware requirements. Specifically, we developed a system that can report the Netflix video being delivered by a TCP connection using only the information provided by TCP/IP headers. > To support our analysis, we created a fingerprint database comprised of 42,027 Netflix…

> There shouldn't be pentesting, because there shouldn't be anything to pentest. At the face this seems like the right approach, but you end up with security-through-obscurity protecting (yet another) critical system. If you don't hire pentesters, how can you be sure there is no way to maliciously interact with the device? Because you didn't intend for there to be? Its a good thing vulnerabilities are never unintentional right? Its also not very resilient to a change in the software's requirements; maybe its okay for a pacemaker not to have a password when you need to open up a patient's chest to connect to it. Maybe those extra microseconds you save mean less blood loss and pain for the patient undergoing surgery, an undeniable win. But this operation turns out to be expensive (by every conceivable measure), so the next model ships with bluetooth, now we have a problem. See also: http://blog.ioactive.com/2013/02/broken-hearts-how-plausible-was.html

If it has an immobilizer? You can find immobilizer bypasses on sale online, who knows if they work, or you can create your own and disable it yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispXq4EMrsY#t=24m45s https://github.com/fjvva/ecu-tool/wiki (see also https://ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_Adventures_in_Automotive_Networks_a… and http://opengarages.org/handbook/ebook/) So besides relaying the key, you can just hack via the CAN bus. There's also a trick to use a second ECU to bypass the immobilizer, but that's probably too time consuming. Many manufacturers (inc. Toyota) also allow bypassing immobilizers and other features using TechStream and a maintenance tool. If they claim you have to buy a new ECU if you lose your master keys, call bullshit: https://attachments.priuschat.com/attachment-files/2015/10/96213_T-SB-…

Of possible interest -- There was a homeland episode [1], where they used a hack on a pacemaker to assassinate someone. This caused lots of discussion around medical device security [2] [3] [4] [5]. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hogan/homeland-recap-season-2-ep… [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/12/06/yes-you-can-hack-a-… [3] http://www.cnbc.com/id/100306578 [4] http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Homeland-Pacemaker-Hack-2206357.S.19247… [5] http://blog.ioactive.com/2013/02/broken-hearts-how-plausible-was.html