Author: Dan Goodin

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Snatching the login credentials of a locked computer just got easier and faster, thanks to a technique that requires only $50 worth of hardware and takes less than 30 seconds to carry out.

Rob Fuller, a principal security engineer at R5 Industries, said the hack works reliably on Windows devices and has also succeeded on OS X, although he's working with others to determine if it's just his setup that's vulnerable. The hack works by plugging a flash-sized minicomputer into an unattended computer that's logged in but currently locked. In about 20 seconds, the USB device will obtain the user name and password hash used to log into the computer. Fuller, who is better known by his hacker handle mubix, said the technique works using both the Hak5 Turtle ($50) and USB Armory ($155), both of which are USB-mounted computers that run Linux.

"First off, this is dead simple and shouldn’t work, but it does," mubix wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. "Also, there is no possible way that I’m the first one that has identified this, but here it is (trust me, I tested it so many ways to confirm it because I couldn’t believe it was true)."

Enlarge / The US Navy Bombe used during World War II to break Germany's Enigma encryption system. (credit: National Security Agency)

When you're an applied cryptographer, teaching your preteen daughters what you do for a living isn't easy. That's why Justin Troutman developed PocketBlock, a visual, gamified curriculum that makes cryptographic engineering fun.

In its current form, PocketBlock is a series of board-like grids that allow players to transform plaintext messages into secret ciphertext and convert it back again, one move at a time. By restricting the operations to little more than addition and subtraction performed by rearranging squares on a piece of paper, PocketBlock helps students understand the fundamentals of encryption without requiring a formal background in mathematics. At the same time, it stays true to the principles of modern cryptography and goes well beyond the classical cryptographic concepts, like the Caesar cipher, reserved for most kid-centric material on cryptography today.

"The goal is for kids to feel like they've worked with something of substance, to an extent that intrigues them," Troutman, a trained cryptographer who is currently the Project Manager at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Ars. "[PocketBlock] introduces cryptography as everything from a pillar of the modern Web to the tradecraft of spies past. It introduces the same cryptographic concepts that I work with as a cryptographer in industry—the same underpinnings you'll find in academic papers. It reduces these concepts to easy-to-solve problems and uses a visual language to map what happens to bits as they travel through a cryptographic algorithm."

Enlarge (credit: Ildar Sagdejev)

In August 2011, multiple servers used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system kernel were infected with malware that gave an unknown intruder almost unfettered access. Earlier this week, the five-year-old breach investigation got its first big break when federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing a South Florida computer programmer of carrying out the attack.

Donald Ryan Austin, 27, of El Portal, Florida, used login credentials belonging to a Linux Kernel Organization system administrator to install a hard-to-detect backdoor on servers belonging to the organization, according to the document that was unsealed on Monday. The breach was significant because the group manages the network and the website that maintain and distribute the open source OS that's used by millions of corporate and government networks around the world. One of Austin's motives for the intrusion, prosecutors allege, was to "gain access to the software distributed through the www.kernel.org website."

The indictment refers to kernel.org officials P.A. and J.H., who are presumed to be Linux kernel developer H. Peter Anvin and kernel.org Chief System Administrator John "'Warthog9" Hawley, respectively. It went on to say that Austin used the credentials to install a class of extremely hard-to-detect malware known as a rootkit and a Trojan that logs the credentials of authorized users who use the secure shell protocol to access an infected computer.

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The official Android app for the NBA's Golden State Warriors continuously listens in on users' private conversations without permission, according to a federal lawsuit that alleges the practice is a violation of privacy statutes.

The 15-page complaint filed in San Francisco federal court said the monitoring was part of beaconing technology integrated into the Golden State Warriors app. The beaconing is used to track users' precise locations so the app can provide content that's tailored to that locale. The app "listens to and records all audio within range" of a user's microphone, and when the app detects a unique audio signal, it is able to determine the user is in close proximity to a specific location associated with the signal. The beaconing technology, the complaint alleged, is provided by a Signal360, a developer of proximity-related products.

The lawsuit names the Golden State Warriors, Signal360, and app developer Yinzcam as defendants. It was filed on behalf of New York state resident Latisha Satchell, and the lawsuit seeks class action status so that other smartphone users who installed apps with similar behavior may also seek damages. It was filed on Monday, and its docket currently shows no hearings are yet scheduled on the matter.

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The world has seen the most unsettling attack yet resulting from the so-called Rowhammer exploit, which flips individual bits in computer memory. It's a technique that's so surgical and controlled that it allows one machine to effectively steal the cryptographic keys of another machine hosted in the same cloud environment.

Until now, Rowhammer has been a somewhat clumsy and unpredictable attack tool because it was hard to control exactly where data-corrupting bit flips happened. While previous research demonstrated that it could be used to elevate user privileges and break security sandboxes, most people studying Rowhammer said there was little immediate danger of it being exploited maliciously to hijack the security of computers that use vulnerable chips. The odds of crucial data being stored in a susceptible memory location made such hacks largely a matter of chance that was stacked against the attacker. In effect, Rowhammer was more a glitch than an exploit.

Now, computer scientists have developed a significantly more refined Rowhammer technique they call Flip Feng Shui. It manipulates deduplication operations that many cloud hosts use to save memory resources by sharing identical chunks of data used by two or more virtual machines. Just as traditional Feng Shui aims to create alignment or harmony in a home or office, Flip Feng Shui can massage physical memory in a way that causes crypto keys and other sensitive data to be stored in locations known to be susceptible to Rowhammer.

Enlarge / Illustration of USBee, in which an ordinary, unmodified USB drive (A) transmits information to a nearby receiver (B) through electromagnetic waves emitted from the drive data bus. (credit: Guri et al.)

In 2013, a document leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden illustrated how a specially modified USB device allowed spies to surreptitiously siphon data out of targeted computers, even when they were physically severed from the Internet or other networks. Now, researchers have developed software that goes a step further by turning unmodified USB devices into covert transmitters that can funnel large amounts of information out of similarly "air-gapped" PCs.

The USBee—so named because it behaves like a bee that flies through the air taking bits from one place to another—is in many respects a significant improvement over the NSA-developed USB exfiltrator known as CottonMouth. That tool had to be outfitted with a hardware implant in advance and then required someone to smuggle it into the facility housing the locked-down computer being targeted. USBee, by contrast, turns USB devices already inside the targeted facility into a transmitter with no hardware modification required at all.

"We introduce a software-only method for short-range data exfiltration using electromagnetic emissions from a USB dongle," researchers from Israel's Ben-Gurion University wrote in a research paper published Monday. "Unlike other methods, our method doesn't require any [radio frequency] transmitting hardware since it uses the USB's internal data bus."

Enlarge / iPhone Spyware known as Pegasus intercepts confidential data. (credit: Lookout)

Apple has patched three high-severity iOS vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited to infect iPhones so attackers can steal confidential messages from a large number of apps, including Gmail, Facebook, and WhatsApp, security researchers said Thursday.

The spyware has been dubbed Pegasus by researchers from mobile security provider Lookout; they believe it has been circulating in the wild for a significant amount of time. Working with researchers from University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, they have determined that the spyware targeted a political dissident located in the United Arab Emirates and was launched by an US-owned company specializing in computer-based exploits. Based on the price of the attack kit—about $8 million for 300 licenses—the researchers believe it's being actively used against other iPhone users throughout the world.

"Pegasus is the most sophisticated attack we’ve seen on any endpoint because it takes advantage of how integrated mobile devices are in our lives and the combination of features only available on mobile—always connected (WiFi, 3G/4G), voice communications, camera, email, messaging, GPS, passwords, and contact lists," Lookout and Citizen Lab researchers wrote in a blog post. "It is modular to allow for customization and uses strong encryption to evade detection."

Enlarge / From an upcoming paper laying out a new attack against 64-bit block ciphers used by HTTPS and OpenVPN. (credit: Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaëtan Leurent)

Researchers have devised a new attack that can decrypt secret session cookies from about 1 percent of the Internet's HTTPS traffic and could affect about 600 of the Internet's most visited sites, including nasdaq.com, walmart.com, match.com, and ebay.in.

The attack isn't particularly easy to carry out because it requires an attacker to have the ability to monitor traffic passing between the end user and one of the vulnerable websites and to also control JavaScript on a webpage loaded by the user's browser. The latter must be done either by actively manipulating an HTTP response on the wire or by hosting a malicious website that the user is tricked into visiting. The JavaScript then spends the next 38 hours collecting about 785GB worth of data to decrypt the cookie, which allows the attacker to log into the visitor's account from another browser. A related attack against OpenVPN requires 18 hours and 705GB of data to recover a 16-byte authentication token.

Impractical no more

Despite the difficulty in carrying out the attack, the researchers said it works in their laboratory and should be taken seriously. They are calling on developers to stop using legacy 64-bit block-ciphers. For transport layer security, the protocol websites use to create encrypted HTTPS connections, that means disabling the Triple DES symmetric key cipher, while for OpenVPN it requires retiring a symmetric key cipher known as Blowfish. Ciphers with larger block sizes, such as AES, are immune to the attack.

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Recently released code that exploits Cisco System firewalls and has been linked to the National Security Agency can work against a much larger number of models than many security experts previously thought.

An exploit dubbed ExtraBacon contains code that prevents it from working on newer versions of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), a line of firewalls that's widely used by corporations, government agencies, and other large organizations. When the exploit encounters 8.4(5) or newer versions of ASA, it returns an error message that prevents it from working. Now researchers say that with a nominal amount of work, they were able to modify ExtraBacon to make it work on a much newer version. The finding means that ExtraBacon poses a bigger threat than many security experts may have believed.

(credit: SilentSignal)

The newly modified exploit is the work of SilentSignal, a penetration testing firm located in Budapest, Hungary. In an e-mail, SilentSignal researcher Balint Varga-Perke wrote:

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In a revelation that shows how the National Security Agency was able to systematically spy on many Cisco Systems customers for much of the last decade, researchers have uncovered an attack that remotely extracts decryption keys from the company's now-decommissioned line of PIX firewalls.

The discovery is significant because the attack code, dubbed BenignCertain, worked on PIX versions Cisco released in 2002 and supported through 2009. Even after Cisco stopped providing PIX bug fixes in July 2009, the company continued offering limited service and support for the product for an additional four years. Unless PIX customers took special precautions, virtually all of them were vulnerable to attacks that surreptitiously eavesdropped on their VPN traffic.

BenignCertain's capabilities were tentatively revealed in this blog post from Thursday, and they were later confirmed to work on real-world PIX installations by two separate researchers. Before the confirmation came, Ars asked Cisco to investigate the exploit. The company declined, citing this policy for so-called end-of-life products. The exploit helps explain documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden and cited in a 2014 article that appeared in Der Spiegel. The article claimed the NSA had the ability to decrypt more than 1,000 VPN connections per hour.