Category Archives: Hack

My preferred papers at Black Hat 2019

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I attended the briefings at Black Hat 2019.  All the presentations I attended were engaging.  Nevertheless, here is the feedback on my preferred ones.  The link gives access to the corresponding slid decks.

A Decade After Bleichenbacher ’06, RSA Signature Forgery Still Works (Sze Yiu Chau)

One of the mitigations to Bleichenbacher’s attack is that the exponent d should be large. Unfortunately, in some standards d is still small, typically 3.  But even with larger exponents, forgery is possible due to vulnerable software.

Forgery uses the fact that many verifiers do not check garbage, parameter lengths, and padding.

He provides a list of vulnerable libraries (that are now fixed).

Lessons:

  • Check everything. No corner cutting.
  • Parsing in security should be bulletproof.  The complexity of the structures and syntax may become an issue.  Complexity is the enemy of security.

Lessons from 3 years of crypto and blockchain audit (Jean-Philippe Aumasson)

Jean Philippe is a Kudelski Security expert. 

He provides a view of most deployed mistakes.  Most are well known.  A few ones that I liked:

  • Weak key derivation from a password. Use a real derivation function.
  • Avoid using panic if the error is not unrecoverable, else it may become a potential DoS.
  • No way to erase securely sensitive memory with garbage collection (for Instance, go)

His preferred language for crypto is Rust.

The slide deck is an excellent refresher of what not to do.  Practitioners should have a look.

Breaking Encrypted Databases: Generic Attacks on Range Queries (Marie-Sarah Lacharite)

She presented how to use access pattern leakage and volume attack leakage to guess the content of the database even if encrypted.

Independently of the provided attacks, the researcher reminded that if using a common encryption key (and same IV) with server-side encryption, it is still possible to perform a range query because the same cleartext generates the same ciphertext.  This may be a PII issue. 

There are some partial solutions to this problem:

  • Order preserving encryption solves the issue
  • Order revealing encryption is even better

Pattern leakages measure the number of returned records per request. She used PQ trees to rebuild the order of the observed answer of access pattern. For N values in the database, N log N queries were needed.

Volume leakage is easier because the attacker may just monitor the communication. For N values in the database, N2 log N of observed queries are needed.

Some possible mitigations:

  • Restricting query types
  • Dummy records
  • Dummy values

The two last solutions may introduce some accuracy issues if not filtered out.

Everybody be Cool, This is a Robbery! (Gabriel Campana, Jean-Baptiste Bédrune)

The studied the actual security of Hardware Security Modules (HSM).  HSMs are rarely studied because they are expensive and if attacked they will erase secret.

They used the PKCS11 API.

The targeted HSM used an old version of LINUX (10-year-old). Furthermore, every process runs as root, and there was NO secure boot.  Attackers used fuzzing to find 14 vulnerabilities.  Exploiting a few of them, they could get access to the private root key!

Lesson:

Hardware Tamper Resistance and controlled API are not enough.  The software should assume that the enclave has been breached and be protected correspondingly. 

Breaking Samsung’s ARM TrustZone (Maxime Peterlin, Alexandre Adamski, Joffrey Guilbon)

Samsung’s Trustzone works only on Samsung chip Exonis and not Qualcomm’s Snapdragon

The secure OS is Kinibi by Trustonics.

Once more, adversaries used a fuzzier (AFL-based)

Currently, the trustlet has no ASLR and PIE (Position Independent Executable). They used buffer overflow on the trustlet and a trusted vulnerable driver to go inside the Trustzone. From there,  they attacked mmap for accessing Kinibi.

They were able to read and write memory arbitrarily. For instance, they accessed the master key both from EL3 and from EL1.  With the master key, the attacker has access to all the secrets in the Trustzone.

Lesson:

Once more, protect code within the secure enclave.  Defense in depth is critical.

Biometric Vein Recognition Hacked

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Biometric vein recognition is considered with iris recognition as the most secure biometrics system. Vein recognition is used in highly secure areas. Automatic Telling Machines starts to use this technology with, for instance in Japan. This statement was valid until December 2018. At the famous German Chaos Communication Congress (35c3), Krissler Ian, also known as Starbug, and Albrecht Julian demonstrated a method (German video) to create a lure hand that defeats commercial systems.

Starbug is a well known hacker in the field of biometrics. For instance, in 2016, he faked successfully the fingerprints of a German minister using high resolution captured photos.

For about 20 years, vein recognition is mainly a Japanese technology. Fujitsu and Hitachi are the two leaders. The network of veins is captured either by reflection from the palm or through transparency with Infra Red (IR) light for fingers. The captured network is turned into minutiae like a typical fingerprint.

The capture phase seems rather simple. The researchers removed the IR filter of a traditional high-end DSLR camera (in that case, Nikon D600) with good lenses. They were able to get a proper capture up to 6 meters with a flash. They also built a raspberry-based system that could be hidden into a device, for instance, a hand-dry-blower. The captured image is processed via a python script to generate a skeleton of the network of veins (as illustrated by the figure below).

Once the skeleton available, they build a fake hand (or finger) using bee wax. The fake hand covers the printed picture. They tried many different materials, but the wax presented the best performance concerning transparency and diffraction of IR light, in other words, it better emulated skin.

Once the fake hand available, the attacker has to use it on the detector. They performed a live demonstration. The demonstration highlighted that the lighting conditions were critical. The strong lighting of the scene spoiled the demonstration, and they had to shade the detector to success. On the other hand, the fake finger detection went on smoothly. The detector was a kind of tunnel. At the time of the presentation, Hitachi and Fujitsu did not have yet reacted.

The attacked detectors had no liveliness detection. As I highlighted in section 7.4.2 of “Ten Laws for Security,” detecting the presence of a real living being behind the captured biometrics is necessarily for robust systems. Unfortunately, such detection increases the complexity and cost of detectors.

Conclusion: Once more, Law 1: Attackers will always find their way
was demonstrated.

Blockchain: a “supply chain” attack

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A hacker, by the handle Right9ctrl, has injected malicious code that steals Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash funds stored inside BitPay’s Copay wallet apps. The hacker injected the malicious code in the JavaScript library Event_Stream. This malicious code lays dormant until used inside the source code of Copay, a Bitcoin wallet. There, it steals much information such as the private key.

Right9ctrl inherited the access to the Event_Stream library because the initial author passed him/her the control. The initial author did not want to maintain anymore the open source library.

In other words, this is an example of a software supply chain attack. One element in the supply chain (here a library) has been compromised. Such an attack is not a surprise. Nevertheless, it raises a question about the security of open source components.

Many years ago, the motto was “Open source is more secure than proprietary solutions.” The primary rationale was that many eyes reviewed the code and we all know that code review is key for secure software. In the early days of open source, this motto may have been mostly true, under some specific trust models ( see https://eric-diehl.com/is-open-source-more-secure/, Chapter 12 of Securing Digital Video…). Is it still true in our days?

Currently, there are a plethora of available open source libraries. With the advent of many new programming languages, the number of libraries is exploding. Many projects have a few contributors, sometimes even only one individual. How many users of these libraries review the code before using it? I would guess very very few. Thus, the motto is becoming weaker. It is probably true for large, well-established projects, such as OpenSSL, but what for projects with one contributor? The success of the library is most probably not a valid indicator of trustfulness.

In this case, a warning signal would have been that the malicious code was heavily obfuscated. There is no legitimate reason why a JavaScript open source should be obfuscated. Open source is about transparency. Obfuscation is about obscurity.

Conclusion: be very careful when selecting an open source library, you may not necessarily trust it.

Conclusion2: if you are using a copy wallet, Sophos provides some advices.

 

Meltdown and Spectre

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On January 2018, security researchers disclosed two attacks coined Meltdown and Spectre. These attacks bypass the memory isolation of modern CPU by exploiting side-channel attacks on hardware-based optimization features of these CPUs. Thus, Meltdown and Spectre can gain arbitrary access to confidential information in the memory of the computer.

Modern CPUs, so-called superscalar computers, do not execute anymore the instructions sequentially. They implement many hardware-based optimization techniques that modify the normal instruction flow. For instance, the CPU executes multiple instructions concurrently to keep the processor’s sub-units as busy as possible (See Eben Upton’s post). Thus, out-of-order execution speculatively executes instructions further down the instruction flow as soon as all needed resources are available. Thus, the CPU may execute an instruction before it is sure that the instruction is needed. If later the CPU determines the instruction was not needed, it discards the corresponding results from its registers. This mechanism is sound architecturally but not at the microarchitecture level. The cache memory still holds the discarded results. Unfortunately, for many years, security researchers have designed side-channel attacks that leak confidential information from the cache. Modern CPUs’ branch predictors attempt to guess the future control flow and, execute the instructions of the predicted instruction flow preemptively. If the predicted decision is wrong, the CPU discards the “results” of the speculative instructions if the prediction was incorrect. Once more, this mechanism is sound architecturally. Unfortunately, the results remain in the cache memory. Covert-side-channel cache attacks can retrieve them.

The attacks

The goal of Meltdown is to dump the kernel memory space from a user-space process. In a simplified explanation, Meltdown operates in two steps. During the first step, Meltdown entices the CPU to access the kernel space through out-of-order instructions. When the instruction flow reaches this execution point, it detects the violation and triggers an exception handling that blocks actual access to the kernel space. During the second step, Meltdown uses covert-channel cache attacks to retrieve the cached “inaccessible” data. Intel memory management maps privileged kernel memory in the user-space. Thus, kernel memory becomes accessible. The usual security assumption is that kernel memory is secure and not accessible on a computer without root access. Meltdown breaks the hardware-enforced isolation between kernel space and user-space.

Meltdown may affect any CPU using out-of-order mechanism and is OS-independent. Meltdown has been successfully tested on Intel x86, Intel XEON processors, and ARM Cortex A57. Meltdown was mounted on cloud containers, such as Docker, successfully. The software countermeasures use KAISER. KAISER is a software patch that prevents the mapping of kernel memory into the user space, thus thwarting Meltdown. The KAISER patch is available for Windows 10, Linux, MacOS and iOS.

The goal of Spectre is to reach information from another process. Spectre exploits branch prediction and speculative execution. It operates in three steps. During the first step, Spectre mistrains the branch predictor by repeatedly executing a given branching. During the second step, Spectre entices the branch predictor to mispredict the control flow. The CPU then executes the speculative code that should perform the “illegal” operations, such as reading unauthorized memory. As in Meltdown, the third step exfiltrates the cached data using a covert-channel cache attack. Spectre accesses from a given user-space the memory of another user-space. Spectre breaks the hardware-enforced isolation between processes.

Spectre has been successfully implemented on recent Intel processors, AMD Ryzen, AMD FX, and AMD PRO. Spectre was implemented on Windows and Linux-based OS. It was written in C and also in JavaScript. The countermeasure would be to halt predictive execution on sensitive execution paths. This is a difficult task as the current instruction set is not fit for that purpose. The alternative solution is to implement in the code mechanisms that reduce the impact of the leaked information (for instance, combining conditional select and conditional move. In other words, developers must be aware of the covert-channel cache attack and implement adequate countermeasures. Compilers may also implement some tricks.

As Spectre can be mounted with JavasScript, malicious adware may become the first exploits using Spectre in the field. Thus, browsers are receiving patches to mitigate the risk. The exploitability via JavaScript is worrying.

Google’s Project Zero released concurrently three vulnerabilities, coined variant 1 to 3. These three vulnerabilities are identical to Meltdown and Spectre. Variant 1 and 2 correspond to Spectre whereas variant 3 maps to Meltdown.

Conclusion

Meltdown and Spectre are not due to bugs. They are the consequences of a new breed of side-channel attacks exploiting information leaking at the microarchitectural level for speed optimization.

It is interesting to notice that Paul Kocher is one of the researchers disclosing Meltdown and Spectre. In 1996, Paul designed the first side channel attack. His attack disrupted the security of smart cards. Since 1996, side-channel attacks have been among the most prolific, complex fields of research in security.

We want/need the CPUs to be faster. Thus, silicon designer added these optimization features to go faster. Unfortunately, most trivial countermeasures would defeat the benefit. For instance, cache attacks may be defeated by randomizing or equalizing the access time, which would annihilate the purpose of the cache. New hardware architecture, as well as new instruction sets, will help to defend. Nevertheless, we have a new class of side channel attacks to take into account. No doubts that variants will soon flourish.

DolphinAttack or How To Stealthily Fool Voice Assistants

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Six researchers from the Zhejiang University published an excellent paper describing DolphinAttack: a new attack against voice-based assistants such as Siri or Alexa. As usual, the objective is to force the assistant to accept a command that the owner of the assistant did not issue. The attack is more powerful if the owner does not detect its occurrence (excepted, of course, the potential consequences of the accepted command). The owner should not hear a recognizable command or even better hear nothing.

Many attacks try to fool the Speech Recognition system by finding characteristics that may fool the machine learning system that powers the recognition without using actual phonemes. The proposed approach is different. The objective is to fool the audio capturing system rather than the speech recognition.

Humans do not hear ultrasounds, i.e., frequencies greater than 20 kHz. Speech is usually in the range of a few 100 HZ up to 5 kHz. The researchers’ great idea is to exploit the characteristics of the acquisition system.

  1. The acquisition system is a microphone, an amplifier, a low-pass filter (LPF), and an analog to digital converter (ADC), regardless of the Speech Recognition system in use. The LPF filters out the frequencies over 20 kHz and the ADC samples at 44.1 kHz.
  2. Any electronic system creates harmonics due to non-linearity. Thus, if you modulate a signal of fm
    with a carrier at fc, in the Fourier domain, many harmonics will appear such as fC – fm, fC + fm¸ and
    fC as well as their multiples.

You may have guessed the trick. If the attacker modulates the command (fm) with an ultrasound carrier fc, then the resulting signal is inaudible. However, the LPF will remove the carrier frequency before sending it to the ADC. The residual command will be present in the filtered signal and may be understood by the speech recognition system. Of course, the commands are more complicated than a mono-frequency, but the system stays valid.

They modulated the amplitude of a frequency carrier with a vocal command. The carrier was in the range 20 kHz to 25 kHz. They experimented with many hardware and speech recognition. As we may guess, the system is highly hardware dependent. There is an optimal frequency carrier that is device dependent (due to various microphones). Nevertheless, with the right parameters for a given device, they seemed to have fooled most devices. Of course, the optimal equipment requires an ultrasound speaker and adapted amplifier. Usually, speakers have a response curve that cut before 20 kHz.

I love this attack because it thinks out of the box and exploits “characteristics” of the hardware. It is also a good illustration of Law N°6: Security is not stronger than its weakest link.

A good paper to read.

 

Zhang, Guoming, Chen Yan, Xiaoyu Ji, Taimin Zhang, Tianchen Zhang, and Wenyuan Xu. “DolphinAttack: Inaudible Voice Commands.” In ArXiv:1708.09537 [Cs], 103–17. Dallas, Texas, USA: ACM, 2017. http://arxiv.org/abs/1708.09537

 

Picture by http: //maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com/Dolphin-Fish-Animal-Sea-Water-Ocean-Mammal-41436

 

 

BlueBorne

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Ben Seri and Gregory Vishnepolsky from the society armis recently disclosed eight vulnerabilities present in various BlueTooth stacks. Their paper “The dangers of Bluetooth implementations: Unveiling zero day vulnerabilities and security flaws in modern Bluetooth stacks” thoroughly describes these vulnerabilities and derives some interesting lessons.

Some vulnerabilities may allow taking control of the Bluetooth device. These exploits do not need the target to be in discoverable mode. They just need to know the Bluetooth MAC address (BDADDR). Contrary to common belief, it is guessable even for non-discoverable devices. If the target generates Bluetooth traffic, then it BDAADR is visible in the access code. If it is not generating traffic, the widely accepted convention to use the same MAC address for Wifi than for Bluetooth may reveal it.

Once the attacker knows the BDADDR, he can use the exploits. One powerful vulnerability is due to some lack of implementation guidelines in the specifications for the “Just Works” authentication. For Android and Windows, if the attacker claims to be “No Input No output, No Man in the middle protection required and no bonding,” the target stealthily accepts the connection with limited security capabilities for a short period of time (due to the no bonding). Of course, any service that would require MiTM protection or bonding, and verifies the requirement, will refuse to operate over such connection. For Apple, the connection requests a validation by the user.

Once the attacker is linked to the unknowing target, it can try many attacks. My preferred ones are CVE-2017-0783 and CVE-2017-8628. They use a flaw in the specification of the Personal Area Network (PAN). This service has a low-level security requirement. This means that the previous attack grants access to the PAN without any authorization! The attacker can mount a pineapple attack over Bluetooth without the target being aware. In a Wifi Pineapple, the attacker impersonates an already known WIFI public network and can act as a man in the middle. In this case, the pineapple does not need to be a known network. Redoutable.

The PAN specification dated from 2003 and was never since revised. “Just works” and the newer authentication protocols were specified more recently. They changed the trust model and trust context. The older specifications were not analyzed to identify potential impacts.

The other vulnerabilities allow either buffer overflows or data leakage by exploring more than the attributed spaces.

The disclosure was part of a coordinated disclosure with Google, Microsoft, and Linux kernel team.

Conclusion: Verify that you installed the August and September security patches for your devices. They contain patches to these vulnerabilities.

 

White box cryptography: an open challenge

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The ideal implementation of a cryptographic algorithm would be such that even if the attacker would have the source code and would entirely control the platform, she would not be able to retrieve the secret key. In 2002, Stanley Chow and his colleagues proposed a new concept coined the white-box cryptography. The threat model of white-box attack assumes that the attacker has full access to the encryption software and entirely controls the execution platform. White-box cryptography attempts to protect the keys even under such a hostile threat model. The main idea is to create a functionally equivalent implementation of the encryption or decryption algorithm that uses only look-up tables. Corresponding look-up tables, with the corresponding hard-coded secret key, replace the S-boxes, Feistel boxes and XOR functions usually employed by symmetric cryptography. Then, the look-up tables are further randomized. In theory, the randomization hides the hard-coded key. White box cryptography is a difficult challenge for skilled reverse engineers.

Abundant cryptographic analysis has demonstrated that these constructions are not theoretically secure. Nevertheless, well-crafted real implementations may resist reverse engineering. Many vendors offer such white-box cryptography for AES. The issue is how do you know whether an implementation is robust. Securing white-box cryptography is a lot of black magic. Currently, the only solutions are either reverse-engineer it yourself or trust your supplier blindly.

Fortunately, the European-funded research project ECRYPT launches an exciting challenge: The WhiBox contest. It is a capture the flag challenge dedicated to white-box cryptography. Developers are encouraged to post AES-128 white-box implementation as a C source code. Attackers are invited to break the challenge, i.e., extract the encryption key.

The contest starts on May 15 and ends August 31. The winners, i.e., the implementation that resisted the longest, and the attacker who broke the “strongest” implementation, during the rump session of CHES 2017.

This initiative is interesting. It will be a benchmark of state of the art in this obscure field. Of course, it will have value only if enough skilled attackers will answer the challenge. I expect some success. It reminds the challenges to evaluate oracle attacks for digital video watermarking (BOWS and BOWS2). BOWS demonstrated the risk associated with the access to a watermark detector.

We will follow this challenge. Will commercial solutions dare to submit implementations? Winning this challenge would be a feather in their hat.

 

Reference:

    Chow, S., Eisen, P., Johnson, H., Oorschot, P.C. van: A White-Box DES Implementation for DRM Applications. In: Feigenbaum, J. (ed.) Digital Rights Management. pp. 1–15. Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2003).