Reducing Vulnerabilities at Scale

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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)…

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…

Jenkins is an open source tool supporting building, deploying and automating software development and delivery, and can be extended by plugins to introduce additional functionalities like Active Directory authentication, or solve reoccurring tasks such as executing a static code analyser or copying a compiled software to a CIFS share. Similar…

Because finding bugs is 1337, but fixing them is 31337… Background to Fix Bounty The concept of “Fix Bounty” came about from conversations with colleagues on how there’s often little to no reward for providing security fixes to vulnerabilities found in open source software. Open source projects can differ greatly…

Introduction We’ve seen a sharp rise in the last five years or so in the amount of security assurance and research activities we’re asked to undertake in the embedded system space. This has naturally led us to working increasingly with the Internet of Things (IoT) in a variety of different…