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, Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, … Continue reading Research Paper – Machine Learning for Static Malware Analysis, with University College London
Category: Whitepaper
Whitepaper – Exploring the Security of KaiOS Mobile Applications
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 vulnerable to remote, and local, … Continue reading Whitepaper – Exploring the Security of KaiOS Mobile Applications
Cyber Security of New Space Paper
NCC Group's Transport Security Practice has co-authored with the Surrey Center for Cyber Security and the Surrey Space Center a new paper titled 'Cyber security in New Space'. It provides analysis of the threats, challenges and key technologies related to the satellite industry.
Research Report – Zephyr and MCUboot Security Assessment
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 (RTOS) such as Mbed or FreeRTOS. However, we have recently … Continue reading Research Report – Zephyr and MCUboot Security Assessment
Whitepaper – Coinbugs: Enumerating Common Blockchain Implementation-Level Vulnerabilities
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 the first decade of Bitcoin’s … Continue reading Whitepaper – Coinbugs: Enumerating Common Blockchain Implementation-Level Vulnerabilities
Whitepaper – Microcontroller Readback Protection: Bypasses and Defenses
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 guidance to implement effective readback … Continue reading Whitepaper – Microcontroller Readback Protection: Bypasses and Defenses
Whitepaper – A Tour of Curve 25519 in Erlang
By Eric Schorn An introduction to elliptic curve cryptography theory alongside a practical implementation in Erlang. This whitepaper may be downloaded below. A Tour of Curve25519 in ErlangDownload
Exploiting the win32k!xxxEnableWndSBArrows use-after-free (CVE-2015-0057) bug on both 32-bit and 64-bit
tl;dr Earlier this year I worked on an exploit for an interesting use-after-free vulnerability in win32k.sys (CVE-2015-0057) and was able to develop a reliable exploit on both 32-bit and 64-bit, affecting XP through Windows 8.1 (with a few exceptions). This writeup describes in detail how I approached exploitation on both architectures, which ended up being … Continue reading Exploiting the win32k!xxxEnableWndSBArrows use-after-free (CVE-2015-0057) bug on both 32-bit and 64-bit
Understanding Ransomware
Our Cyber Defence Operations team, led by David Cannings, has published a new whitepaper on understanding ransomware. It looks at the impact, evolution and defensive strategies that can be employed by organisations. While the paper is primarily focused on Microsoft Windows due to the historic prevalence and devastating impact on ransomware on this platform, it … Continue reading Understanding Ransomware
Whitepaper – XML Schema, DTD, and Entity Attacks: A Compendium of Known Techniques
by Timothy D. Morgan and Omar Al Ibrahim The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is an extremely pervasive technology used in countless software projects. A core feature of XML is the ability to define and validate document structure using schemas and document type definitions (DTDs). When used incorrectly, certain aspects of these document definition and validation … Continue reading Whitepaper – XML Schema, DTD, and Entity Attacks: A Compendium of Known Techniques