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Hardware Hacking 101: Introduction to JTAG

Introduction Welcome back to our introduction to hardware hacking series! In this post we will be covering the Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) interface, its state machine, pinout, and electrical characteristics. This is the first part of a multi-part series about JTAG. In this first installment, we provide background and information to get started working with JTAG. In our next post, we will share a teardown of a TP-LINK AC1750 to demonstrate how to identify and verify a pinout for JTAG.

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Equitable management of cybersecurity workforce meal-related debts with questionable integrity protections

Introduction For the modern cybersecurity workforce, there is oftentimes nothing more important than a satisfying meal. While COVID-19 has meant that most employees are working from home, we address some important issues for employees who may be returning to offices soon – and will need satiation. Some offices, including many lab spaces, may have few ideal local lunch options. While a trip to a local artisan food establishment may be a welcome distraction from a long day of reverse engineering, the time spent going back and forth to pick up meals may be considered a distraction to some.

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Ninjadiff - open source binary hashing

A year ago, we released a series of blog posts documenting our research into the world of binary hashing. While we speculated about the efficacy of this technique for binary diffing, our primary goal was to recognize similar code between binaries for the purpose of porting annotations from one analyzed binary to another and many of our design choices reflected this end-goal. Luckily, we’ve been given the opportunity to explore how these hashing techniques could be applied to the world of “bindiffing” through DARPA’s Assured Micropatching (AMP) ¹ program.

As part of this ongoing research, we have developed NinjaDiff - an open source binary diffing plugin for BinaryNinja. Throughout this blog post, we will be discussing the underlying algorithms and technical design choices made while designing this tool.

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Security Penetration Testing: Why, When, and How?

Proactive cybersecurity protections are critical to overall product success due to increasing risk, combined with consumer and enterprise awareness of cyber practices and their impact. River Loop Security works with a wide variety of organizations to secure their products; as a result we have seen the effectiveness proactive security has on their success. One tool that we often draw upon is penetration testing (‘pentest’ for short), or the act of simulating a scenario in which a malicious actor is attempting to penetrate a device or system. From this scenario, we are able to emulate the attacker mindset and see things that are often missed during regular code review or quality assurance, resulting in valuable feedback that can be used to further secure a system. In this post we will be discussing some key advantages penetration tests provide, the differences in testing during various stages of the product lifecycle, along with some of our methodology on how we work with teams to provide the most value during a penetration test.

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Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020: What You Need to Know

On November 17, 2020 the senate passed H.R. 1668, the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020, by unanimous consent. It is expected to be signed into law, making it a major step in describing and enforcing Internet of Things (IoT) cybersecurity.

In short, this bill requires that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) set standards, guidelines, and best practices for IoT devices that are procured or used by federal agencies. While the scope of the bill is limited to federal contracts (via the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR)), we believe it will have far-ranging consequences on the security of IoT and other embedded systems in the future.

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Hardware Hacking 101: Glitching into Privileged Shells

Introduction Welcome back to our hardware hacking series! We are excited to share the “glitching” techniques we use in our device assessment process. Glitching, or voltage or fault injection, is the process of changing voltage levels in a digital system in a manner that causes disruption of the system under test or corruption of data. If timed correctly, a glitch of even 1 millisecond can cause a system to fail open into a potentially privileged state.

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CVE-2020-13995: Details on a Vulnerability in a NITF Parser

While fuzzing a NITF Extract utility extract75 utility published by the US Air Force Sensor Data Management System, we found a global buffer overflow that leads to a write-what-where condition. This flaw has been assigned CVE-2020-13995 and is disclosed in this blog post.

See our Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure process for more information on how we go about disclosing vulnerabilities we find.

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Suggested Updates to the National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) Specification

The National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) was brought to our attention under the DARPA SafeDocs program. In this program, we are using binary instrumentation and static analysis to understand parsers’ de facto file format specifications. The NITF format is a container format for other image files. It details a large amount of metadata, such as classification info for each file and sub-section. A single NITF file can contain, for example, multiple images, text annotations, and graphics.

This blog post shares our analysis of the format, and updates to the format that we have proposed to the NITF Technical Board. We focus on features or specification language that we believe are likely to lead to implementation errors and vulnerabilities.

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Digging into the Android SystemUI Crash from a JPEG

In late May 2020, we were asked to help triage the root cause of a bug where an image, when parsed by Android SystemUI, caused the Android process to crash. This could cause a boot loop if, for example, the image was set as the phone’s background. We quickly identified the root cause which we found interesting from an ecosystem perspective.

This blog shares parts of our analysis, and covers our trace of the relevant code path and diagnosis of the root cause. We describe how the fixes work, and then dive into why this bug was only seen relatively recently. Finally, we break down the file’s JPEG and ICC structures, and what impacts these may have on the parsers.

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Analysis Methods and Tooling for Parsers

This is the first post in a series that describes how we built tools to rapidly identify and characterize “format extensions”: modifications and new feature additions in parsers of complex formats. In this puzzle, we were given a set of binaries and a few input files – in this instance PDFs. Our task was to precisely characterize any new feature(s) present in the binaries and describe how the input files triggered them. Moreover, our goal was to build tools to enable a human to do this faster and/or more completely than they could previously. Our approach was to make the best use of the inputs that triggered modified behaviors, with a combination of fine-grained static binary diffing and execution trace and memory trace analysis.

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