Niklaus Schiess on Insinuator.net - Bold Statements

Multiple Vulnerabilities in innovaphone VoIP Products Fixed

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dear all,

innovaphone fixed several vulnerabilities in two VoIP products that we disclosed a while ago. The affected products are the Linux Application Platform and the IPVA. Unfortunately, the release notes are not public (yet?) and the vendor does not include information about the vulnerabilities for the Linux Application Platform. Therefore, we decided to publish some more technical details for the issues.

Multiple Vulnerabilities in Linux Application Platform

The Linux Application Platform was affected by three vulnerabilities that could be chained to get full root access to a target system. However, the initial access vector is only exploitable by authenticated users. The vulnerabilities have been identified on the Linux Application Platform V10 SR41. According to the vendor they have been fixed in V10 SR57.

Pidgin, Word Documents, my Clipboard and I

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Lately, I’ve experienced some weird Pidgin crashes when I was copy&pasting into chat windows. The strange part was: I didn’t even know what triggered the crash because I actually didn’t know what was in my clipboard at this exact point. This is a quick write-up of how I investigated the issue and some interesting properties I found out about clipboards.

Everything started with a document that I was editing in a Windows VM in Microsoft Word. At some point, I wanted to copy some lines of the document and paste it into a Pidgin chat window on my Linux host system. As I did this, I noticed that when I pasted the data into the chat window it included a lot of white spaces. I thought something went wrong and just tried to delete it by pressing CTRL+A (to mark everything) and press BACKSPACE. But this caused Pidgin (2.13.0-5 on Arch Linux) to close with a segfault and created a core dump.

Dumping Decrypted Documents from a North Korean PDF Reader

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a write-up about how to use Frida to dump documents from a process after they have been loaded and decrypted. It’s a generic and very effective approach demonstrated on a piece of software from North Korea.

Some time ago we received an ISO file which was a dump of a CD-ROM from North Korea. The only information we got was that it included a document viewer and various PDF documents. I started to dump the content of the ISO in order to analyze what the reader was actually doing by mounting it:

Reversing and Patching .NET Binaries with Embedded References

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been analyzing a .NET binary that was quite interesting. It was a portable binary that shipped without any third-party dependencies. I started looking at the .NET assembly with ILSpy and noticed that there was not that much code that ILSpy found and there were a lot of references to classes/methods that were neither in the classes identified by ILSpy nor were they part of the .NET framework.

At some point I was going through everything that ILSpy displayed about the binary, including the resources which were looking very interesting:

Creating Static Binaries for Nmap, Socat and other Tools

Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In various scenarios it might be helpful or even required to have a statically compiled version of Nmap available. This applies to e.g. scenarios where only limited user privileges are available and installing anything to the system might not be desirable.

For such cases I’ve started to create recipes to build such binaries. Similar projects are already available on GitHub, but there are several reasons why I chose to create my own tools:

11th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT17)

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The 11th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT17) took place the last two days in Vancouver. Some colleagues and I had the chance to attend and enjoy the presentations of all accepted papers of this rather small, single-track co-located USENIX event. Unfortunately, the talks have not been recorded. However, all the papers should be available on the website. It’s worth taking a look at all of the papers, but these are some presentations that we’ve enjoyed:

6th No-Spy Conference

Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last friday Florian and me attended the 6th No-Spy Conference in Stuttgart, Germany. We gave a talk about surveillance and censorship on modern devices in North Korea and discussed various aspects with the attendees. The atmosphere was very welcoming and we had some nice discussions about various topics which allowed us to better clarify some things. The slides are available here.

Thanks to the organizers for having us!

KNXmap: A KNXnet/IP Scanning and Auditing Tool

Mon, 05 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Users of the KNX, a standard for home automation bus systems, may already have come across KNXnet/IP (also known as EIBnet/IP): It is an extension for KNX that defines Ethernet as a communication medium for KNX which allows communication with KNX buses over IP driven networks. Additionally, it enables one to couple multiple bus installations over IP gateways, or so called KNXnet/IP gateways.

In the course of some KNX related research we’ve had access to various KNXnet/IP gateways from different vendors, most of them coupled in a lab setup for testing purposes. The typical tools used for such tasks are ETS, the professional software developed by the creators of KNX (proprietary, test licenses available) and eibd, an open source implementation of the KNX standard developed by the TU Vienna.

REcon 2016 – A Quick Recap

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Some of us had the pleasure to visit this year’s REcon in Montreal, Canada. Unfortunately, work caught us just when we arrived back in Germany, so I haven’t had time to sit down and write down a few words so far. However, we think that what we’ve experienced at REcon is worth writing about.

The overall quality of the speakers and talks were very nice. What really amazed me was the art work of REcon:

Implementing an Obsolete VPN Protocol on Top of HTTP: Because Why Not?

Tue, 31 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve started some research on MikroTik’s RouterOS, the operating system that ships with RouterBOARD devices. As I’m running such a device myself, one day I got curious about security vulnerabilities that have been reported on the operating system and the running services as it comes with tons of features. Searching for known vulnerabilities in RouterOS on Google doesn’t really yield a lot of recent security related stuff. So I thought, there is either a lack of (public) research or maybe it is super secure… 🙂

Discover the Unknown: Analyzing an IoT Device

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Hacking 101 Training at TROOPERS16

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This year’s Hacking 101 workshop at TROOPERS16 will give attendees an insight into the hacking techniques required for penetration testing. These techniques will cover various topics like information gathering, network mapping, vulnerability scanning, web application hacking, low-level exploitation and more.

During this workshop you will learn, step by step, a testing methodology that is applicable to the majority of scenarios. So imagine you have to assess the security of a system running on the Internet. How would you start? First, you need a good understanding about the target, including running services or related systems. Just scanning an IP will most likely not reveal a lot of information about the system. The gathered information may help you to identify communication relations of services that could include vulnerabilities. A brief understanding of the target and it’s related systems/services/applications will make scanning and identifying vulnerabilities a lot easier and more effective. Then, the last step will be the exploitation of the identified vulnerabilities, with the ultimate aim to get access to the target system and pivot to other, probably internal, systems and resources.

Cisco and the Maintenance Operation Protocol (MOP)

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy,

this is a short write up about the Maintenance Operation Protocol (MOP), an ancient remote management protocol from the DECnet protocol suite. It’s old, rarely used and in most cases not needed at all. But as we stumbled across this protocol in some network assessments, it seems like a lot of network admins and other users don’t know about it. Even various hardening guides we’ve seen don’t mention MOP at all.

KNX Support for Nmap

Sun, 09 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Hi folks,

our home automation research, especially with KNX, is still in progress. As part of this research we’ve implemented various tools to easy the process of identifying and enumerating KNX devices, in both IP driven networks and on the bus.

Lately we’ve written two Nmap NSE scripts to discover KNXnet/IP gateways. These allow everyone to discover such gateways in local and remote networks and print some useful information about them. One of them follows the specification to discover gateways by sending multicast packets, where all devices on the network must respond to. Due to the specification of KNXnet/IP this process is rather non-invasive because only a single UDP packet is needed to discover multiple gateways. The other script allows to identify gateways via unicast connections by a slightly different message type, which allows discovery over e.g. the Internet.

GitHub Enterprise 2.0.0 Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Recently we had the pleasure to take a look at GitHub’s Enterprise appliance. The appliance allows one to deploy the excellent GitHub web interface locally to host code on-site. Besides the well known interface, which is similar to the one hosted at github.com, the appliance ships with a separate interface called the management console, which is used for administrative tasks like the configuration of the appliance itself. This management interface is completely decoupled from the user interface.

DeepSec 2013

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last week Florian and I participated at this year’s DeepSec in Vienna. We had a really good time, thanks again to the DeepSec staff for a nice conference. Although it might be a bit late, I want to share some impressions about various talks I enjoyed.

## spin: Static Instrumentation For Binary Reverse-Engineering

This talk primarily covered a technique called binary instrumentation, which is used e.g. for performance evaluation, CPU emulation, tracing and profiling but also for malware- and threat-analysis. David Guillen Fandos proposed the application of this technique in the field of reverse engineering. Binary instrumentation is a technique which allows to modify and rewrite binaries during their execution by injecting instructions into the original code (pretty much like virtual machines do too). Therefore one could easily wrap instructions with logging/tracing functions, to observe the execution status before and after easy instruction step (and/or dump the output into a file). For the purpose of reversing, one could also create complex conditional breakpoints (retaining status across executions), which makes it possible to characterize functions.

Vulnerabilities & attack vectors of VPNs (Pt 1)

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first part of an article that will give an overview of known vulnerabilities and potential attack vectors against commonly used Virtual Private Network (VPN) protocols and technologies. This post will cover vulnerabilities and mitigation controls of the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) and IPsec. The second post will cover SSL-based VPNs like OpenVPN and the Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP). As surveillance of Internet communications has become an important issue, besides the traditional goals of information security, typically referred as confidentiality, integrity and authenticity, another security goal has become explicitly desirable: Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). PFS may be achieved if the initial session-key agreement generates unique keys for each session. This ensures that even if the private key would be compromised, older sessions (that one may have captured) can’t be decrypted. The concept of PFS will be covered in the second post.