Research Blog
Insights and research from our global cybersecurity team.
Tool Release: Code Query (cq)
Code Query is a new, open source universal code security scanning tool. CQ scans code for security vulnerabilities and other items of interest to security-focussed code reviewers. It outputs text files containing references to issues found, into an output directory. These output files can then be reviewed, filtered by unix…
CowCloud
A common challenge technical teams (e.g. penetration testers) face is centralized deployment and pipelining execution of security tools. It is possible that at some point you have thought about customising several tools, buying their commercial licenses, and allowing a number of people to run the tools from AWS. The problem…
OffensiveCon 2023 – Exploit Engineering – Attacking the Linux Kernel
Cedric Halbronn and Alex Plaskett presented at OffensiveCon on the 19th of May 2023 on Exploit Engineering – Attacking the Linux kernel. Slides The slides for the talk can be downloaded below: libslub libslub can be downloaded from here. Abstract The abstract for the talk was as follows: Over the…
Tool Release: Code Credential Scanner (ccs)
Code Credential Scanner is a new open source tool designed to detect hardcoded credentials, or credentials present in configuration files within a repository. These represent a serious security issue, and can be extremely hard to detect and manage. The tool is intended to be used directly by dev teams in…
Exploring Overfitting Risks in Large Language Models
In the following blog post, we explore how overfitting can affect Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular, since this technology is used in the most promising AI technologies we see today (chatGPT, LLaMa, Bard, etc). Furthermore, by exploring the likelihood of inferring data from the dataset, we will determine how…
The Paillier Cryptosystem with Applications to Threshold ECDSA
You may have heard of RSA (b. 1977), but have you heard of its cousin, Paillier (b. 1999)? In this post, we provide a close look at the Paillier homomorphic encryption scheme [Paillier1999], what it offers, how it’s used in complex protocols, and how to implement it securely. Contents RSA…
Rigging the Vote: Uniqueness in Verifiable Random Functions
This blog post presents a whirlwind overview of Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs) as used by several leading-edge blockchains, and shows how a very interesting and recently found implementation oversight causes the VRF’s assurance of uniqueness to fall apart. As VRFs are commonly used for selecting blockchain consensus voting committees, this…
Medical Devices: A Hardware Security Perspective
Medical device security is gaining more attention for several reasons. The conversation often gets connected to device safety, that is, the degree to which the risk of patient harm is limited by preventing or controlling for device malfunction. Device security expands the scope of safety by supposing a malicious attacker…
NETGEAR Routers: A Playground for Hackers?
A detailed analysis on multiple vulnerabilities which were identified on the NETGEAR Nighthawk WiFi 6 Router (RAX AX2400) and may exist on other NETGEAR router models.
Real World Cryptography Conference 2023 – Part I
The annual Real World Cryptography Conference organized by the IACR recently took place in Tokyo, Japan. On top of 3 days of excellent talks, RWC was preceded by the 2nd annual FHE.org Conference and the Real World Post-Quantum Cryptography Workshop and followed by the High Assurance Crypto Software Workshop. Nearly…