Breaking Pedersen Hashes in Practice
The Pedersen hash function has gained popularity due to its efficiency in the arithmetic circuits used in zero-knowledge proof systems. Hash functions are a crucial primitive in cryptography, and zero-knowledge proof systems often make heavy use of them, for example when computing Merkle tree roots and paths. Instead of being…
A Race to Report a TOCTOU: Analysis of a Bug Collision in Intel SMM
About four months ago, in October 2022, I was idly poking around the “ICE TEA” leak. This leak was of particular interest to me, because it happened to expose the source code for Intel’s Alder Lake platform BIOS. It’s always fun to finally get to see the code for modules…
Making New Connections – Leveraging Cisco AnyConnect Client to Drop and Run Payloads
The Cisco AnyConnect client has received a fair amount of scrutiny from the security community over the years, with a particular focus on leveraging the vpnagent.exe service for privilege escalation. A while ago, we started to look at whether AnyConnect could be used to deliver payloads during red team engagements…