North American Research

This executable blog post is the fourth in a series related to machine learning and is a fascinating trifecta involving hardened cryptography software, embedded IoT-type hardware, and deep machine learning techniques. While the AES algorithm is designed such that a brute-force secret key guessing attack would likely finish ‘sometime near…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

[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…

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 a novel and not widely understood technique. In this blog post, we point out several bug classes that we observed in confidential smart contract designs and…

Istio is a service mesh, which, in general, exist as a compliment to container orchestrators (e.g. Kubernetes) in order to provide additional, service-centric features surrounding traffic management, security, and observability. Istio is arguably the most popular service mesh (using GitHub stars as a metric). This blog post assumes working familiarity…

While Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs) were first described just over twenty years ago [1], they have recently seen a strong resurgence in popularity due to their usefulness in blockchain applications [2]. This blog post will introduce VRFs in the context of other well-known cryptographic primitives, describe three example use cases,…

By Sultan Qasim Khan Microcontrollers commonly include features to prevent the readout of sensitive information in internal storage. Such features are commonly referred to as readback protection or readout protection. This paper describes common readback protection implementation flaws, discusses techniques that can be used to defeat readback protection, and provides…

This blog post describes my history with the C Standards Committee, the work standards organizations are currently doing in software security, and the future of NCC Group’s work in improving software security by working with the C Standards Committee and other standardzation efforts. Past I became involved with the C…

By Eric Schorn An introduction to elliptic curve cryptography theory alongside a practical implementation in Erlang. This whitepaper may be downloaded below.

On Saturday, February 1st, I gave my talk titled “Command and KubeCTL: Real-World Kubernetes Security for Pentesters” at Shmoocon 2020. I’m following up with this post that goes into more details than I could cover in 50 minutes. This will re-iterate the points I attempted to make, walk through the…

Summary: PlaySMS is an open source SMS gateway, which has a web management portal written in PHP. PlaySMS supports a custom PHP templating system, called tpl (https://github.com/antonraharja/tpl). PlaySMS double processes a server-side template, resulting in unauthenticated user control of input to the PlaySMS template engine. The template engine’s implementation then…

Several months ago, I was having a poke at the Mozilla WebThings IoT gateway. The gateway essentially allows a user to host their own IoT cloud from a device (such as a Raspberry Pi) on their local network. It creates a tunnel to a personal subdomain of mozilla-iot.org for managing…

This month, members of NCC Group will be giving the following 6 conference presentations: Mark Manning, “Command and KubeCTL: Real-World Kubernetes Security for Pentesters” presented at Shmoocon (Washington, DC – January 31-February 2 2020) Clint Gibler, “How to 10X Your Company’s Security (Without a Series D),” presented at BSidesSF (San Francisco, CA…

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…

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…

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

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…

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…