Research

Introduction We are going to walk through the process we took to reverse engineer parts of the Android game Coin Hunt World. Our goal was to identify methods and develop tooling to cheat at the game. Most of the post covers reverse engineering the game’s binary protocol and using that…

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…

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…

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.

Different forms of DNS rebinding attacks have been described as far back as 1996 for Java Applets and 2002 for JavaScript (Quick-Swap). It has been four years since our State of DNS Rebinding presentation in 2019 at DEF CON 27 (slides), where we introduced our DNS rebinding attack framework Singularity…

This executable blog post is the third in a series related to machine learning and explores code generation from a 16 billion parameter large language model (LLM). After a brief look under the hood at the LLM structure and parameter allocation, we generate a variety of Python functions and make…

Alex Plaskett and McCaulay Hudson presented this talk at HITB AMS on the 20th April 2023. The talk showcased NCC Exploit Development Group (EDG) in Pwn2Own 2022 Toronto targeting all consumer routers (Netgear, TP-Link and Synology) from both a LAN and WAN perspective.  The talk also described how we compromised…

There is a specific type of cryptographic transformation that arises in storage-oriented blockchains. The transformation is a “slowable” 1-1 mapping which does not involve any secrets and is tradeoff-resistant in the following sense: it should not be possible to partially compute the function, store a fraction of the function’s state…

This is a four part blog post series that starts with Rustproofing Linux (Part 1/4 Leaking Addresses). Shared memory is often used to share data without the performance hit of copying. Whenever a shared resource is consumed by one component while being modified by another component, there is potential for…

This is a four part blog post series that starts with Rustproofing Linux (Part 1/4 Leaking Addresses). In the C programming language, integer types can be a bit confusing. Portability issues can arise when the same code is used in multiple hardware architectures or operating systems. For example, int is…

TL;DR: Don’t use ChatGPT for security code review. It’s not meant to be used that way, it doesn’t really work (although you might be fooled into thinking it does), and there are some other major problems that make it impractical. Also, both the CEO of OpenAI and ChatGPT itself say…

This is a four part blog post series that starts with Rustproofing Linux (Part 1/4 Leaking Addresses). This post uses a simple example to demonstrate a class of vulnerability that we encounter quite frequently when auditing kernel drivers and firmware. It’s a race condition, or more precisely a TOCTOU vulnerability.…

Rust is a programming language guaranteeing memory and thread safety while still being able to access raw memory and hardware. This sounds impossible, and it is, that’s why Rust has an unsafe keyword which allows a programmer to dereference a raw pointer and perform some other dangerous operations. The dangerous…

This blog post is the second in a series related to machine learning, and demonstrates exactly how a data poisoning attack might work to insert a backdoor into a facial authentication system. The simplified system has similarities to that which the TSA is running a proof of concept trial at the Detroit…

If you frequently deliver source code review assessments of products, including machine learning components, I’m sure you are used to reviewing Jupyter Notebook files (usually python). Although I spend most of my time reviewing the source code manually, I also use static analysis tools such as semgrep, using both public…

Summary Vulnerability Details Overview Execution Flow /bin/pucfu /usr/lib/libfwcheck.so get_check_fw fw_check_api curl_post /lib/libpu_util.so SetFileValue pegaPopen Check Firmware HTTPS Normal Request Response Exploitation Command Injection Response Root Shell Final Notes Patch Pwn2Own Note Summary This blog post describes a command injection vulnerability found and exploited in November 2022 by NCC Group in…

Summary Target Binary tdpServer Architecture Mitigations Forks Understanding The Vulnerability Reaching The Vulnerable Function Broadcast Fork Flow Server Fork Flow JSON Array Stack Overflow Triggering The Bug Broadcast Fork Response Server Fork Request Vulnerability Constraints Storing Arbitrary Content In Memory cJSON Summarized cJSON Struct cJSON Data cJSON Heap Memory Single…

Professor Ron Rivest observed the close relationship between cryptography and machine learning at the ASIACRYPT conference back in 1991. Cross-fertilization of common notions, such as integrity, privacy, confidentiality and authenticity, have only grown in the following three decades as these fields have become more central to our everyday lives. This blog…

In this blog post, I’m going to recount the story of my quest to train OpenAI’s large language model, GPT-2, to create a virtual doppelganger of myself and my peers. Machine learning is one of those buzzwords that, sometimes, lives up to its reputation. As an information security professional, my…

After nearly four years into my role, I am stepping down as NCC Group’s SVP Global Head of Research. In part just for myself, to reflect on a whirlwind few years, and in part as a thank you and celebration of all of the incredible researchers with whom I have…

First things first: there is now a specification for the jq255e and jq255s elliptic curves; it is published on the C2SP initiative and is formally in (draft) version 0.0.1: https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/blob/main/jq255.md The jq255e and jq255s groups are prime-order groups appropriate for building cryptographic protocols, and based on elliptic curves. These curves…

Summary NXP System-on-a-Chip (SoC) fuse configurations with the SDP READ_REGISTER operation disabled (SDP_READ_DISABLE=1) but other serial download functionality still enabled (SDP_DISABLE=0) can be abused to read memory contents in warm and cold boot attack scenarios. In lieu of an enabled SDP READ_REGISTER operation, an attacker can use a series of…

Web3 Decoder is a Burp Suite Extension that allows to decode “web3” JSON-RPC calls that interact with smart contracts in a EVM blockchain. As it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, the following two screenshots shows a Raw JSON-RPC call, and its decoded function call: Background…

New Microcorruption challenges created by Nick Galloway and Davee Morgan Today we are releasing several new challenges for the embedded security CTF, Microcorruption. These challenges highlight types of vulnerabilities that NCC Group’s Hardware and Embedded Systems practice have discovered in real products. The new challenges provide a simple interface to…

Vendor: OpenJDK Project Vendor URL: https://openjdk.java.net Versions affected: 8-17+ (and likely earlier versions) Systems Affected: All supported systems Author: Jeff Dileo <jeff.dileo[at]nccgroup[dot]com> Advisory URL / CVE Identifier: TBD Risk: Low (implicit data validation bypass) Summary The private static InetAddress::getAllByName(String,InetAddress) method is used internally and by the public static InetAddress::getAllByName(String) to…

NXP’s HABv4 API documentation references a now-mitigated defect in ROM-resident High Assurance Boot (HAB) functionality present in devices with HAB version < 4.3.7. I could find no further public documentation on whether this constituted a vulnerability or an otherwise “uninteresting” errata item, so I analyzed it myself! This post shines…

In 2015 Raphael Mudge released an article [1] that detailed that versions of mimikatz released after 8th of October, 2015 had a new module that was utilising certain types of external USB devices to flash lights in different colours if mimikatz was executed. The technique presented in the article required…

Six years ago, NCC Group researchers Tim Newsham and Jesse Hertz released TriforceAFL – an extension of the American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) fuzzer which supports full-system fuzzing using QEMU – but unfortunately the associated whitepaper for this work was never published. Today, we’re releasing it for the curious reader and…

tl;dr You can now have Scout Suite scan not only your cloud environments, but your Kubernetes clusters. Just have your kubeconfig ready and run the following commands: $ pip3 install --user https://github.com/nccgroup/ScoutSuite/archive/develop.zip $ scout kubernetes Background NCC Group’s Container Orchestration Security Service (COSS) practice regularly conducts Kubernetes cluster configuration reviews…

Modern organizations evolved and took the next step when they became digital. Organizations are using cloud and automation to build a dynamic infrastructure to support more frequent product release and faster innovation. This puts pressure on the IT department to do more and deliver faster. Automated cloud infrastructure also requires…

We are excited to announce the release of a new version of our open-source, multi-cloud auditing tool ScoutSuite (on Github)! This version includes multiple bug fixes, dependency updates and feature enhancements for AWS, Azure and GCP. It also adds and updates several rules for these three cloud providers, alongside improved…

Authored by Alberto Segura (main author) and Mike Stokkel (co-author) Editor’s note: This post was originally published on the Fox-IT blog. Introduction  After we discovered in February 2022 the SharkBotDropper in Google Play posing as a fake Android antivirus and cleaner, now we have detected a new version of this…

Throughout September and October, members of NCC Group will be presenting their work at SANS CyberThreat, 44CON, ResponderCon, BSides St John’s, ICMC, DevOps World, RootCon, Hexacon, and Hardwear.io NL. Please join us! Enterprise IR: Live free, live large Ollie Whitehouse Eric Shamper SANS CyberThreat 22 September 12-13, 2022Abstract forthcoming. Mastering…

Introduction netlink and nf_tables Overview Sets Expressions Set Expressions Stateful Expressions Expressions of Interest nft_lookup nft_dynset nft_connlimit Vulnerability Discovery CVE-2022-32250 Analysis Set Creation Set Deactivation Initial Limited UAF Write Exploitation Building an Initial Plan Offsets We Can Write at Into the UAF Chunk Hunting for Replacement Objects What Pointer Do…

At present all major operating system kernels are written in C/C++, languages which provide no or minimal assistance in avoiding common security problems. Modern languages such as Rust provide better security guarantees by default and prevent many of the common classes of memory safety security bugs. In this post we…

[Editor’s note: This post is a part of our blog series from our NCC Group summer interns! You can see more posts from consultants in our internship program here.] When testing APIs with short-lived authentication tokens, it can be frustrating to login every few minutes, taking up a consultant’s time…

Authored by: Jesús Miguel Calderón Marín Introduction Two years ago I carried out research into online casino games specifically focusing on roulette. As a result, I composed a detailed guide with information on classification of online roulette, potential vulnerabilities and the ways to detect them[1]. Although this guideline was particularly…

Max Groot Ruud van Luijk TL;DR A recently uncovered malware sample dubbed ‘Saitama’ was uncovered by security firm Malwarebytes in a weaponized document, possibly targeted towards the Jordan government. This Saitama implant uses DNS as its sole Command and Control channel and utilizes long sleep times and (sub)domain randomization to…

Editor’s note: since the publication of this blog post, an expanded and more technical discussion of the implementation process has been written, and is available on eprint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1283. Introduction Last weekend (July 30th) a truly incredible piece of mathematical/cryptanalysis research was put onto eprint. Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru of KU…

tl;dr Grab the release binary from our repo and have fun. Also, happy new year; 2021 couldn’t end soon enough. Background A while back, I was asked by one of my coworkers on the PSC team about ways in which to make their custom credit card data scanner cloud native…

The following vulnerabilities were found as part of a research project looking at the state of security of the different Nuki (smart lock) products. The main goal was to look for vulnerabilities which could affect to the availability, integrity or confidentiality of the different devices, from hardware to software. Eleven…

We recently published “Practical Attacks on Machine Learning Systems”, which has a very large references section – possibly too large – so we’ve boiled down the list to five papers that are absolutely essential in this area. If you’re beginning your journey in ML security, and have the very basics…

This paper collects a set of notes and research projects conducted by NCC Group on the topic of the security of Machine Learning (ML) systems. The objective is to provide some industry perspective to the academic community, while collating helpful references for security practitioners, to enable more effective security auditing…

Originally published June 29, 2022 on the Fox-IT blog Authored by Alberto Segura (main author) and Rolf Govers (co-author) Summary Flubot is an Android based malware that has been distributed in the past 1.5 years inEurope, Asia and Oceania affecting thousands of devices of mostly unsuspecting victims.Like the majority of…

Summary ExpressLRS is a high-performance open source radio control link. It aims to provide a low latency radio control link while also achieving maximum range. It runs on a wide variety of hardware in both 900 Mhz and 2.4 GHz frequencies. ExpressLRS is very popular in FPV drone racing and…

The healthcare sector and ransomware attacks appear together frequently in the media. Since before the start of the pandemic rarely a week goes by without at least one story about a healthcare organisation falling victim to a ransomware attack. We often hear about the financial impact these attacks have or how they…

Robust exception handling is one of the tenets of best practice for development, no matter what the coding language. This blog post explores the curious circumstances in which a developer trying to do the right thing – but without appreciating the full effects – could lead to data integrity issues…

The Trendnet TEW-831DR WiFi Router was found to have multiple vulnerabilities exposing the owners of the router to potential intrusion of their local WiFi network and possible takeover of the device. Five vulnerabilities were discovered. Below are links to the associated technical advisories: Technical Advisory: Stored XSS in Web Interface…

By Nicolas Bidron, and Nicolas Guigo. U-boot is a popular boot loader for embedded systems with implementations for a large number of architectures and prominent in most Linux based embedded systems such as ChromeOS and Android Devices. Two vulnerabilities were uncovered in the IP Defragmentation algorithm implemented in U-Boot, with…

Congratulations to NCC Group researcher Jeremy Boone, who was recently recognized for both the Highest Quality Report, as well as the Most Eligible Reports, as an invited researcher to the Intel Circuit Breaker program! From Intel: “This exclusive event invited a select group of security researchers to hunt vulnerabilities in…

This month, members of NCC Group will be presenting their technical work training courses at the following conferences: NCC Group, “Training: Mastering Container Security,” to be presented at 44CON (June 13-15 2022) NCC Group, “Training: Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Security Review,” to be presented at 44CON (June 13-16 2022) Jennifer…

This discussion focuses on specific configuration details of the ESP32 family of microcontrollers and the recommended best practices associated with those details.

From September 28th through October 23rd, 2020, Lantern – in partnership with the Open Technology Fund – engaged NCC Group to conduct a security assessment of the Lantern client. Lantern provides a proxy in order to circumvent internet censorship. This assessment was open ended and time-boxed, providing a best-effort security…

Current Vendor: SerComm Vendor URL: https://www.sercomm.com Systems Affected: SerComm h500s Versions affected: lowi-h500s-v3.4.22 Authors: Diego Gómez Marañón @rsrdesarrollo CVE Identifier: CVE-2021-44080 Risk: 6.6(Medium)- AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H Summary The h500s is a router device manufactured by SerComm and packaged by a few telecoms providers in Spain (and possibly other regions) to provide CPE…

(The version of Ghidra used in this article is 10.1.2. For the Go string recovery tool release, skip ahead to Ghostrings Release.) Introduction A well-known issue with reverse engineering Go programs is that the lack of null terminators in Go strings makes recovering string definitions from compiled binaries difficult. Within…

Introduction Ghostrings is a collection of Ghidra scripts for recovering string definitions in Go binaries with P-Code analysis. A well-known issue with reverse engineering Go programs is that the lack of null terminators in Go strings makes recovering string definitions from compiled binaries difficult. Within a compiled Go program, many…

Summary The Kwikset/Weiser Kevo line of smart locks support Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) passive entry through their Touch-to-Open functionality. When a user touches the exterior portion of the lock, the lock checks that an authorized BLE device is exterior to and within a short distance of the smart lock, and…

Summary The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y employ a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based passive entry system. This system allows users with an authorized mobile device or key fob within a short range of the vehicle to unlock and operate the vehicle, with no user interaction required on the…

Summary Many products implement Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based proximity authentication, where the product unlocks or remains unlocked when a trusted BLE device is determined to be nearby. Common examples of such products include automotive Phone-as-a-Key systems, residential smart locks, BLE-based commercial building access control systems, and smartphones and laptops…

Summary Ruby on Rails is a web application framework that follows the Model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. It offers some protections against Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks in its helpers for the views. Several tag helpers in ActionView::Helpers::FormTagHelper and ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper are vulnerable against XSS because their current protection does not restrict properly the…

As one of the proud contributors to the newest version of the CIS Google Cloud Platform Foundation Benchmark, I wanted to raise awareness about the new version release of this benchmark [1] by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and how it can help a company to set a strong…

“Customer Interaction Tracker” is one of the telemetry systems that exist within Windows, responsible for tracking interaction with the system and applications. We provide an overview and means to parse as a data source to aid forensic investigations.

Double fetch vulnerabilities in C and C++ have been known about for a number of years. However, they can appear in multiple forms and can have varying outcomes. As much of this information is spread across various sources, this whitepaper draws the knowledge together into a single place, in order…

Since we published about identifying Cobalt Strike Team Servers in the wild just over three years ago, we’ve collected over 128,000 beacons from over 24,000 active Team Servers. Today, RIFT is making this extensive beacon dataset publicly available in combination with the open-source release of dissect.cobaltstrike, our Python library for…

We’re proud to announce the release of a new version of our open-source, multi-cloud auditing tool ScoutSuite (on Github)! The most significant improvements and features added include: Core Improved CLI options, test coverage and some dependencies AWS Added new findings for multiple services Bug fixes Added ARNs for all resources…

The use of pairings in cryptography began in 1993, when an algorithm developed by Menezes, Okamoto and Vanstone, now known as the MOV-attack, described a sub-exponential algorithm for solving the discrete logarithm problem for supersingular elliptic curves. It wasn’t until the following decade that efficient pairing-based algorithms were used constructively…

As one of the proud contributors to the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Microsoft 365 Foundation Benchmark, I wanted to raise awareness about the new version release by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) released on February 17th, and how it can help a company to have a secure baseline…

Erik Steringer, NCC Group Overview TL;DR: Go check out https://github.com/ncc-erik-steringer/Aerides As public cloud service consumption has grown, engineering and security professionals have responded with different tools and techniques to achieve security in the cloud. As a consultancy, we at NCC Group have published multiple tools that we use to guide…

Introduction The work presented in this blog post is that of Ewan Alexander Miles (former UCL MSci student) and explores the expansion of scope for using machine learning models on PE (portable executable) header files to identify and classify malware. It is built on work previously presented by NCC Group,…

by Aaron Haymore, Iain Smart, Viktor Gazdag, Divya Natesan, and Jennifer Fernick Mainstream appreciation for cyberattacks targeting continuous integration and continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines has been gaining momentum. Attackers and defenders increasingly understand that build pipelines are highly-privileged targets with a substantial attack surface. But what are the potential…

Following the popularity of our first Annual Research Report in 2020, we present to you now for the second year, a summary of our public-facing security research findings from across the over 237 conference publications, technical blog posts, advisories, and tool releases published by researchers at NCC Group between January…

(Or, “Can large language models generate exploits?”) While attacking machine learning systems is a hot topic for which attacks have begun to be demonstrated, I believe that there are a number of entirely novel, yet-unexplored attack-types and security risks that are specific to large language models (LMs), that may be…

by Drew Wade, Emily Liu, and Siddarth Adukia TL; DR We studied a range of Canadian provinces’ proof-of-vaccination apps to analyze their associated security and privacy properties. In particular, building on prior work in which some of us created an assessment framework for evaluating the security privacy of vaccine passports,…

We released ruby-trace back in August to coincide with my DEF CON 29 talk on it and parasitic tracing in general. Back then, it supported (c)Ruby 2.6 through 3.0. A few days ago, Ruby 3.1 was released. We have updated ruby-trace to add support for Ruby 3.1 and reorganized our…

Background Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) provide a number of mechanisms to inspect and modify the Java applications and the runtime they stand on. These include Java agents, JARs that are capable of modifying Java class files at runtime; and JVMTI agents, native libraries that can perform deep hooking into the…

The Microcontroller Unit (MCU) is the heart of an embedded device, where the main firmware executes its instructions to carry out the system’s functions. These come in many varieties. Relatively simple microcontrollers with limited-resource processors may bundle only a few IO peripherals, a small amount of memory, and be intended…

Background For the uninitiated, an FPGA is a field-programmable array of logic that is typically used to perform or accelerate some specific function (or functions) within a computer system. They are typically paired with a separate traditional microprocessor (or as part of a combined system-on-chip (SoC)) but can operate standalone…

tl;dr Run our new tool by adding -javaagent:log4j-jndi-be-gone-1.0.0-standalone.jar to all of your JVM Java stuff to stop log4j from loading classes remotely over LDAP. This will prevent malicious inputs from triggering the “Log4Shell” vulnerability and gaining remote code execution on your systems. . In this post, we first offer some…

Summary SonicWall SMA 100 Series appliances running firmware versions 10.2.0.8-37sv, 10.2.1.1-19sv and below suffer from an unauthenticated arbitrary file-delete vulnerability which can be exploited by a remote attacker to delete arbitrary files from the underlying Operating System. This vulnerability exists in the sonicfiles RAC_DOWNLOAD_TAR method, which allows users to download…

Summary SonicWall SMA 100 Series appliances running firmware versions 10.2.0.8-37sv, 10.2.1.1-19sv and below suffer from a Stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability within the management interface. This vulnerability arises due to lack of sufficient output encoding when displaying postscript file names within the management interface. Due to CVE-2021-20040, this issue can…

Summary SonicWall SMA 100 Series appliances running firmware versions 10.2.0.8-37sv, 10.2.1.1-19sv and below, are vulnerable to multiple stack-based and heap-based buffer overflows in the fileexplorer component, which can be reached by an unauthenticated attacker, calling the sonicfiles RAC_COPY_TO method. These vulnerabilities arise due to the unchecked use of strcpy with…

Summary SonicWall SMA 100 Series appliances running firmware versions 10.2.0.8-37sv, 10.2.1.1-19sv suffer from a post-authenticated command injection vulnerability, which can be exploited to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges. The vulnerability exists in the Python management API, which is exposed remotely via HTTP, and is accessible to authenticated administrative users.…

Summary SonicWall SMA 100 Series appliances running firmware versions 10.2.0.8-37sv, 10.2.1.1-19sv and below suffer from a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in the sonicfiles RAC_GET_BOOKMARKS_HTML5 API. This vulnerability arises due to the unchecked use of the strcat function on a fixed size buffer, when displaying user bookmarks. This vulnerability requires authentication…

Summary SonicWall SMA 100-series appliances running versions 10.2.0.8-37sv, 10.2.1.1-19sv and earlier, suffer from an unauthenticated file upload vulnerability. This could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to use path traversal to upload files outside of the intended directory. Impact An unauthenticated attacker may be able to write files with controlled content…

Introduction Internet of Things security can mean any number of things for your product and its users. This will depend largely on the context of the product and its deployment, and can include specific requirements, such as integrity, confidentiality, availability, safety, privacy, consent, authenticity, and more. Understanding how security fits…

tl;dr An approach to detecting suspicious TLS certificates using an incremental anomaly detection model is discussed. This model utilizes the Half-Space-Trees algorithm and provides our security operations teams (SOC) with the opportunity to detect suspicious behavior, in real-time, even when network traffic is encrypted.  The prevalence of encrypted traffic As a…

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has become the de facto standard for protecting modern communications. ECC is widely used to perform asymmetric cryptography operations, such as to establish shared secrets or for digital signatures. However, insufficient validation of public keys and parameters is still a frequent cause of confusion, leading to…

Following on from our previous blog post ‘The Challenges of Fuzzing 5G Protocols’, in this post, we demonstrate how an attacker could use the results from the fuzz testing to produce an exploit and potentially gain access to a 5G core network. In this blog post we will be using…

Pepijn Hack, Cybersecurity Analyst, Fox-IT, part of NCC Group Zong-Yu Wu, Threat Analyst, Fox-IT, part of NCC Group Abstract Organizations worldwide continue to face waves of digital extortion in the form of targeted ransomware. Digital extortion is now classified as the most prominent form of cybercrime and the most devastating…

Written by Ben Lister and Kane Ryans This blog post details the collaboration between NCC Group’s Detection Engineering team and our Containerisation team in tackling detection engineering for Kubernetes. Additionally, it describes the Detection Engineering team’s more generic methodology around detection engineering for new/emerging technologies and how it was used…

The open and wide-reaching nature of social media platforms have led them to become breeding grounds for misinformation, the most recent casualty being COVID-19 vaccine information. Misinformation campaigns launched by various sources for different reasons but working towards a common objective – creating vaccine hesitancy – have been successful in…

Summary Stark Bank is a financial technology company that provides services to simplify and automate digital banking, by providing APIs to perform operations such as payments and transfers. In addition, Stark Bank maintains a number of cryptographic libraries to perform cryptographic signing and verification. These popular libraries are meant to…

NCC Group’s global Cyber Incident Response Team has observed an increase in Clop ransomware victims in the past weeks. The surge can be traced back to a vulnerability in SolarWinds Serv-U that is being abused by the TA505 threat actor. TA505 is a known cybercrime threat actor, who is known…

by Robert C. Seacord The cutoff for new feature proposals for the next C Language Standard (C23) has come and gone meaning that we know some of the things that will be in the next standard and all of the things that will not be. There are still a bunch…

Category:  Detection/Reduction/Prevention Overview Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is how users of Microsoft Windows systems can get a remote desktop on systems remotely to manage one or more workstations and/or servers.  With the increase of organizations opting for remote work, so to has RDP usage over the internet increased. However, RDP was…

Outline 1. Introduction 2. How does MT19937 PRNG work? 3. Using Neural Networks to model the MT19937 PRNG 3.1 Using NN for State Twisting 3.1.1 Data Preparation 3.1.2 Neural Network Model Design 3.1.3 Optimizing the NN Inputs 3.1.4 Model Results 3.1.5 Model Deep Dive 3.1.5.1 Model First Layer Connections 3.1.5.2 The…

Outline 1. Introduction 2. How does xorshift128 PRNG work? 3. Neural Networks and XOR gates 4. Using Neural Networks to model the xorshift128 PRNG 4.1 Neural Network Model Design 4.2 Model Results 4.3 Model Deep Dive 5. Creating a machine-learning-resistant version of xorshift128 6. Conclusion 1. Introduction This blog post proposes…

In June of this year, Traficom – the Finnish transport and communications agency – along with the Aalto University, Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia, and PwC, organized the 5G Cyber Security Hack competition. A similar event was organised in November 2019 in Oulu, Finland and this hackathon-style event was a follow-up to…

We present here a new construction which has no real immediate usefulness, but is a good illustration of a fundamental concept of cryptography, namely that there is a great difference between knowing that some mathematical object exists, and being able to build it in practice. Thus, this construction can be…

Among the variety of penetration testing engagements NCC Group delivers, some – often within the gaming industry – require performing the assignment in a blackbox fashion against an obfuscated binary, and the client’s priorities revolve more around evaluating the strength of their obfuscation against content protection violations, rather than exercising…

If you have ever looked at fuzzing in any depth you will quickly realize it’s not as trivial as it first appears. There are many different types of fuzzers, but here we are focused on network fuzzers.  These fuzzers are of particular interest as they are most suited to fuzzing…

Author: Jelle Vergeer This blog will be a technical deep-dive into CyberArk credential files and how the credentials stored in these files are encrypted and decrypted. I discovered it was possible to reverse engineer the encryption and key generation algorithms and decrypt the encrypted vault password. I also provide a…

Summary When connecting to the UPF port for the PFCP protocol (8805) and sending an Association Setup Request followed by a Session Establishment Request with a PDI Network Instance set to ‘internet’, it causes a stack corruption to occur. Impact Exploitation of this vulnerability would lead to denial of service…

There has been a lot of development lately in the field of health credentials, especially in the field of vaccine credentials. This has largely been driven by a perceived need to track and validate an individual’s vaccination status with respect to COVID-19. This post attempts to explore the security and…

Last month, the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a Cybersecurity Technical Report (CTR) detailing the security hardening they recommend be applied to Kubernetes clusters, which is available here. The guidance the document contains is generally reasonable, but there are several points…

This month, members of NCC Group will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Javed Samuel, “Overview of Open-Source Cryptography Vulnerabilities”, to be presented at the International Cryptographic Module Conference 2021 (Virtual – Sept 3 2021) Robert Seacord, “Secure Coding”, to be presented at Auto ISAC Analysts (Virtual –…

tl;dr NFC tags are becoming increasingly more common in everyday use cases such as:  Public spaces like museums, art galleries or even retail stores in order to provide additional information about an item or product.  Inventory management sites use NFC tags on product packaging to update information on its contents. …

Category:  Reduction/Prevention Overview Document macros have gone in and out of style since 1995 as a deployment method for malware. Netskope’s latest ‘Cloud and Threat Report: July 2021 Edition’ points out that in Q2 of 2021, Microsoft Office macros accounted for 43% of malicious Office document downloads, compared to just…

Having been in the game of auditing kprobe-based tracers for the past couple of years, and in light of this upcoming DEF CON on eBPF tracer race conditions (which you should go watch) being given by a friend of mine from the NYU(-Poly) (OSIR)IS(IS) lab, I figured I would wax…

Background For some time there has been a growing movement amongst consumers who wish to repair their own devices in a cost effective manner, motivated to reduce their expenses, and reduce e-waste. This is becoming ever more difficult to achieve as devices reach ever higher levels of complexity, and include…

Authors: Jeremy Boone, Sultan Qasim Khan In the previous blog post we described a set of software-based fault injection countermeasures. However, we recognize that software-based mitigations are not a silver bullet and do have several drawbacks. Though they can frustrate an attacker and reduce the reliability of an exploit attempt,…

This post contains various C functions, macros and programming patterns that can be used to achieve double glitch resistance within software. By “double glitch resistance”, we mean that skipping or incorrect evaluation of any two instructions should not be able to induce incorrect entry to the protected side of a…

This blog post is the first in a series on the topic of fault injection, also known as glitching. This first post covers the basic principles of fault injection – types of glitches, their effects, and how an attacker can characterize hardware and firmware to achieve a successful glitch. In later posts we will…

by Robert C. Seacord Memory Safety Reliably-checked Strings is a library binding I created that uses static array extents to improve diagnostics that can help identify memory safety flaws. This is part of broader initiative in the C Standards Committee to improve bounds checking for array types. See my blog…

Unauthorised access to data is a primary concern of clients who commission a Salesforce assessment. The Salesforce documentation acknowledges that the sharing model is a “complex relationship between role hierarchies, user permissions, sharing rules, and exceptions for certain situations”[1]. It is often said that complexity and security are natural enemies.…

tl:dr Incremental Learning is an extremely useful machine learning paradigm for deriving insight into cyber security datasets. This post provides a simple example involving JA3 hashes showing how some of the foundational algorithms that enable incremental learning techniques can be applied to novelty detection (the first time something has happened)…

More and more applications we test are implementing some form of two-factor authentication (2FA, sometimes known as multi-factor authentication or MFA). This post provides a whirlwind tour of common 2FA mechanisms and detailed information on testing them. How does 2FA Work? The general concept behind two-factor authentication is the pairing…

This is the first blog post in a new code-centric series about selected optimizations found in pairing-based cryptography. Pairing operations are foundational to the BLS Signatures [1] central to Ethereum 2.0, zero-knowledge arguments central to Zcash and Filecoin [2], and a wide variety of other emerging applications. A prior blog…

For the past few years, NCC Group has been an industry partner to the Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Intensive Science (CDT in DIS) at University College London (UCL). CDT is composed of a group of over 80 academics from across UCL in areas such as High Energy Physics,…

tl;dr The User Enrollment MDM option added with iOS 13 does not restrict MDM-deployed certificates to MDM-deployed applications, and in the absence of additional controls such as certificate pinning these certificates are, surprisingly, trusted by personally installed apps. When using User Enrollment on the organization’s Wi-Fi, it is possible for…

Component-based Software Development Supply chain security is a complex problem that needs to be solved to before we can gain confidence in the quality of the software systems we depend upon. In July 2001, Addison-Wesley Professional  published the Building Systems from Commercial Components book I coauthored with Kurt Wallnau and Scott Hissam. Building…

Authorization vulnerabilities continue to be one of the largest and most difficult to remediate classes of vulnerabilities that affect web applications. Compared to other vulnerability classes like XSS or SQL injection, there are no frameworks or design patterns which can be used to prevent authorization flaws at a fundamental level…

by fumik0_ the RIFT TL:DR Our Research and Intelligence Fusion Team have been tracking the Gozi variant RM3 for close to 30 months. In this post we provide some history, analysis and observations on this most pernicious family of banking malware targeting Oceania, the UK, Germany and Italy.  We’ll start with an overview of its origins and current operations before…

Principal Mapper, or PMapper, is a tool and library for in-depth analysis with AWS Identity and Access Management, as well as AWS Organizations. PMapper stores data about AWS accounts and organizations, then provides options to query, visualize, and analyze that data. The library, written in Python, enables users to extend…

The Single Sign-On (SSO) approach to authentication controls and identity management was quickly adopted by both organizations and large online services for its convenience and added security. The benefits are clear; for end-users, it is far easier to authenticate to a single service and gain access to all required applications.…

I gave a short talk on the Future of C Code Review at our internal (Not) NCC Con Conference this year (held virtually due to Covid-19) and recorded it for posterity. In this short talk, I focus on optimizations resulting from pointer provenance-based alias analysis that can modify the behavior…

Created by Dan Hastings and Emanuel Flores Solitude is an open source privacy analysis tool that enables you to conduct your own privacy investigations into where your private data goes once it leaves your web browser or mobile device. Whether a curious novice or a more advanced researcher, Solitude makes…

We prototyped a Windows Installer Package Canary to help detect certain first stage trade craft. The ultimate goal being to alert for those threat actors targeting security products through uninstallation.

Introduction Covenant [1] is an open source .NET command and control framework to support Red Team operations, similar in many ways to the well-known Cobalt Strike threat emulation software. Covenant is an ASP.NET Core, cross-platform application that includes a web-based interface that allows for multi-user collaboration. It has two main…

Multiple vulnerabilities were found in Netgear ProSafe Plus JGS516PE switches that may pose a serious risk to their users. The most critical vulnerability could allow unauthenticated users to gain arbitrary code execution. The following vulnerabilities were the most relevant identified during the internal research: Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (CVE-2020-26919) NSDP…

We prototyped a Windows Service Canary to help detect and respond to certain pre-ransomware trade craft. The ultimate goal being to alert and minimize the impact of ransomware deployments.

Wubes is like Qubes but for Microsoft Windows. The idea is to leverage the Windows Sandbox technology to spawn applications in isolation. We currently support spawning a Windows Sandbox for the Firefox browser, with other applications easily added.

Current Vendor: Gigaset Vendor URL: https://www.gigaset.com/es_es/gigaset-dx600a-isdn/ Versions affected: V41.00-175.00.00-SATURN-175.00 Systems Affected: DX600A Authors: Manuel Ginés - manuel.gines[at]nccgroup[dot]com Admin Service Weak Authentication CVE Identifier: CVE-2021-25309 Risk: 8.8 (High) - AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H AT Command Buffer Overflow CVE Identifier: CVE-2021-25306 Risk: 4.5 (Medium) - AV:A/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H Summary According to the oficial documentation, the Gigaset DX600A…

Overview RFCs have played a pivotal role in helping to formalise ideas and requirements for much of the Internet’s design and engineering. They have facilitated peer review amongst engineers, researchers and computer scientists, which in turn has resulted in specification of key Internet protocols and their behaviours so that developers…

In this post, we summarize our security research findings from across the nearly 200 conference publications, blog posts, and tool releases published by researchers at NCC Group between January 1 2020 and December 31 2020. We present our findings and their impact in context, with links to the associated research…

Throughout February and March, members of NCC Group will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Jennifer Fernick (NCC Group), Rao Lakkakula (JPMorgan Chase), Christopher Robinson (Red Hat), Kay Williams (Microsoft), “Frontiers in Securing the Open Source Ecosystem,” to be presented at FOSS Backstage (Virtual – February 10-12 2021)…

We provide a technical introduction on how to leverage the Z3 Theorem Prover to reason about the correctness of cryptographic software, protocols and otherwise, and to identify potential security vulnerabilities. We cover two distinct use cases: modeling and analysis of an algorithm documented in an old version of the QUIC…

This post is about some new (or sort of new) elliptic curves for use in cryptographic protocols. They were made public in mid-December 2020, on a dedicated Web site: https://doubleodd.group/ There is also a complete whitepaper, full of mathematical demonstrations, and several implementations. Oh noes, more curves! Will this never…

Preface Half way through 2020, UK independent consumer champion Which? magazine reached out to us and asked if we could assist investigating the security of a series of domestic IoT devices and to perform a vulnerability assessment of each device. The assessments included smart plugs and smart/connected doorbells. We also…

Depthcharge v0.2.0 is now available on GitHub and PyPi. This release introduces new “configuration checker” functionality and includes some major updates intended to improve usability. A tl;dr summary can be found in the CHANGELOG file. This blog post dives a bit more into the motivations for the changes, envisioned use-cases,…

Recently, I was working on weaponizing a particular bug with a colleague. For reasons unfathomable to me, we’ve been implementing our exploit in Ruby. As part of this, we wrote a rinky-dink port scanner that attempts to find instances of the service on a given host because it has a…

This post is a technical discussion of the underlying vulnerability of CVE-2020-15257, and how it can be exploited. Our technical advisory on this issue is available here, but this post goes much further into the process that led to finding the issue, the practicalities of exploiting the vulnerability itself, various…

HTTPSignatures is a PortSwigger Burp Suite extension that implements the Signing HTTP Messages draft-ietf-httpbis-message-signatures-01 specification draft document. What motivated my creation in this tool was the lack of an easy way to test applications and services using HTTP Signatures. This extension allows Burp Suite users to seamlessly test applications that…

In this recording of a presentation by NCC Group’s Damon Small at Hou.Sec.Con in October 2020, he outlines the evolution of the Purdue Reference Model in ICS/OT security, which draws the security boundaries between users, ICS networks, and business networks, and shows the dramatic ways in which these boundaries have…

Editor’s note: Updated December 14th 2020 to include CCC presentation and December 16th 2020 to include No cON Name presentation. This month, members of NCC Group will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Jon Szymaniak, “Guiding Engineering Teams Toward a More Secure Usage of U-Boot,” to be presented…

Threat Intel Analyst: Antonis Terefos (@Tera0017)Data Scientist: Anne Postma (@A_Postma) 1. Introduction TA505 is a sophisticated and innovative threat actor, with plenty of cybercrime experience, that engages in targeted attacks across multiple sectors and geographies for financial gain. Over time, TA505 evolved from a lesser partner to a mature, self-subsisting…

Author: Jelle Vergeer Introduction A while ago we had a forensics case in which a Linux server was compromised and a modified OpenSSH binary was loaded into the memory of a webserver. The modified OpenSSH binary was used as a backdoor to the system for the attackers. The customer had…

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson invented the C Programming Language at Bell Telephone Laboratories  in 1972 [Ritchie 1993]. The C Language is a highly successful system programming language that can work with a wide range of computing hardware and architectures. Nearly 50 years later, C remains as vital and popular…

This month, members of NCC Group will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Sourya Biswas, “Cybersecurity is War: Lessons from Historical Conflicts,” to be presented at BSidesCT (Virtual – November 14 2020) Ian Coldwater (Independent), Duffie Cooley, Brad Geesaman (Darkbit), and Rory McCune (NCC Group), “Keynote: SIG-Honk AMA…

Current Vendor: Jitsi Vendor URL: https://jitsi.org Versions affected: 1.x.x Systems Affected: Jitsi Meet Electron Authors: Robert Wessen robert[dot]wessen[at]nccgroup[dot]com CVE Identifier: CVE-2020-27162 Risk: 8.3 (High) – AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H Summary Jitsi is an open source online communication suite. It includes a variety of audio, video, text and screen sharing capabilities. Both server, client,…

Current Vendor: Jitsi Vendor URL: https://jitsi.org Versions affected: 1.x.x Systems Affected: Jitsi Meet Electron Authors: Robert Wessen robert[dot]wessen[at]nccgroup[dot]com CVE Identifier: CVE-2020-27161 Risk: 5.3 (Medium) AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N Summary Impact Jitsi Meet Electron includes apparent debugging code which ignores certificate validation errors, and therefore allows for man-in-the-middle attacks against limited, specially named Jitsi…

Current Vendor: Belkin Vendor URL: https://www.linksys.com/sg/p/P-WRT160NL/ Versions affected: Latest FW version - 1.0.04 build 2 (FW_WRT160NL_1.0.04.002_US_20130619_code.bin) Systems Affected: Linksys WRT160NL (maybe others) Authors: Diego Gómez Marañón – Diego.GomezMaranon[at]nccgroup[dot]com CVE Identifier: CVE-2020-26561 Risk: 8.8 (High) – AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H Summary The Linksys WRT160NL is a switch device initially owned by Cisco and, after…

This research was conducted by our intern Ilya Zhuravlev, who has returned to school but will be rejoining our team after graduation, and was advised by Jeremy Boone of NCC Group’s Hardware Embedded Systems Practice. With the advent of affordable toolchains, such as ChipWhisperer, fault injection is no longer an…

NCC Group is today releasing three months of honeypot web traffic data related to the F5 CVE-2020-5902 and Citrix CVE-2020-8193, CVE-2020-8195 and CVE-2020-8196 exploitation events from earlier in 2020. Our objective is to enable all threat intelligence researchers to gain further understanding and contribute back to the community.

With Coronavirus still active across the world, life is far from settled, but the uptake of remote working is surely here to stay. From a security standpoint, organisations[1] may feel less comfortable at the moment simply because staff are working out of sight. Whether that feeling is justified will depend…

This month, members of NCC Group will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Dirk-Jan Mollema, “Walking Your Dog in Multiple Forests: Breaking AD Trust Boundaries through Kerberos Vulnerabilities,” to be presented at Black Hat Asia 2020 (Virtual – October 1 2020) Sanne Maasakkers, “Improve Security Awareness Campaigns by…

by Nicolas Guigo ICPin is an Intel pintool leveraging the framework’s JIT mode designed to track a binary’s integrity checks. It records all reads and all writes performed by the target executable or dynamically loaded library on its text section and outputs a human readable text file describing each memory…

Elliptic curves are commonly used to implement asymmetric cryptographic operations such as key exchange and signatures. These operations are used in many places, in particular to initiate secure network connections within protocols such as TLS and Noise. However, they are relatively expensive in terms of computing resources, especially for low-end…

Summary: Lansweeper is an application that gathers hardware and software information of computers and other devices on a computer network for management and compliance and audit purposes. The application also encompasses a ticket based help desk system and capabilities for software updates on target devices. Location: http://[LANSWEEPER_URL]/configuration/HelpdeskUsers/HelpdeskusersActions.aspx Impact: An attacker…

Introduction In recent years, the gaming industry has grown significantly, especially casino games and sports betting. Online casinos consolidate their position as one of the main sources of entertainment in many countries worldwide, which evidently involves a notable rise in their turnover. For instance, in Spain alone, the gaming industry…

In this post we explore how to use the extensible nature of Thinkst Canary to build a high interaction honeypot.

This month, NCC Group researchers will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Rami McCarthy, “AWS Security: Easy Wins and Enterprise Scale,” to be presented at BSides Boston (Virtual – September 26 2020) Dirk-Jan Mollema, “Walking Your Dog in Multiple Forests: Breaking AD Trust Boundaries through Kerberos Vulnerabilities,” to…

KaiOS is a mobile operating system, forked from the discontinued Firefox OS, in which all the mobile applications running on a KaiOS-based mobile device are built using web technologies, such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. In this independent research project, we demonstrate that six of the pre-installed mobile applications are…

wolfSSL is a C-language-based SSL/TLS library targeted at IoT, embedded, and RTOS environments. wolfSSL incorrectly implements the TLS 1.3 client state machine. This allows attackers in a privileged network position to completely impersonate any TLS 1.3 servers and read or modify potentially sensitive information between clients using the wolfSSL library…

Multiple HTML injection vulnerabilities were found in several KaiOS mobile applications that are pre-installed on KaiOS mobile devices. The following vulnerabilities affected multiple KaiOS mobile devices: KaiOS Email Application HTML Injection (CVE-2019-14756) KaiOS Contacts Application HTML Injection (CVE-2019-14757) KaiOS File Manager Application HTML Injection (CVE-2019-14758) KaiOS Recorder Application HTML Injection…

In December 2019 we launched this new technical security research blog site. As part of its launch we had cause to revisit our old blog website and found a myriad of forgotten whitepapers and conference presentations spanning NCC Group’s history (formation in 1999). Deeply nested on our old blog site…

This is the last of three code-centric blog posts on pairing based cryptography. Support for these operations in an Ethereum precompiled contract has been proposed [1], and support for a related pairing configuration in precompiled contracts is already in operation [2, 3]. The first post [4] covered modular arithmetic, finite…

Yesterday, the Microsoft Security Response Center announced their Most Valuable Security Researchers for 2020 (MVRs). This honour, awarded annually by Microsoft during Black Hat USA, is a part of MSRC’s Researcher Recognition program, and recognizes the top security researchers globally based upon the volume, accuracy, and impact of their vulnerability…

Preface During the Covid-19 pandemic, the battle to secure and protect businesses as well as consumers changed from the office environment to our homes, but this did not stop us from working on research projects aimed at contributing to the creation of a safer online world. Working from home, this…

This month, NCC Group researchers will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Dirk-Jan Mollema, “ROADtools and ROADrecon,” to be presented at Black Hat USA 2020 (Virtual – August 1-6 2020) Chris Nevin, “Carnivore: Microsoft External Attack Tool” to be presented at Black Hat USA 2020 (Virtual – August…

by George Osterweil Winstrument is a modular framework built on top of Frida designed to help testers reverse engineer Windows applications and assess their attack surface. Motivation Winstrument is built on top of Frida, a powerful dynamic instrumentation framework which aids reverse engineering and debugging by injecting into a process…

Depthcharge is an extensible Python 3 toolkit designed to aid security researchers when analyzing a customized, product-specific build of the U-Boot bootloader. This blog post details the motivations for Depthcharge’s creation, highlights some key features, and exemplifies its use in a “tethered jailbreak” of a smart speaker that leverages secure…

Vendor: TP-Link Vendor URL: https://www.tp-link.com/uk/ Versions affected: 1.7.0 Systems Affected: Tapo C200 Author: Dale Pavey Risk: High Summary: The device is vulnerable to the heartbleed vulnerability and a Pass-the-Hash attack. Impact: Successfully exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability leads to the device being remotely taken over using the memory-leaked user hash and…

This is the second of three code-centric blog posts on pairing based cryptography. The first post [1] covered modular arithmetic, finite fields, the embedding degree, and presented an implementation of a 12-degree prime extension field tower. The series will ultimately conclude with a detailed review of the popular BLS12-381 pairing…

OAuth is the widely used standard for access delegation, enabling many of the “Sign in with X” buttons and “Connect your Calendar” features of modern Internet software. OAuth 2.0 is the most common and recent version of this specification, which defines four grant types (as well as various extensions), specifically…

A local macOS user or process may be able to modify or replace files executed by Installer. This could allow a low-privileged user or process to gain arbitrary code execution with root privileges, effectively leading to a full system compromise.

The secure generation of parameters for zk-SNARKs is a crucial step in the trustworthiness of the resulting proof system. By highlighting some potential pitfalls and important security considerations of these implementations, NCC Group hopes to provide helpful pointers to all implementers and avoid the introduction of vulnerabilities detrimental to the…

Authors: Nikolaos Pantazopoulos, Stefano Antenucci (@Antelox), Michael Sandee and in close collaboration with NCC’s RIFT. About the Research and Intelligence Fusion Team (RIFT):RIFT leverages our strategic analysis, data science, and threat hunting capabilities to create actionable threat intelligence, ranging from IOCs and detection capabilities to strategic reports on tomorrow’s threat…

Introduction A month ago, we released a new tool that made it possible to tunnel traffic over an existing Remote Desktop Connection without the need to alter the configuration of the environment. This tool enables penetration testers to conduct their assessments over Windows-based jump boxes. Remote Access technologies are quite…

This vulnerability applied to a 5 year old end of life version of CobaltStrike and is being published in the spirit of archaeological interest in the vulnerability. tl;dr This blog looks at some of the communication and encryption internals of Cobalt Strike between Beacons and the Team Server in the…

Vendor: ARM Vendor URL: https://os.mbed.com/ Versions affected: Prior to 5.15.2 Systems Affected: ARM Mbed OS Author: Ilya Zhuravlev Risk: High Summary: The ARM Mbed operating system contains a USB Mass Storage driver (USBMD), which allows emulation of a mass storage device over USB. This driver contains a three (3) memory…

Publicly discovered in late April 2020, the Team9 malware family (also known as ‘Bazar’) appears to be a new malware being developed by the group behind Trickbot. Even though the development of the malware appears to be recent, the developers have already developed two components with rich functionality. The purpose…

This blog post provides an overview of cheating and anti-cheat methods in electronic games. NCC Group has previously looked at cheating, and found ways to bypass anti-cheat, but this is more of an overview. It doesn’t contain details on particular games or companies. Cheats are specific to individual games and…

Using a carefully crafted calendar event, an attacker can retrieve semi-arbitrary files from a target victim’s macOS system, all the victim has to do is click on an invite.

Authors: Jeremy Boone, Ilya Zhuravlev Over the years, NCC Group has audited countless embedded devices for our customers. Through these security assessments, we have observed that IoT devices are typically built using a hodgepodge of chipset vendor board support packages (BSP), bootloaders, SDKs, and an established Real Time Operating System…

The fifth and final blog posts exploring the detailed exploitation of CVE-2018-8611.

The fourth of five blog posts exploring the detailed exploitation of CVE-2018-8611.

Introduction The rise of endpoint protection and the use of mobile operating systems has created additional challenges when targeting corporate users with phishing payloads designed to execute code on their endpoint device. Credential capture campaigns offer an alternative chance to leverage remote working solutions such as VPNs or Desktop Gateways…

Introduction Recently we came across a class of vulnerability that was discovered some time ago yet is not very well known, despite the potential impact of its discovery and exploitation being critical. During the (re)discovery of this type of bug we managed to get a privileged shell on a Linux-based…

The third of five blog posts exploring the detailed exploitation of CVE-2018-8611.

Introduction Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is used to create an interactive session on a remote Windows machine. This is a widely used protocol mostly used by Administrators to remotely access the resources of the operating system or network based services. As penetration testers we frequently find ourselves in a situation…

This post explores the potential abuse of some features within the macOS Calendar application. It covers multiple attack paths that could lead to code execution and discusses the protections Apple has in place to mitigate them.

The second of five blog posts exploring the detailed exploitation of CVE-2018-8611.

This post is about elliptic curves as they are used in cryptography, in particular for signatures. There are many ways to define specific elliptic curves that strive to offer a good balance between security and performance; here, I am talking about specific contributions of mine: a new curve definition, and…

The first of five blog posts exploring the detailed exploitation of CVE-2018-8611.

On November 25th, AWS released the Ramp-Up Learning Guide for AWS Cloud Security, Governance, and Compliance. The Security Ramp-Up is a curated list of educational AWS resources. The goal is “to teach in-demand cloud skills and real-world knowledge that you can rely on to keep up with cloud security, governance,…

Summary This post describes some of the most common design patterns for authorization checking in web application code. Comparisons are made between the design patterns to help understand when each pattern makes sense as well as the drawbacks of the pattern. For developers and architects, this post helps you to…

When ordering a product or service online, it’s fairly common to get a confirmation email from the provider, often with a link where you can view details of your order. This is all very helpful, but have you ever considered whether the link you can follow is secure, or if…

On April 10, Apple and Google announced1, 2 that they were joining forces in an effort to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. Their solution leverages Bluetooth technology to trace interactions between individuals. This principle is known as contact tracing and public health agencies are heavily relying on it to…

One of the current research priorities for NCC Group is smart cities. We perceive that in the future substantial investment will be made into deploying intelligent sensor systems into our cities: initially the focus being on passive applications, gathering and collecting data, but potentially in future leading to more active…

[Editor’s Note: Robert Seacord of NCC Group is a longstanding member of the C Standards Committee. In this blog post, he outlines a recently adopted change he proposed to the C Language Standard, to help eliminate double-free vulnerabilities being introduced to C code as a result of zero-sized reallocations of…

Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs) have recently seen a strong surge in popularity due to their usefulness in blockchain applications. Earlier I wrote about what VRFs are, where they can be used, and a few dozen things to consider when reviewing them. In this follow-on blog post, I am pleased to…

tl;dr 1,300 phishing campaigns were analysed involving over 360,000 users Targets in Charities to be over 3 times more likely to click than the Health Sector However once clicked half of all targets were likely to supply credentials regardless Best case 1/10 of targets will click a link Best case…

DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is a new protocol to perform DNS resolution over HTTPS. It has been in the news recently as Google and Mozilla have both implemented DoH in Chrome and Firefox respectively. DoH encrypts DNS traffic using HTTPS. This prevents internet service providers and anybody in a privileged…

By Aleksandar Kircanski and Terence Tarvis A good amount of effort has been dedicated to surveying and systematizing Ethereum smart contract security bug classes. There is, however, a gap in literature when it comes to surveying implementation-level security bugs that commonly occur in basic PoW blockchain node implementations, discovered during…

Running smart contracts in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) such as Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to preserve the confidentiality of blockchain transactions is