We wish you a happy new year and a good start to 2014. A new year has begun and,
just before that, 30C3 took place. I think almost all of you have heard about
the congress and its topics. In particukar there was Glenn Greenwald’s
keynote or
there were new
publications/revelations
by Jacob Appelbaum, which you will probably have heard about from main media.
But besides of all that, there were really a lot of other interesting talks we
want to give you a short introduction to. Overall it was a really good
conference this year and a lot of awesome talks. But, like always, it is not
possible to see all of them, so here is a short summary of some of our
favorites:
Reverse Engineering of CHIASMUS from GSTOOL
(Jan Schejbal)
Jan
showed his research on the BSI’s CHIASMUS cipher and its implementation in
GSTOOL for local encryption of its data. Nobody of the audience really was
heavily surprised about the result: the implementation of CHIASMUS in GSTOOL is
broken, but it really was nice to hear all the stories about vulnerability
management by the BSI. Still it should be mentioned that CHIASMUS itself is not
broken and still seems to be a feasible encryption method, it is just the
implementation in GSTOOL which should not be used. Unfortunately in the near
future there seems not to be an alternative which can be recommended to fix this
problem and therefore out of band encryption like
Truecrypt
should be used.
An Introduction to Firmware Analysis
(Stefan Widmann)
With
this talk Stefan Widmann gave a coherent explanation of the fundamentals of
firmware hacking. The first part covered different approaches to get the
firmware image of a device. This can be easy if it is possible to download an
image directly from the vendor’s website. If no image is offered but instead an
update manager is used, it is possible to observe the updater application and
sniff the transferred files via TraceSPTI (for IDE,SATA and USB on WinXP) or
Wireshark (for USB). In case there is no updater or firmware file to download,
one can try to extract the image raw from the (E)EPROM, Flash or Serial Flash
chips (not covered further in the talk).
Once the image is in place it may be packed [and/or encrypted] so before
further operations can take place, one has to extract [and/or decrypt] it with
the right tool.
After unpacking the image one has to find the processor type and architecture it
is designed for. This can be done by loading the firmware binary into
disassemblers like IDA Pro or Online Disassembler (ODA) and doing trial and
error with the processor types and architectures until the disassembly makes
sense (no ‘unknown data’-parts are shown by IDA/ODA).
Now as the assembly is readable one can try to find some calls to get some
information about the structure of the firmware. So maybe further research is
needed but the talk showed up a lot of interesting approaches.
Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit
(Travis Goodspeed)
This
talk shows Travis Goodspeed’s approach to communicate with low earth orbit
satellites, including some funny stories.
As those move quickly through the sky and are difficult to track with high
accuracy he described how he built a remotely operable satellite tracking
system.
Therefore Travis bought a Navy-surplus Inmarsat dish on a known auction platform
and received it at his home in Southern Appalachia, where he founded the South
Appalachian Space Agency (short: SASA :-)).
The dish has several stepper motors which are controlled by a Postgres database
next to various daemons spread across multiple machines. So, for tracking a
satellite, a command in form of a SQL statement is sent to the receiver and the
motor daemon then starts to track the new target while the prediction daemon
maintains accurate estimates of its position in the sky. Additional daemons take
spectral prints or software-defined radio recordings of the targeted object for
later review.
The whole hardware is fully controllable from remote, so even if this dish is
located at the SASA, a simple smartphone app can be used to observe low orbit
objects.
We think this is a very interesting subject and look forward to hear about the
first vulnerabilities on satellites from Travis in one of his next talks.
**Electronic Bank Robberies
(tw,sb)
**This talk described an investigated lifecycle of ATM hacking. The speakers
presented how the attackers infected the machines over USB sticks and how they
got the money out.
The analysis of the executables showed that an installer contains encrypted
payloads, which are encrypted with keys specific to one ATM (volume serial).
Some integrity checks in the dropper helped to brute force the XOR key (PE
header at the beginning). The installed malware hooked into the keypad routines
to obtain the entered numbers.
With a special 12 digit number the malware opens an additional menu in front of
the original ATM program. From this menu and his submenu multiple functions were
accessible: cash-out, enable/disable network interfaces, format system (actually
deletes malware), show out-of-order screen or a defaced screen. Important
functions like cash-out or format require a challenge response procedure. If one
of the items were selected, a challenge gets displayed and the person in front
of the terminal has to call his HQ to get the response code for this
challenge.
During the talk a demo of the malware including his functions were presented in
a virtual machine running Windows XP.
Kryptographie nach Snowden
(Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Weis)
Prof.
Dr. Rüdiger Weis of the Beuth-University in Berlin presented how we should
consider current crypto algorithms after the published information about the
NSA.
His first and main announcement was that (under the current known Snowden
documents) strong crypto is still strong and not breakable by the NSA at the
moment. In the following parts of his talk, he laid out in more detail which
algorithms should be used (and which not). One of his main concerns was to
replace weak ciphers like RC4,MD4/MD5 or SHA-1 (SHA-2 could be also replaced,
because it’s developed by the NSA and works similarly to SHA-1) with stronger
ones (AES-256, SHA-3). He also discussedsome problems with ECC (Elliptic Curve
Cryptography). One possible future problem of ECC could reside in the small key
lengths (when will the NSA use quantum computers?).
A current problem is the (general) problem of weak random generators (ECC has a
higher dependency on them). Weis also called on the audience to rethink the
needs of TPM chips, because they are very powerful and not controllable all
times. At the end of his talk he gave some recommendations for crypto use:
AES-256, RSA with key lengths greater or equal 4096 bit, 512 bit hash algorithms
and PFS should be default in all implementations.
Amtliche Datenschützer: Kontrolleure oder Papiertiger?
(Peter Schaar)
Peter
Schaar is a former data protection officer of Germany and this was his first
talk in front of a hacker community. It was really interesting to see his
experiences and opinion to how some things work in politics. Usually, data
protection officers are a bit twofold, on the one hand they protect our data,
but on the other hand they are known as bureaucrat, disturbing the business (and
mostly only on a formal point of view, far away from reality).
Nevertheless, it was a very interesting talk about his fields of duty and
especially about obstacles in politics (and there seem to be a lot of them) and
why a data protection officer is not able to change much without support of
politicians. Finally he gave some suggestions about what should be changed in
future to get more focus on data protection in Germany.
Have a good start into 2014!
Yours,
Hendrik/Timo/Kevin