Misc

Security Considerations on Istio’s CRDs with Namespace-based Multi-Tenancy

We reported a possible Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack scenario in which a VirtualService can redirect or intercept traffic within the service mesh. This affects Namespace-based Multi-Tenancy clusters where tenants have the permissions to deploy Istio resources (networking.istio.io/v1).

In collaboration with Istio, we published a guest submission in Istio’s blog (as well as below), a Security Bulletin, and an update to their Security Model to address this issue.

This blog post highlights the risks of using Istio in multi-tenant clusters and explains how users can mitigate these risks and safely operate Istio in their deployments.

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Misc

Assessing Endpoint Protection: Our Approach to EDR/XDR and Supplements Evaluation

There is a growing landscape of security products promising to protect an organization’s IT infrastructure from attacks. Solutions referred to as EDR, and sometimes also as XDR, are designed to protect endpoints from all malicious activity. The ever-increasing cases of breaches and the associated costs, especially in the realm of ransomware attacks, raise the question of whether there is more that can be done to add an additional layer to traditional endpoint protection concepts. That is why a customer of ours commissioned us to evaluate whether EDR supplementing solutions provide extended protection against ever-evolving threats, as well as to shine a light on the performance overheads those solutions might introduce.

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Breaking

Vulnerabilities in Broadcom VMware Aria Operations: Privilege Escalation (CVE-2025-41245 / CVE-2026-22721)

During a customer project, we identified privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Broadcom VMware Aria Operations. It is possible to escalate the privileges of an administrative vCenter user to an Aria administrator and take over systems integrated in Aria. Meaning, the vCenter user can gain privileged access to systems they have no access to. While both users might sound similarly privileged, this is not true in most environments – especially not in complex corporate environments: An insignificant vCenter user in a development environment can take over all other vCenters in a complex corporate environment.

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Breaking

Hacking a Bluetooth Printer Server: GATT to UART Adapter?

This blog post describes the journey of how we discovered an interesting Bluetooth SoC within the Datong NP330, a Printer Server IoT device. Our initial goal was to reverse-engineer and analyze the Bluetooth controller that is included in the device. So we wanted to be able to dump the firmware or, if possible, get shell access on the printer server. During that journey we found a few vulnerabilities that ultimately let an attacker fully compromise the device. This is possible over Bluetooth or network via unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges.

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Breaking

BlackBoxAI: AI Agent can get your computer fully compromised

AI agents are here, there, and everywhere. Smarter, faster, and more skilled, they gain greater autonomy and trust. We trust their capabilities to do many tasks much faster and sometimes better than we can. We trust them as they usually demonstrate their eagerness to please us and fulfill our commands. Isn’t that too good to be true, and we might be dealing with a double-edged sword here? Can attackers use the same capabilities of the AI agents to attack their own users? Can they exploit their eagerness to please their users to fulfill the attackers’ intentions? And most importantly: what’s the worst that could happen if you fully trust some random AI Agent?

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Breaking

Vulnerability Disclosure: JWT Authentication Bypass in OpenID Connect Authenticator for Tomcat

During a customer project we identified an issue with the validation of JWT tokens that allowed us to bypass the authentication by using unsigned tokens with arbitrary payloads. During analysis we found out that this is caused by a vulnerability within the library OpenID Connect Authenticator for Tomcat.

OpenID Connect Authenticator for Tomcat between versions 2.0.0 and 2.5.0, as well as the current state on branch master contain a security flaw (introduced with commit 64e9a99) that allows attackers to bypass JWT signature validation easily.

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Building

One More Thing: Introducing the New macOS 26 Tahoe Hardening Guide

After seven years, we’re publishing a new macOS hardening guide. Fully updated, modernized, and now publicly available on GitHub as Markdown and on our website as PDF.

The previous guide, written for macOS Mojave (10.14), reflected a very different macOS security model. At the time, hardening often meant working around the operating system, manually enforcing controls, and compensating for missing platform guarantees. That guide served its purpose, but the platform has fundamentally changed since then.

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Misc

Capture Bumble Bluetooth Traffic with Wireshark

When conducting pentests of Bluetooth devices or whilst working on Bluetooth related research, we often use Bumble. In this Blogpost I will present a solution to capture a live stream of Bumble Bluetooth traffic in Wireshark.

Bumble is a fully featured Bluetooth stack, written entirely in Python. What makes it extremely powerful for security assessments and research is the level of control it provides. It can simulate certain conditions, including errors, with a level of precision that most Bluetooth stacks don’t offer. However, sometimes you not only need control, you also need visibility.

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Misc

Incident Response in GCP: Out of Scope – Out of Mind

We are regularly offering a GCP Incident Response and Analysis training. In this training, we analyze resources in GCP cloud together with our trainees that were successfully compromised by attackers, e.g., GCE instances and Cloud Build projects. Therefore, we need tooling that quickly detects misconfiguration of resources that helped the attacker during the compromise. During the analysis of different tools and different kinds of misconfiguration we realized that GCE instance access scopes are a blind spot of many (in fact all that we tested) security audit tools. In this blog post, we want to elaborate on the problems that arise from this behavior.

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Misc

Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: Full Disclosure of Airoha RACE Vulnerabilities

About six months ago we released a security advisory on this blog about vulnerabilities in Airoha-based Bluetooth headphones and earbuds. Back then, we didn’t release all technical details to give vendors more time to release updates and users time to patch their devices. Around the time of the initial partial disclosure in the beginning of June, Airoha put out an SDK release for their customers that mitigates the vulnerabilities. Now, half a year later, we finally want to publish the technical details and release a tool for researchers and users to continue researching and check whether their devices are vulnerable.

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