Building

Introduction of a new hardware guy

Hi folks!

We couldn’t be more proud to welcome such a predestined #1 hardware hacking victim, than VICTor is!
Before Brian and I gave a lecture on hardware hacking last week at DHBW Mosbach, we felt, that we needed a custom victim which is fully documented and provides a good “hackability” to the students.
Surely we could also have used some cheap $wifi_ap, but here’s the thing: Would you really want to use a device which you don’t really know? Mostly, there’s a massive lack of documentation regarding the SoCs used…not to mention the unavailability of schematics and layouts.
As we wanted to teach students the basics of hardware hacking effectively, we decided to create something by ourselves.

Introducing VICTor...

 

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Building

Review about the System and Security Info iOS App from SektionEins GmbH

Dear readers of Insinuator,

Today I want to give a little review about the latest app released by SektionEins called “System and Security Info” due to its recent media appearance. So first of all the app can be obtained via the Apple App store for 0,99ā‚¬ at the time this article was written. This article will try to answer two basic questions: for whom (or ā€œwhich groups of peopleā€) is this app helpful, and which security features does this app actually has. The design of the app is straight forward and pretty minimalistic with a clean and modern design. The first page of the Application called “Overview” provides nothing more than the current CPU usage of the device, with detailed subdivision in User, Idle, Total and Load. The next section provides an overview about the used RAM divided into Wire, Active RAM usage, Inactive RAM usage, “other”, free and the total amount of the deviceā€™s ram. The next option shows the used and unused part of the devices available storage, with “used”, “free” and total amount of space. While these features can be handled with several other (free and open source) applications I won’t write a comment wether it Ā these components make sense. Continue reading “Review about the System and Security Info iOS App from SektionEins GmbH”

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Breaking

How ā€˜securityā€™ black boxes might corrupt your investment

Usually Iā€™m not the kind of guy who talks about such economic topics. Because Iā€™m an engineer / security researcher who is exclusively concerned with understanding technical problems and if possible, solving them accordingly. My whole education is based on this and contains predominantly technical aspects of information security. This sometimes makes it difficult to understand what the market cares about (and why some products are being developed / exist on the market šŸ˜‰ ). Nevertheless, a current engagement for one of our customers made me stumble upon such a product.

We were involved in a test where a security appliance (a black box šŸ˜‰ ) played the core role. As you might know, the test procedure generally depends on the security question to be answered. In this case the question to be answered was, whether the black box provides the promised information security benefit. More specifically, we took a look at the environment / infrastructure, the protocols and the systems around it and checked if the black box does its magic. So the black box itself wasn’t in direct focus of the test. We were quite amazed about the blind trust the product received (but what else can one do, but trust the device they have already purchased ;-)? You can analyze it and that is what we did. Continue reading “How ā€˜securityā€™ black boxes might corrupt your investment”

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Events

A Trip to Hannover Messe

Once every few years I decide to head to Hannover and attend Hannover Messe, probably the largest industrial trade fair in Germany and apparently on of the most important in the world. As this year’s main topic was “Industrie 4.0” I simply could not resist to go out on a hunt for new and interesting (secure) smart connected magic! And trust me, I was not disappointed – here’s a few of my impressions.

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Events

SAP Security @ Troopers16

When it comes to SAP, Troopers has two events that are about Security in SAP Systems in particular. On the first day of the Troopers16 Trainings the BIZEC workshop takes place. The second event is a dedicated SAP track during the conference. Apart from these events there were of course a lot of nice folks to talk to (about SAP) šŸ™‚ This post is a short overview about SAP security @ TROOPERS16.

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Events

Infiltrate and Syscan 360

Hi everyone,

I spent the last weeks traveling to SingaporeĀ and MiamiĀ to present my Xenpwn research about double fetch vulnerabilities in paravirtualized devices at Infiltrate and Syscan360. You can find my slides here. Both conferences had great organization, very technical talks and a cool audience. In the following I want to give a short recap of some of the talks I liked the most:

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Breaking

Discover the Unknown: Analyzing an IoT Device

This blog post will give a brief overview about how a simple IoT device can be assessed. It will show a basic methodology, what tools can be used for different tasks and how to solve problems that may arise during analyses. It is aimed at readers that are interested in how such a device can be assessed, those with general interest in reverse engineering or the ones who just want to see how to technically approach an unknown device.

This post will most likely not cover any vulnerabilities per se. However, it outlines weaknesses which affect a wide range of IoT devices so various aspects are applicable to other devices and scenarios.

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