Windows Hello for Business is a key component of Microsoft’s passwordless authentication strategy. It enables user authentication not only during system sign-in but also in conjunction with new and advanced features such as Personal Data Encryption, Administrator Protection, and Recall. Rather than depending on traditional passwords, Windows Hello leverages a PIN or biometric methods – such as fingerprint or facial recognition – to unlock cryptographic keys protected by the Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
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Using the Raspberry Pi Pico W as a Bluetooth Dongle
During our recent research, we experimented with different Bluetooth USB dongles. There are tons of options, and sometimes, it’s challenging to determine what chipset a dongle actually contains, what Bluetooth features it supports, and whether it works on Linux. Inspired by the recent ESP32 Bluetooth research, we wondered whether we could turn our Raspberry Pi Pico Ws into a functioning Bluetooth dongle. We had a few lying around, and the advantage here is that we know exactly which Bluetooth controller it uses – the Infineon CYW43439. It’s also very easy to get one. You can just buy the Pico W for a few bucks, even cheaper than some Bluetooth dongles. You also have a controller family that has been researched quite a bit in the internalblue project. However, there was one disadvantage. We did not find any code that exposes the CYW43439’s HCI interface via USB. So we had to write that on our own.
Continue reading Continue readingWhen Your Edge Browser Syncs Private Data to Your Employer
Recently, one of our customers contacted us to investigate the extent of some unwanted and unexpected behavior regarding browsing data of employees.
Employees started contacting IT support because private browser bookmarks, private login credentials etc. showed up on their work machines. All affected employees stated that they never created these bookmarks on work systems. And interestingly, the data seemed to have been collected over quite some time.
Our customer wanted to understand how private data ended up in their environment. Obviously, private employee data in the enterprise landscape could cause some data privacy trouble (GDPR).
Continue reading Continue readingJigsaw RDPuzzle: Piecing Attacker Actions Together
In a recent incident response project, we had the chance to virtually look over the attackers’ shoulder and observe their activities. The attackers used the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for lateral movement within the compromized environment and beyond (MITRE techniques T1570, T1021). As a matter of fact, RDP creates cache files that contain tiles of the transferred screen recording data. While this fact is well-known and there are existing tools, we found it worth reporting because of two different aspects:
Continue reading Continue readingPart I: Bluetooth Auracast from a Security Researcher’s Perspective
Auracast, the new Bluetooth LE Broadcast Audio feature has gained some publicity in the past months. The Bluetooth SIG has introduced the LE Audio feature-set to the Bluetooth 5.2 Specification in 2019 and vendors are only now starting to implement it. Auracast facilitates broadcasting audio over Bluetooth LE to a potentially unlimited number of devices. It does not require pairing or interaction between the sender and the receivers.
We also presented this topic at 38c3. This blog post will contain similar contents albeit with some more details.
Continue reading Continue readingAnnouncement: Progress Kemp LoadMaster CVE-2024-7591
Hey everybody,
during a recent Red Teaming engagement Marius Walter from ERNW found a command injection issue in Progress (Kemp) LoadMaster. It was registered as CVE-2024-7591 and scores a CVSS of 10.0.
The vendor already has patches out, make sure to apply them as this is a high severe issue. You can find the official announcement and the patch references on the official support page.
Marius will follow up with a technical blog post on this issue once we think everybody had a realistic chance of applying the patches.
Continue readingCrowdStrike: What is the worldwide BSOD all about?
This article is about the massive BSOD triggered by CrowdStrike worldwide on July 19. Analysis and information from CrowdStrike or other sources are regularly published, completing what is expressed here. Updates may also be provided in the future.
Friday, July 19, is a day to be remembered in computing history as the day of one of the biggest BSODs (Blue Screens of Death). We have seen air traffic come to a standstill over the USA and people climbing ladders with USB sticks to update giant screens. The impact was still measurable over many days. The question on everyone’s lips is how that all happened. CrowdStrike provided, on a regular basis, an explanation for people to understand what happened. But explanations can be hard to understand, especially for one who would like to read directly within CrowdStrike’s internal wording in their publications and regarding technical driver implementation details. Also, the analysis misses some points we consider relevant for secure software development. This article discusses conclusions from this massive crash, especially the necessity to change our mindset about software. This means we should understand, document, and evaluate independently software provided by vendors to know exactly what we install on our systems and to figure out the risk that may be taken by using the software. The time of naive belief in software magic must end with a third party’s independent review of the software, analysing its reliability, security, and stability. This is an activity we have been doing at ERNW for years, especially for e.g. the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI)1.
Continue reading Continue readingBMBF UNCOVER – Monitoring von Sicherheitsvorfällen in Fahrzeugen
English Abstract
For the realization and introduction of autonomous vehicles, the safe interaction of functions, systems and services as well as their monitoring over the entire product life cycle is essential. An exclusive security-by-design approach is no longer sufficient and must be continuously supported by feedback obtained from in-the-wild operation. This is where the recently successfully completed joint project BMBF UNCOVER comes into play, which targets the requirements of the standards ISO/SAE 21434 (Road vehicles – Cybersecurity engineering) and ISO 21448 (Road vehicles – Safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF)).
Continue reading Continue readingLinux Character Devices: Exploring systemd-run and pkexec
In this blog post, we quickly look into issues involving character devices. As
is typical for Linux, everything is a file, so character devices are referenced
as files, such as pseudo terminals (pts) under /dev/pts/. man pty briefly
introduces the topic. Essentially, it is used to connect a program, such as a
terminal emulator, to a shell. In the end, a pty can read and write like a
regular file. A colleague already brought up the topic of ptys and character
devices. But more recently a
Twitter post and
the
accompanying advisory
piqued my interest.
Is Google Play Protect a Reliable Malware Detector?
Google Play Protect is a built-in Android solution that enhances devices’ security. Its main job is to detect and block malware on Android devices. Several malware families were known for bypassing Play Protect checks in recent years. This brings us to an important question: “Is Google Play Protect a Reliable Malware Detector?”. This blog post shows how Play Protect deals with various Android malware in different scenarios. I deal with Play Protect as a black box.
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