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A Tale Of Two Pwnies (Part 2)

2012 Jun 11, 6:39

Summary of one of the Chrome security exploits from pwn2own.  Basically XSS into the chrome URI scheme which gives access to special APIs.

PermalinkCommentstechnical browser web-browser security xss

Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists | Ars Technica

2012 Jun 7, 9:12

So this is another Stuxnet by Israel/US?

The analysis reinforces theories that researchers from Kaspersky Lab, CrySyS Lab, and Symantec published almost two weeks ago. Namely, Flame could only have been developed with the backing of a wealthy nation-state. … “It’s not a garden-variety collision attack, or just an implementation of previous MD5 collisions papers—which would be difficult enough,” Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins University, told Ars. “There were mathematicians doing new science to make Flame work.”

PermalinkCommentstechnical security web internet md5 cryptography flame

Stuxnet Explained - Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

2012 Jun 1, 4:57

From his first months in office, President Obamasecretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

PermalinkCommentssecurity politics iran nuclear virus

IAmA a malware coder and botnet operator, AMA (reddit.com)

2012 May 11, 10:19

Very interesting - both technically as well as looking into the moral justifications the botnet operator provides. But equally interesting  is the discussion on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960034. Especially the discussion on the Verified by Visa (3D Secure) system and how the goal is basically to move liability onto the consumer and off of the merchant or credit card company.

PermalinkCommentstechnical security botnet credit-card

We never recovered the bicycle, of course. The lock itself...

2012 May 11, 6:28


We never recovered the bicycle, of course. The lock itself wasn’t attacked at all, as you can see.

PermalinkCommentstechnical moral-of-the-story security via-ericlaw lock

The Lazy Man's URL Parsing (joezimjs.com)

2012 May 7, 12:41

Web apps really make obvious the lack of URI APIs in the DOM or JavaScript.  This blog post goes over using DOM API side effects to resolve relative URIs and parse URIs.  An additonal benefit of this mechanism is that you avoid security issues caused by mismatched behavior between the browser’s URI parsing and your app’s URI parsing.

PermalinkCommentstechnical uri api dom browser hack url web-browser

Google Chrome - Fuzzing for Security

2012 Apr 26, 3:09

Overview of Google’s fuzzing security practices for Chrome.

PermalinkCommentstechnical security fuzz fuzzing chrome web-browser browser google

Hotel Wifi JavaScript Injection (justinsomnia.org)

2012 Apr 5, 3:23

In short, Marriott is injecting JavaScript into the HTML of every webpage its hotel customers view for the purpose of injecting ads (and in the meantime, breaking YouTube).

PermalinkCommentstechnical css html security web internet javascript injection

“Zero-day” exploit sales should be key point in cybersecurity debate

2012 Mar 30, 2:40

Intro to the world of the 0day exploit market.

PermalinkCommentssecurity technical 0day internet

Understanding Enhanced Protected Mode

2012 Mar 23, 1:18

Eric Lawrence describes the new security features of IE10.

PermalinkCommentstechnical ie10 security ie web-browser eric-lawrence

Dave Weston on security best practices in Win8 HTML Metro Apps.

2012 Mar 14, 9:29PermalinkCommentssecurity technical video david-weston wwa win8 programming html javascript

Alternate IPv4 Forms - URI Host Syntax Notes

2012 Mar 14, 4:30

By the URI RFC there is only one way to represent a particular IPv4 address in the host of a URI. This is the standard dotted decimal notation of four bytes in decimal with no leading zeroes delimited by periods. And no leading zeros are allowed which means there's only one textual representation of a particular IPv4 address.

However as discussed in the URI RFC, there are other forms of IPv4 addresses that although not officially allowed are generally accepted. Many implementations used inet_aton to parse the address from the URI which accepts more than just dotted decimal. Instead of dotted decimal, each dot delimited part can be in decimal, octal (if preceded by a '0') or hex (if preceded by '0x' or '0X'). And that's each section individually - they don't have to match. And there need not be 4 parts: there can be between 1 and 4 (inclusive). In case of less than 4, the last part in the string represents all of the left over bytes, not just one.

For example the following are all equivalent:

192.168.1.1
Standard dotted decimal form
0300.0250.01.01
Octal
0xC0.0XA8.0x1.0X1
Hex
192.168.257
Fewer parts
0300.0XA8.257
All of the above

The bread and butter of URI related security issues is when one part of the system disagrees with another about the interpretation of the URI. So this non-standard, non-normal form syntax has been been a great source of security issues in the past. Its mostly well known now (CreateUri normalizes these non-normal forms to dotted decimal), but occasionally a good tool for bypassing naive URI blocking systems.

PermalinkCommentsurl inet_aton uri technical host programming ipv4

Cursor:none abuse (trick users into clicking Facebook 'like') (co.uk)

2012 Mar 6, 7:19

Cursor spoofing. Great job!

PermalinkCommentstechnical javascript css html cursor security

(via Taxi-window sticker: our security stinks and your credit...

2012 Feb 15, 5:14


(via Taxi-window sticker: our security stinks and your credit card will be sniffed)

Don’t you have to meet some minimum security requirements to process credit card transactions?

PermalinkCommentshumor credit-card security

Hacking Google for Fun and Profit (andrewcantino.com)

2011 Dec 28, 5:34

First hand account of security researcher reporting security issues to Google and details on the security issues.

PermalinkCommentstechnical google security csrf

Sprint loaded spyware on its Android phones

2011 Nov 30, 4:22

“TechCrunch and others are reporting that a program called “Carrier IQ” that comes pre-installed on Sprint phones has some pretty amazing spyware capabilities, right down to keylogging everything you do on the phone.”

PermalinkCommentstechnical cell-phone privacy security

"HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)" - Jeff Hodges, Collin Jackson, Adam Barth

2011 Nov 14, 5:28PermalinkCommentstechnical https ietf

Eric Lawrence and Adam Barth on Strict-Transport-Security

2011 Aug 22, 9:27PermalinkCommentshttps http http-header technical strict-transport-security browser

Telex

2011 Jul 18, 2:38Neat idea: "When the user wants to visit a blacklisted site, the client establishes an encrypted HTTPS connection to a non-blacklisted web server outside the censor’s network, which could be a normal site that the user regularly visits... The client secretly marks the connection as a Telex request by inserting a cryptographic tag into the headers. We construct this tag using a mechanism called public-key steganography... As the connection travels over the Internet en route to the non-blacklisted site, it passes through routers at various ISPs in the core of the network. We envision that some of these ISPs would deploy equipment we call Telex stations."PermalinkCommentsinternet security tools censorship technical

LulzSec manifesto: "We screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction"

2011 Jun 20, 2:09"Why did the hackers at Lulz Security ("LulzSec") invade Sony Pictures websites, take down cia.gov, and release 60,000+ e-mail addresses and passwords? For the lulz, of course—but what might look lulzy to one person could certainly enrage another. In honor of its 1,000th tweet, the witty wankers of LulzSec released a manifesto of sorts, defending their actions to the angry Internets."PermalinkCommentsinternet security privacy hack technical
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