Author: Florian Grunow

Events
by Florian Grunow

“We have a Code Blue right here!”

That was the opener for my presentation on the Security in Medical Devices at CodeBlue 2015 last week in Tokyo, Japan. A Code Blue often describes a patient in a critical condition, mostly needing resuscitation. That just seemed to be a perfect match, also in the sense that the condition of some medical devices out there are still pretty critical concerning security. If you follow our current research on this you know what I am talking about. I hope that we are not talking about this topic anymore three years from now. That would mean that we have made the world a safer place, although it took some time … 😉

Speaking at Code Blue really was a blast! “Arigato” for having me! The conference was organized very well and the staff was extremely caring. You could really feel the community vibe in this event. Considering that the conference is only around a few years that is really remarkable. The talks I enjoyed most obviously were both keynotes: Takuya Matsuda – The Singularity is Near and Richard Thieme’s thoughtprovoking speech at the end of the conference. I also enjoyed Bhavna Soman’s high quality talk about using metrics to correlate APT binaries. The overall quality of the talks on Code Blue was pretty good but what I enjoyed the most were the discussions and the exchange with other researcher from all over the planet.

I hope to see some of you at Troopers16! 🙂

Cheers,

Florian

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Breaking
by Florian Grunow

RedStar OS Watermarking

During the last few months information about one of North Koreas operating systems was leaked. It is a Linux based OS that tries to simulate the look and feel of a Mac. Some of it’s features have already been discussed on various blog posts and news articles. We thought we would take a short look at the OS. This blog post contains some of the results.

As you can imagine, most interesting for us was to investigate features that impact the privacy of the users. There are some publications concerning the security of the OS, this is an aspect that we will not cover in this post. We will stick to a privacy issue that we identified in this post. As ERNW has a long history of “Making the World a Safer Place”, we consider this topic an important one. The privacy of potential users (especially from North Korea) may be impacted and therefore we think that the results must be made available for the public. So, here we go … Continue reading “RedStar OS Watermarking”

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Breaking
by Florian Grunow

Scal(e)ing down Privacy

As you might know we are continuously doing research on medical devices. I presented some of the new results at Power of Community 2014 last week and we thought we would share some of the details with you here. The focus of the previous work was testing medical devices that are used in hospitals like patient monitors, syringe pumps or even MRIs. This time we looked at a device that every user can use at home and which is available to anyone on the market: A smart scale.

The scale implements some basic features as you might have guessed, that is measuring your weight. In this case there are a lot more additional features that you can use, e.g. measuring the air quality, the room temperature, your heart rate and your fat mass. The latter makes testing this device quite hard, because somebody has to step on it and the results were not funny at all and will be kept secret! 😉

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Events
by Florian Grunow

Power of Community 2014

I had the pleasure to participate in this year’s Power of Community and was invited to talk about the insecurity of medical devices. The conference is based in Seoul, Korea and started in 2006. It has a strong technical focus and it is a community driven event. For me it was great to participate as mostly hackers from Asia were there and I got the chance to talk to a lot of nice folks that I wouldn’t be able to meet otherwise. This is especially true for the host, vangelis.

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Breaking
by Florian Grunow

XSS in SAP Netweaver

We just got credits for a flaw we found in SAP Netweaver. The issue is a reflected Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). It can be triggered in the administrative interface for the Internet Communication Manager (ICM) and Web Dispatcher. This means that the targets for this XSS will definitely be users with administrative privileges. This makes it especially juicy for an attacker. Continue reading “XSS in SAP Netweaver”

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Breaking
by Florian Grunow

Medical Device Security

One of our guiding principles at ERNW is “Make the World a Safer Place”. There could not be a topic that matches this principle more than the security or insecurity of medical devices. This is why we started a research project that is looking at how vulnerable those devices are that might be deployed in hospitals around the world. Recently the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has put out a recommendation concerning the security of medical devices. It recommends that “manufacturers and health care facilities take steps to assure that appropriate safeguards are in place to reduce the risk of failure due to cyberattack, which could be initiated by the introduction of malware into the medical equipment or unauthorized access to configuration settings in medical devices and hospital networks”. We thought that we should take a look at how manufacturers deal with security for these devices. Continue reading “Medical Device Security”

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Events
by Florian Grunow

DayCon VII

Some of us had the pleasure to participate in this year’s Daycon VII, three days of Real Hacking and Relevant Content, in Dayton, OH. The event began on September 16th with the Packetwars bootcamp. We had the chance to teach some really promising young students and to prepare them for the Packetwars battle that was scheduled four days later. The students had to go through topics like Windows security, network security and web application security both practical and in theory.

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Building
by Florian Grunow

SLES 11 Hardening Guide

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) has been around since 2000. As it is designed to be used in an enterprise environment the security of these systems must be kept at a high level. SLES implements a lot of basic security measures that are common in most Linux systems, but are these enough to protect your business? We think that with a little effort you can raise the security of your SLES installation a lot.

We have compiled the most relevant security settings in a SLES 11 hardening guide for you. The guide is supposed to provide a solid base of hardening measures. It includes configuration examples and all necessary commands for each measure. We have split the measures into three categories: Authentication, System Security and Network Security. These are the relevant parts to look for when hardening a system. The hardening guide also includes lists of default services that will help to decide which services to turn off, which is an essential step to minimize the attack surface of your system.

See all of the steps that we compiled for you in our hardening guide for SLES 11: ERNW_Checklist_SLES11_Hardening.pdf

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