Building
by Enno Rey

Should IPv6 Packets With Source Address ::1 Be Processed When Received on an External Interface?

This is a guest post from Antonis Atlasis.

Most of you are probably aware of the recently discovered/-closed severe ntpd vulnerabilities (CVE-2014-9293, CVE-2014-9294, CVE-2014-9295, CVE-2014-9296, see also the initial ntp.org security notice). Some days ago the Project Zero team at Google published a blog post “Finding and exploiting ntpd vulnerabilities” with additional details. In this one they mentioned a seemingly minor but quite important detail: on a default OS X installation one of the built-in protection mechanisms of ntpd (that is the restriction to process certain packets only if they are sourced on the local machine) can easily be circumvented by sending IPv6 packets with a spoofed source address of ::1 (the equivalent to 127.0.0.1 in IPv4 which would be discarded by the kernel once received from an external source).

This brought up a number of more generic questions:

a) Should such packets having as source address the IPv6 loopback one be processed at all?
b) Which OSs process such packets?
c) How can we protect our systems from them?

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Building
by Matthias Luft

Some Design Aspects of Hacking Challenges

We’re currently starting the preparation for the Troopers15 PacketWars Challenge, and since I’ve participated in quite some CTF games and have been involved in the preparation of a number of PacketWars Battles, I thought I’d write down some thoughts on the design of hacking challenges.

First of all, my experience is limited almost exclusively to attack-defend-CTFs or interactive war games (such as PacketWars or CCDC). While thinking about this blogpost, I also came across several terms which are used, so I decided to give a short summary:

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Breaking
by Hendrik Schmidt

Telco Research 2015

Hello and a happy new year 2015 to everybody!

As follow up of our 2014 talk “LTE vs. Darwin” I want to inform you about our telco research in 2015. We are currently dealing with the so called IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which handles the call and media logic of 4G telecommunication networks. This network part provides functions like VoIP (or VoLTE) and takes care of the interconnection to other call or media related networks.
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Breaking
by Felix Wilhelm

Revisiting an Old Friend: Shell Globbing

One interesting observation we make when testing complex environments is that at the bottom of huge technology stacks, there is usually a handful of shell scripts doing interesting stuff. More often than not these helper scripts are started as part of cron jobs running as root and perform basic administrative tasks like compressing and copying log files or deleting leftover files in temporary directories. Of course, these high privileges make them an interesting target for privilege escalation attacks and one class of vulnerability we reliably encounter in shell scripts is unsafe handling of globbing or filename expansions. Continue reading “Revisiting an Old Friend: Shell Globbing”

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