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Tool Release – Collaborator++
When testing for out-of-band vulnerabilities, Collaborator has been an invaluable tool since its initial release in 2015. By acting as a HTTP, DNS and SMTP server, Collaborator allows researchers to identify complex out-of-band interactions between target applications and external services aiding in the discovery of vulnerabilities such as server-side request forgery (SSRF), XML external entity… Read more
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Public Report – Electric Coin Company NU3 Specification and Blossom Implementation Audit
In October 2019, the Electric Coin Company engaged NCC Group to conduct a review of two Zcash improvement proposals (ZIP 213 and ZIP 221) and of the implementation of ZIP 208 within the Zcash node implementation. ZIP 213 proposes a change to consensus rules to allow coinbase transactions to target shielded addresses. ZIP 221 describes… Read more
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Tool Release – Enumerating Docker Registries with go-pillage-registries
Containerization solutions are becoming increasingly common throughout the industry due to their vast applications in logically separating and packaging processes to run consistently across environments. Docker represents these processes as images by packaging a base filesystem and initialization instructions for the runtime environment. Developers can use common base images and instruct Docker to execute a… Read more
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Conference Talks – January 2020
This month, in addition to the several dozen technical talks and trainings our researchers will offer at our internal conferences, NCC CON US and NCC CON Europe, two NCC Group researchers will also be presenting work publicly: Clint Gibler, “DevSecOps State of the Union v2.0,” presented at AppSec Cali (Santa Monica, CA – January 22-24… Read more
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Passive Decryption of Ethereum Peer-to-Peer Traffic
Ethereum, a popular cryptocurrency, utilizes a P2P flood network overlay
protocol in order to propagate new transactions and state around the network. As has been shown in previous works[^1][^2], observing the propagation of transactions through the peer-to-peer network layer is often enough to deanonymize users of cryptocurrency networks…. Read More -
On Linux's Random Number Generation
I have been asked about the usefulness of security monitoring of entropy levels in the Linux kernel. This calls for some explanation of how random generation works in Linux systems. So, randomness and the Linux kernel. This is an area where there is longstanding confusion, notably among some Linux kernel developers, including Linus Torvalds himself.… Read more
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Demystifying AWS' AssumeRole and sts:ExternalId
Amazon Web Services’ AssumeRole operation accepts an optional parameter called “sts:ExternalId” which is intended to mitigate certain types of attacks. However, both the attacks that sts:ExternalId mitigates and how to properly use it are widely misunderstood, resulting in large numbers of vulnerable AWS-based applications. This post aims to describe what std:ExternalId does, when to use… Read more
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Welcome to the new NCC Group Global Research blog
Welcome to the new NCC Group Global Research blog. Here we will share blog posts on a range of technical topics that our consultants are thinking about, and on NCC Group’s research projects, papers, presentations, and tools from around the globe.