Disclosure on Insinuator.net - Bold Statements

Vulnerability Disclosure: Stealing Emails via Firefox’s AI Features

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine the following: You visit a webpage with a lot of text you don’t want to read and ask your AI assistant for a summary. A few moments later, the AI assistant has extracted one of your emails and sent it to an attacker without you ever knowing.

In October 2025, we found exactly this vulnerability in Firefox’s AI chatbot integration¹.

Firefox offers a summarization, explaination and proofread AI feature. When a user makes use of one of these features, Firefox pastes a prompt into the sidebar AI chat including the page title, the selected text (or, if the whole page is summarized, a selection is being made by Firefox) and an instruction on how to process the provided text. The sidebar AI chat is essentially an IFrame of a third-party chatbot (Claude, Copilot, …).

Disclosure: Command Injection in Geutebrück Cameras

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

During a penetration test for a customer, we identified a command injection vulnerability in Geutebrück security cameras that allows authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary commands as root through the web interface. The root cause is unsanitized user input being passed into a sed script (and at least 12 other CGI endpoints). In addition to the injection, we identified an XSS vulnerability, an exposed system menu leaking configuration and log data, and an insecure GET-parameter-to-environment-variable mapping that enables abuse of variables like LD_PRELOAD and LD_DEBUG. We reported the findings to Geutebrück and a patched firmware was provided. This post walks through how we got from a sed error message to a root shell.

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

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Vulnerability Disclosure: Stealing Emails via Prompt Injections

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With the rise of AI assistance features in an increasing number of products, we have begun to focus some of our research efforts on refining our internal detection and testing guidelines for LLMs by taking a brief look at the new AI integrations we discover.

Alongside the rise of applications with LLM integrations, an increasing number of customers come to ERNW to specifically assess AI applications. Our colleagues Florian Grunow and Hannes Mohr analyzed the novel attack vectors that emerged and presented the results at TROOPERS24 already.

Security Advisory: Airoha-based Bluetooth Headphones and Earbuds

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Important note: Some media coverage on this topic falsely or inaccurately depicts the attack conditions. To be clear: Any vulnerable device can be compromised if the attacker is in Bluetooth range. That is the only precondition.

During our research on Bluetooth headphones and earbuds, we identified several vulnerabilities in devices that incorporate Airoha Systems on a Chip (SoCs). In this blog post, we briefly want to describe the vulnerabilities, point out their impact and provide some context to currently running patch delivery processes as described at this year’s TROOPERS Conference.

Disclosure: Multiple Vulnerabilities in X.Org X server prior to 21.1.17 and Xwayland prior to 24.1.7

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The X11 Window System has been used since September 1987 for Unix desktop systems, allowing applications to display their windows. Today, one of the server implementations of the protocol is the X.Org X server and XWayland, which both use the same codebase. While reviewing the X server, several legacy security issues were identified. These appear to originate from earlier design stages when security considerations were less prominent. Despite the project’s maturity and widespread use, some of these issues have persisted.

Disclosure: Input Validation Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Bookings

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In a recent customer project, we discovered vulnerabilities in Microsoft Bookings, an online appointment scheduling tool integrated into Microsoft 365, allowing companies to have customers book meetings in available times themselves. The findings originate from insufficient input validation on the public meeting scheduling endpoint. Although Microsoft has largely mitigated this vulnerability, our analysis provides important insights into potential risks and areas for improvement.

Introduction & Context

Microsoft Bookings is a service that allows organizations to manage appointments and meetings via a web interface. With integration to services such as Microsoft Teams, the security of the booking process is critical. This blog post outlines our technical analysis of the vulnerability, including proof-of-concept details and an overview of the vendor response.

Full Disclosure: Multiple Rundeck Job Command Injections

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

During a red-teaming-style customer project, we managed to get access to an Rundeck API token. Rundeck is a job scheduler and runbook automation platform designed to automate routine IT tasks across multiple systems. At first, we were excited about this API token because if we could create new Rundeck jobs, we could execute arbitrary code on the Rundeck nodes and move laterally from there. However, it turned out that with this token we only had permissions to run existing jobs.

Vulnerability Disclosure: Restricted Shell Breakout (CVE-2025-1950) and Privilege Escalation (CVE-2025-1951) in IBM Power Hardware Management Console (HMC)

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We discovered a private key for accessing an IBM Hardware Management Console (HMC) during a recent red team engagement. The IBM Hardware Management Console (HMC) is a dedicated management system used to control and manage IBM servers, especially those running on Power Systems (like IBM Power9/Power10) and mainframes (z Systems). After brief research, we identified two security vulnerabilities that can be leveraged to gain root access to the HMC.

Access for most users via SSH is limited through the hmcbash, a restricted shell environment. Using LD_PRELOAD, attackers can break out of the restricted bash and gain access to additional binaries installed on the system. With the restrictions lifted, attackers can use a setuid binary, copysshkey, to elevate privileges to root.

CVE-2024-11035: Minor Security Issues in VMware Carbon Black Cloud

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We recently conducted a security assessment of VMware Carbon Black Cloud, a unified SaaS solution that integrates endpoint detection and response (EDR), anti-virus, and vulnerability management capabilities. As part of our evaluation, we tested the solution’s ability to detect and prevent malicious activity on Windows and Linux systems. Our analysis focused on the Carbon Black agents for these platforms, and although we did not identify any critical vulnerabilities, we want to share some of the findings in this blog post.

Vulnerability Disclosure: Command Injection in Kemp LoadMaster Load Balancer (CVE-2024-7591)

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While conducting security research, I identified a critical vulnerability in Kemp’s LoadMaster Load Balancer. This vulnerability is a Command Injection and allows full system compromise. It requires no authentication and can be exploited remotely by having access to the Web User Interface (WUI). Kemp found that all LoadMaster versions up to and including version 7.2.60.0 and also the multi-tenant hypervisors up to and including version 7.1.35.11 are affected.

Kemp LoadMaster is a widely used Load Balancing Application that can commonly be seen in customer engagements. Therefore, we decided to take a closer look as part of our regular research projects.

Vulnerability Disclosure: Authentication Bypass in Vaultwarden versions < 1.32.5 - CVE-2024-55225

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

During a penetration test for a customer, we briefly assessed Vaultwarden, an open-source online password safe. In June 2024, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) published results¹ of a static and dynamic test of the Vaultwarden server component. Therefore, only a partial source code audit was performed during our assessment. However, a quick look was needed to find some glaring issues with the authentication.

Vaultwarden

Vaultwarden is an alternative online password safe server to Bitwarden and exposes the same API so that Bitwarden clients can connect to the Vaultwarden server. Since Bitwarden has a Browser client and Mobile clients, they can all connect to Vaultwarden, too.

Disclosure: Potential Limitations of Apple ADE in Corporate Usage Scenarios

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Apple Automated Device Enrollment (ADE) is presented as a way to automate and simplify the enrollment process of Apple devices within Mobile Device Management (MDE) solutions. This blog post is aimed at organizations currently planning or even already using this feature and making you, the reader, aware of potential limitations of this process that might otherwise not be clearly addressed in your companies’ device management process.

How Apple ADE Is Presented

Looking at the Apple Support pages today, Automated Device Enrollment is described as a process that

Disclosure: Apple ADE – Network Based Provisioning Bypass

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions are used to centrally manage mobile devices in corporate environments. This includes the monitoring of the device, automatic installation/removal of apps or certificates and restrict the functionality. Even though MDM solutions exist for multiple vendors, we will look specifically on Apple devices enrolled via Intune. When an Apple device is registered for Automated Device Enrollment (ADE), it will automatically download and apply these policies during the initial setup and prior to the first boot.

Security Advisory: Achieving PHP Code Execution in ILIAS eLearning LMS before v7.30/v8.11/v9.1

Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

During my Bachelor’s thesis, I identified several XSS vulnerabilities and a PHP Code Execution vulnerability via an insecure file upload in the learning management system (LMS) ILIAS. The XSS vulnerability can be chained with the code execution vulnerability so that attackers with tutor privileges in at least one course can perform this exploit chain.

The Bachelor’s thesis was motivated by the ever-increasing number of compromised universities in Germany¹^(,)²^(,)³^(,)⁴^(,)⁵. The thesis analyzed the importance of LMS systems in that context, as those services are often exposed to the internet.

Breaking GLS Parcel Tracking

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, we held a talk at the Winterkongress¹ of the Digitale Gesellschaft Schweiz in Winterthur, Switzerland, about our research project on breaking German parcel tracking sites. We could not name all the parcel services for which we identified vulnerabilities respecting disclosure timelines. Today, we describe our findings at GLS, another player in the German parcel market, and the disclosure process of corresponding vulnerabilities.

Findings

Similar to the vulnerabilities previously disclosed for DHL² and DPD³, and UPS⁴, we identified that the GLS parcel tracking website discloses the recipient’s geographic area by showing the name of the destination parcel center. Furthermore, the recipient’s ZIP code was used to unlock personal information (including the exact coordinates of the address) and features that influence the parcel delivery process. The website did not implement rate-limiting or other techniques to prevent brute-forcing ZIP codes using the API.

Breaking UPS Parcel Tracking

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we describe our findings at United Parcel Service of America, Inc. (UPS), another German parcel market player, and the corresponding vulnerabilities’ disclosure process.

Findings

Only a valid tracking number is needed to get the personal information of a parcel’s receiver, including the sender’s location, the recipient’s name, and the recipient’s location (city and country). It was possible to enumerate numerous tracking numbers during testing by iterating from known ones. Since the last digit of a tracking number is a checksum, it can be calculated. Also, certain businesses have a predefined prefix in their tracking numbers. This schema allows the enumeration of every parcel sent from a particular business.

Lua-Resty-JWT Authentication Bypass

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was writing some challenges for PacketWars at TROOPERS22. One was intended to be a JWT key confusion challenge where the public key from an RSA JWT should be recovered and used to sign a symmetric JWT. For that, I was searching for a library vulnerable to JWT key confusion by default and found lua-resty-jwt. The original repository by SkyLothar is not maintained and different from the library that is installed with the LuaRocks package manager. The investigated library is a fork of the original repository, maintained by cdbattags in version 0.2.3 and was downloaded more than 4.8 million times according to LuaRocks.

Breaking DPD Parcel Tracking

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post is the continuation of our parcel research. We already reported about how we broke parcel tracking at DHL and the disclosure process of the identified problems. As DHL is not the only parcel service in Germany, we also investigated the other available parcel services. In this blog post, we want to talk about DPD, also called Geopost, which belongs to the French Post Office.

Efficient Guessing of Tracking Numbers

DPD uses the recipient’s ZIP code to unlock detailed shipment information and additional options. After trying some ZIP codes manually, we received CAPTCHA prompts in the web interface (more on this later).

ManiMed: Ypsomed AG – mylife YpsoPump System Vulnerabilities

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) aims to sensitize manufacturers and the public regarding security risks of networked medical devices in Germany. In response to the often fatal security reports and press releases of networked medical devices, the BSI initiated the project Manipulation of Medical Devices (ManiMed) in 2019. In this project, a security analysis of selected products is carried out through security assessments followed by Coordinated Vulnerability Diclosure (CVD) processes. The project report was published on December 31, 2020, and can be accessed on the BSI website [1].

ManiMed: Hamilton Medical AG – HAMILTON-T1 Ventilator Vulnerabilities

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

ManiMed: B. Braun Melsungen AG – Space System Vulnerabilities

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

ManiMed: Innokas Yhtymä Oy - VC150 Patient Monitor Vulnerabilities

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

ManiMed: Philips Medizin Systeme Böblingen GmbH – IntelliVue System Vulnerabilities

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Root Cause Analysis of a Heap-Based Buffer Overflow in GNU Readline

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In the last blog post, we discussed how fuzzers determine the uniqueness of a crash. In this blog post, we discuss how we can manually triage a crash and determine the root cause. As an example, we use a heap-based buffer overflow I found in GNU readline 8.1 rc2, which has been fixed in the newest release. We use GDB and rr for time-travel debugging to determine the root cause of the bug.

VMware NSX-T MITM Vulnerability (CVE-2020-3993)

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

NSX-T is a Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) solution of VMware which, as its basic functionality, supports spanning logical networks across VMs on distributed ESXi and KVM hypervisors. The central controller of the SDN is the NSX-T Manager Cluster which is responsible for deploying the network configurations to the hypervisor hosts.

This summer, I looked into the mechanism which is used to add new KVM hypervisor nodes to the SDN via the NSX-T Manager. By tracing what happens on the KVM host, I discovered that the KVM hypervisor got instructed to download the NSX-T software packages from the NSX-T Manager via unencrypted HTTP and install them without any verification. This enables a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacker on the network path to replace the downloaded packages with malicious ones and compromise the KVM hosts.

Vulnerabilities in GNU Readline Fixed

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I discovered some vulnerabilities in GNU Readline. These bugs have been fixed in GNU Readline version 8.1.

The case of identifying the vulnerabilities was rather interesting. I wanted to fuzz another program and wrote a quick harness to test if my setup works. This test harness used GNU Readline to read input from stdin and passed the data along to the function under test. I left the fuzzer running while I started to improve the harness (which would also mean getting rid of GNU Readline as it is relatively slow for the use-case at hand). However, AFL showed the first crashes and upon inspection, the vulnerabilities where not in the code I actually wanted to fuzz but in my systems GNU Readline.

ERNW White Paper 69 – Safety Impact of Vulnerabilities in Insulin Pumps

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With this blog post I am pleased to announce the publication of a new ERNW White Paper [1]. The paper is about severe vulnerabilities in an insulin pump we assessed during project ManiMed and we are proud to publish this subset of the results today.

Manipulating Medical Devices

The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), in its role as the Federal Cyber Security Authority in Germany, aims to sensitize manufacturers and the public regarding security risks of networked medical devices. In response to the often fatal security reports and press releases of networked medical devices, the BSI initiated the project Manipulation of Medical Devices (ManiMed) in 2019. In this project, a security analysis of selected products is carried out through security assessments. In the context of this project, severe vulnerabilities were identified during the assessment of the DANA Diabecare RS system.

Medical Device Security: HL7v2 Injections in Patient Monitors

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Digital networking is already widespread in many areas of life. In the healthcare industry, a clear trend towards networked devices is noticeable, so that the number of high-tech medical devices in hospitals is steadily increasing.

In this blog post, we want to elucidate a vulnerability we identified during the security assessment of a patient monitor. The device sends HL7 v2.x messages, such as observation results to HL7 v2.x capable electronic medical record (EMR) systems. A user with malicious intent can tamper these messages. As HL7 v2.x is a common medical communication standard, we also want to present how this kind of vulnerability may be mitigated. The assessment was part of the BSI project ManiMed, which we would like to present in the following section.

Jenkins – Groovy Sandbox breakout (SECURITY-1538 / CVE-2019-10393, CVE-2019-10394, CVE-2019-10399, CVE-2019-10400)

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I discovered a sandbox breakout in the Groovy Sandbox used by the Jenkins script-security Plugin in their Pipeline Plugin for build scripts. We responsibly disclosed this vulnerability and in the current version of Jenkins it has been fixed and the according Jenkins Security Advisory 2019-09-12 has been published. In this blogpost I want to report a bit on the technical details of the vulnerability.

Description

The groovy sandbox transforms some AST nodes of the script to add security checks. For example

Multiple Vulnerabilities in Nexus Repository Manager

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, we identified security issues in the Nexus Repository Manager software developed by Sonatype. The tested versions were OSS 3.12.1-01 and OSS 3.13.1-01.

The following issues could be identified:

Multiple Cross-Site Scripting (CVE-2018-16619)
Missing Access Controls (CVE-2018-16620)
Java Expression Language Injection (CVE-2018-16621)

The vulnerabilities are fixed in version 3.14.0. See the release notes and security advisories for further information.

We identified a Java Expression Language Injection in the role and user creation function. In order to exploit this issue, the attacker needs to be authenticated with high privileges, the standard anonymous user is not sufficient.

Multiple Vulnerabilities in UNIFY OpenScape Desk Phone CP600

Fri, 12 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We recently identified security issues in the UNIFY OpenScape Desk Phone CP600 HFA software. We disclosed the vulnerabilities to Unify, as a fix is now provided we want to give a brief overview of the vulnerability affecting the web interface.

We were able to identify the following vulnerabilities in the Web interface of the telephone:

Command Injection in Picture Delete function of OpenScape Desk Phone Webportal
Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Access in the OpenScape Desk Phone Webportal
Memory Corruption in the OpenScape Desk Phone Webservice
Missing Hardening of the OpenScape Desk Phone Webservice Binary
Cross Site Request Forgery Missing in the OpenScape Desk Phone Webservice

Squirrelmail Full Disclosure – TROOPERS18

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Birk an me basically fully disclosed a 0day in Squirrelmail yesterday. This is a short Q&A to answer the most common questions about the issue to calm you all down a little bit. 😉

What is the punchline, what do I need to know?

An attacker able to exploit this vulnerability can extract files of the server the application is running on. This may include configuration files, log files and additionally all files that are readable for all users on the system. This issue is post-authentication. That means an attacker would need valid credentials for the application to log in or needs to exploit an additional vulnerability of which we are not aware of at this point of time.

Information About SAP Security Note 2336795

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I encountered a slight variation of an internal port scan vulnerability for the CrystalReports component of SAP Business Objects. The original vulnerability was presented and disclosed by rapid7 in the talk “Hacking SAP Business Objects”. The corresponding slides can be found here.

Basically, the original vulnerability allowed port scanning of (internal) systems via the URL http://hostname/CrystalReports/viewrpt.cwr?id=$ID&wid=$WID&apstoken=ip:port@$TOKEN. By accessing this URL, different responses were received depending on if the port (parameter port in the URL) of the system (parameter ip in the URL) was in the state “open” or “closed”. The original vulnerability has been fixed a long time ago (SAP security note 1432881), but the fix did allow for a slight variation to make the attack work again.

Analyzing yet another Smart Home device

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

As you have probably already recognized, some of us here at ERNW are doing research in the area of smart home technologies e.g. KNX. Recently, we took a deeper look into a device which is used to control a smart home system produced by the vendor BAB TECHNOLOGIE GmbH called “eibPort”. This device can be used to control smart home systems based on different technologies e.g. EnoCean or KNX depending on the version of the device. The eibPort comes with a visualization running on a webserver to control the whole system e.g. open or close windows, changing the temperature in different rooms or turning the alarm system on or off by simply clicking on symbols. The following screenshots illustrate an example of such a visualization:

Linq Injection – From Attacking Filters to Code Execution

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Some of you (especially the .Net guys) might have heard of the query language Linq (Language Integrated Query) used by Microsoft .Net applications and web sites. It’s used to access data from various sources like databases, files and internal lists. It can internally transform the accessed data in application objects and provides filter mechanisms similar to SQL. As it is used directly inside the application source code, it will be processed at compile time and not interpreted at runtime. While this provides a great type safety and almost no attack surface for injection attacks (except from possible handling problems in the different backends), it is extremely difficult to implement a dynamic filter system (e.g. for datatables which should allow users to select the column to filter on). That’s probably the reason why Scott Guthrie (Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group in Microsoft, also one of the founders of the .Net project) presented the System.Linq.Dynamic package as part of the VS-2008 samples in 2008. This library allows to build Linq queries at runtime and therefore simplify dynamic filters. But as you may know, dynamic interpretation of languages based on user input is most of the time not the best option….

DameWare Vulnerability

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In course of a recent research project, I had a look at SolarWinds DameWare, which is a commercial Remote Access Software product running on Windows Server. I identified a remote file download vulnerability in the download function for the client software that can be exploited remotely and unauthenticated and that allows to download arbitrary files from the server that is running the software.

A very simple proof of concept HTTP request to download the C:\Windows\win.ini file of the target machine is the following:

BMC BladeLogic: CVE-2016-1542 and CVE-2016-1543

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

Hope those of you who attended Troopers16 enjoyed it as much as we did! In this post I want to summarize my Troopers16 talk and provide you with some details about freshly assigned CVE-2016-1542 and CVE-2016-1543 related to BMC BladeLogic software.

To start with, BMC Software Inc. is an American company specializing in business service management software; they develop software used for multiple functions, including IT service management, data center automation, performance management, virtualization lifecycle management and cloud computing management. Among other products they have developed a BladeLogic suite that includes Database Automation, Middleware Automation, Server Automation, and Network Automation tools. The one under our focus was BladeLogic Server Automation (BSA).

Classic Web Vulns Found in Google Search Appliance 7.4

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Hi all,

I’ve recently found some sort of classic web vulnerabilities in the Google Search Appliance (GSA) and as they are now fixed [0][1][2], I’d like to share them with you.

First of all, some infrastructure details about the GSA itself. The GSA is used by companies to apply the Google search algorithms to their internal documents without publishing them to cloud providers. To accomplish this task, the GSA provides multiple interfaces including a search interface, an administrative interface and multiple interfaces to index the organization’s data.

Another Perspective in Vulnerability Disclosure

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As you know we (as in ERNW) are quite involved when it comes to vulnerability disclosure and we’ve tried to contribute to a discussion at several occasions, such as Reflections on Vulnerability Disclosure and ERNW Newsletter 50 Vulnerability Disclosure Reflections Case Study.

In this post I want to add (yet) another perspective, motivated by a disclosure procedure which just happened recently.

todb’s article, R7-2015-23: Comcast XFINITY Home Security System Insecure Fail Open is a well planned public forum vulnerability disclosure. The article itself is very well done: It gives credit to the researcher who discovered the vulnerability and it shows a vulnerability disclosure timeline where Rapid7 reached out to Comcast (the vendor). They even go a step further and publish the link showing the process for discovered vulnerabilities in a Rapid7 product as well as how Rapid7 handles disclosing those vulnerabilities they find in external products. For their internal disclosure process, they make sure to release a patch before “publicly announcing the vulnerability in the release notes of the update”(rapid7 disclosure).

Xen XSA 155: Double fetches in paravirtualized devices

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my research on the security of paravirtualized devices, I reported a number of vulnerabilities to the Xen security team, which were patched today. All of them are double fetch vulnerabilities affecting the different backend components used for paravirtualized devices. While the severity and impact of these bugs varies heavily and is dependent on a lot of external factors, I would recommend patching them as soon as possible. In the rest of this blog post I’ll give a short teaser about my research with full details coming out in the first quarter of 2016 .

Sending Mixed Signals – What Can Happen in the Course of Vulnerability Disclosure

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Update:

Given there’s quite some speculation and, as we think, misinformation going around we think it’s helpful to add/clarify the following information:

we fully comply with the injunction and we have no intentions to violate it. we do not plan to publish any technical information besides the report (agreed upon with FireEye themselves) and the slides (based on the former) anyway. No 3rd parties except for the ones involved (FireEye, lawyers) have received any additional technical information from our side, let alone an earlier version of the report.
the injunction covers accompanying details mostly within the architecture space, but not the core vulnerabilities themselves. Those are not part of the injunction.
we stand by the timeline as provided below. In particular, the following two points:
– FireEye received a draft version of the report which had the objectionable material (as identified by the cease and desist letter) fully removed on August 11th.
– according to the cease and desist letter FireEye’s lawyer sent us, they were informed – from our side – about the planned talk at 44CON on Jul 23rd.
there’s an injunction, but not a lawsuit. I used the term “sue” after consulting Merriam-Webster which states: “sue: to seek justice or right from (a person) by legal process”, but this might have been misinterpreted by some readers. As stated, there’s a pending injunction, but not a lawsuit.

Please note that we won’t share legal documents with 3rd parties or publish them as we consider this inappropriate.
Please note further that, during the whole process, our goal was to perform a responsible disclosure procedure with its inherent objectives (namely vulnerability remediation by vendor and education of various stakeholders involved, see also here or here). We consider this disclosure process as concluded. We don’t see a need to add technical details from our side as we feel that the objectives of responsible disclosure are met (not least as patches are released since quite some time and both vendor & finder have released reports).

Reflections on Vulnerability Disclosure

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I’ll discuss some aspects of vulnerability disclosure. I don’t want to delve into an abstract & general discussion of vulnerability disclosure (for those interested here’s some discussion in the context of Google’s Project Zero, this is the well-known CERT/CC approach, this a paper from WEIS 2006 laying out some variants, and finally some statement by Bruce Schneier back in 2007). Instead I will lay out which approach we followed in the past (and why we did so) and which developments make us consider it necessary to re-think our way of handling. The post is not meant to provide definitive answers; it was also written not least to provide clarity for ourselves (“write down a problem in order to better penetrate it”) and, maybe, to serve as a starting point for a discussion which will help the community (and us) to find a position on some of the inherent challenges.

Revisiting Xen’s x86 Emulation: Xen XSA 123

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In my last blog post, I gave an overview about recent vulnerabilities discovered in the x86 emulation layer of Xen. While both of the discussed vulnerabilities only allow for guest privilege escalation, the complexity of the involved code seemed to indicate that even more interesting bugs could be discovered. So I spent some time searching for memory corruption issues and discovered a very interesting bug that resulted in XSA 123 . This post gives an overview about the root cause of the bug and a short description of exploitation challenges. A follow-up post will describe possible exploitation strategies in more detail.

The Dangers of x86 Emulation: Xen XSA 110 and 105

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Developing a secure and feature rich hypervisor is no easy task. Recently, the open source Xen hypervisor was affected by two interesting vulnerabilities involving its x86 emulation code: XSA 110 and XSA 105. Both bugs show that the attack surface of hypervisors is often larger than expected. XSA 105 was originally reported) by Andrei Lutas from BitDefender. The patch adds missing privilege checks to the emulation routines of several critical system instructions including LGDT and LIDT. The vulnerable code can be reached from unprivileged user code running inside hardware virtual machine (HVM) guests and can be used to escalate guest privileges. XSA 110 was reported by Jan Beulich from SUSE and concerns insufficient checks when emulating long jumps, calls or returns.

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.

How to Own a Router – Fritz!Box AVM Vulnerability Analysis

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The below post was originally written on February 9th as a little educational exercise & follow-up to my BinDiff post. (This research was actually triggered by a relative asking about that strange Fritz!Box vulnerability he heard about on the radio). Once we realized the full potential of the bug we decided against publishing the post and contacted several parties instead. Amongst others this contributed to the German BSI press release. Given the cat is out of the bag now anyway, we see no reason to hold it back. We will further take this as an opportunity to lay out our basic vulnerability disclosure principles in a future post. This topic will also be discussed in the panel “Ethics of Security Work & Research” at Troopers

Responsible Disclosure and Academic Freedom, Again

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Reading this article from the Guardian, on this guy apparently being banned from fully discussing research results in his talk at upcoming USENIX Security, leaves me scratching my head once more. Things might (as so often) be more complex than they seem, but this looks like yet-another misconception as for the contribution of security research (and its public discussion) to the greater good of us all. Which is unfortunate for the speakers (I’ve been in a similar situation once, receiving a threatening legal letter from a very large organization one day before one of our Black Hat presentations and can tell you that stuff like that doesn’t add to one’s anticipation of the talk or the event…), for the audience (including some ERNW guys who will be a USENIX-SEC, so, btw, expect a summary post here) and for the whole community of security researchers.

Ross Anderson on Responsible Disclosure and Academic Freedom

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Hi,

just a short, somewhat non-technical, post today: I really like this response Ross Anderson gave to the “UK Cards Association” asking Cambridge University for taking offline a thesis of one of their students. It (the letter) pretty much summarizes how security research should be treated and backed by those interested in a more secure world we live in.

On a personal note I’d like to add that Ross’ main volume “Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems”, initially published in 2001 and updated in the interim with a second edition in 2008, has been the most influential security book for me on my long way in the infosec space (which started back in 1997, with some workshops on firewalls I gave for IT auditors). If I could take only one infosec book to a lonely island, it would be this one.