Translated Press Release: IT Security is increasingly dominated by Geopolitics

Sanna/ February 18, 2019/ Call for Papers, Conference, DeepIntel, ROOTS

DeepSec and DeepINTEL conference open call for papers – submission for lectures and trainings are in demand.Anyone who reads the technology part of their favourite magazine can hardly escape the promises of future network technologies. Your own car becomes a smartphone. The talking fridge becomes a therapist. 5G mobile networks promise high-speed fibre optic streaming of data on the speed-limited electric scooter. The second reading reveals the meaning of the letter G in 5G – it stands for geopolitics. As part of the network expansion, there are discussions about hidden killswitches for emergency shutdowns, entire networks and backdoors to eavesdrop on customers. In November, the DeepSec In-Depth Security Conference addresses the technical challenges of the Internet of Things, emerging network technologies, and geopolitical constraints dictated by key events of the last 6 years. 5G

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Translated Article: Campaign of the Spy Alliance “Five Eyes” against WhatsApp and Co

Sanna/ January 8, 2019/ Discussion, High Entropy, Security

Feldzug der Spionageallianz „Five Eyes“ gegen WhatsApp und Co for fm4 by Erich Moechel The current scattered news and reports on “encryption” belong together. The military secret services of the “Five Eyes” conduct a global campaign; in Australia they’ve already reached their first milestone. Every two years, around the same time, a campaign of the espionage alliance “Five Eyes” against encryption programs takes place. Unlike in 2016, the new campaign has reached its first goal in a flash. In early December, a bill was passed in the Australian Parliament obliging Internet companies to break up encrypted communications. The providers of Whatsapp, Snapchat, and Co are hereby required to build surveillance interfaces into their apps to give hidden access to the Australian law enforcement. In a parliamentary coup – without discussion or amendments – the “Assistance

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ROOTS 2018: Library and Function Identification by Optimized Pattern Matching on Compressed Databases – Maximilian von Tschirschnitz

Sanna/ January 7, 2019/ ROOTS

[Editor’s note: This article belongs to the Reversing and Offensive-oriented Trends Symposium 2018 (ROOTS). It was misplaced, so we publish it today. Maximilian’s talk was recorded and can be watched on Vimeo.] The goal of library and function identification is to find the original library and function to a given machine-code snippet. These snippets commonly arise from penetration tests attacking a remote executable, static malware analysis or from an IP infringement investigation. While there are several tools designed to achieve this task, all of these seem to rely on varied methods of signature-based identification. In this work, the author argues that this approach is not sufficient for many cases and propose a design and implementation for a multitool called KISS. KISS uses lossless compression and highly optimized pattern matching algorithms to create a very

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ROOTS 2018 Talk: Kernel-Assisted Debugging of Linux Applications – Tobias Holl, Philipp Klocke, Fabian Franzen

Sanna/ November 22, 2018/ Conference, ROOTS

On Linux, most—if not all—debuggers use the ptrace debugging API to control their target processes. However, ptrace proves unsatisfactory for many malware analysis and reverse engineering tasks: So-called split-personality malware often adapts its behavior in the presence of a debugger, yet ptrace makes no attempt to hide from a target process. Furthermore, ptrace enforces a strict one-to-many relation meaning that while each tracer can trace many tracees, each tracee can only be controlled by at most one tracer. Simultaneously, the complex API and signal-based communications provide opportunities for erroneous usage. Previous works have identified the newer uprobes tracing API as a candidate for building a replacement for ptrace, but ultimately rejected it due to lack of practical use and documentation. Building upon uprobes, we introduce plutonium-dbg, a Linux kernel module providing debugging facilities independent

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: Attacks on Mobile Operators – Aleksandr Kolchanov

Sanna/ November 21, 2018/ Conference, Security

I’d like to talk about telecom security. My research contains information about security of mobile operators: classic and new (or very rare) attack vectors and vulnerabilities. This presentation will consist of three main parts: First, I will share information on the security of mobile operators in general. I’ll tell you a little bit about why it is important (usually, phone numbers are used as a key to social networks, messengers, bank accounts, etc). So, if an attacker can hack a mobile operator, he can gain access to a big amount of user data and money. Also, in this part, I will tell you about typical SS7 attacks (how to intercept SMS or send fake ones). During the second part, I will tell you about different vulnerabilities and security issues. All of the problems I

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DeepINTEL 2018 Talk: Framing HUMINT as an information gathering technique – Ulrike Hugl

Sanna/ November 20, 2018/ DeepIntel, Security Intelligence

NATO defines human intelligence (HUMINT) or hyoo-mint as “a category of intelligence derived from information collected and provided by human sources” (NATO Glossary of terms and definitions, APP-6, 2004) focusing on different kinds of information, for example data on things related to a human, information about a human’s specific knowledge of a situation, and other issues. HUMINT is differentiated into several categories like clandestine and overt collection. And: It is one of several other traditional intelligence collection disciplines, so called INTs; examples are SIGINT (signals intelligence), OSINT (open source intelligence), MASINT (measurements and signatures intelligence), GEOINT (geospatial intelligence), TECHINT (technical intelligence), SOMINT (social media intelligence), FININT (financial intellicence, gathered from analysis of monetary transactions), as well as CYBINT/DNINT (cyber intelligence/digital network intelligence, gathered from cyberspace). Intelligence Services deal with the analysis and collection of

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: RFID Chip Inside the Body: Reflecting the Current State of Usage, Triggers, and Ethical Issues – Ulrike Hugl

Sanna/ November 14, 2018/ Conference

Chipping humans can be seen as one of the most invasive biometric identification technologies. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) as the key technology in the field of the Internet of Things produces many applications. For example, human implants are used by scientists in the fields of cyborgism, robotics, biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence, by hobbyists for identification reasons to start their computers, cars, for smart home applications or to pay by credit card, by hospitals for the control of human biological functions of patients, but also by companies to tag their employees for security reasons and workplace surveillance. All in all, worldwide human implants are mainly used for security, healthcare, and private (individual) reasons. Beside some positive individual or organizational outcomes, implants may compromise privacy and raise manifold ethical questions. For example, research in the

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ROOTS 2018 Talk: The Swift Language from a Reverse Engineering Perspective – Malte Kraus & Vincent Haupert

Sanna/ November 13, 2018/ Conference, ROOTS

Over the last decade, mobile devices have taken over the consumer market for computer hardware. Almost all these mobile devices run either Android or iOS as their operating systems. In 2014, Apple introduced the Swift programming language as an alternative to Objective C for writing iOS and macOS applications. The rising adoption of this new language has to some extent obsoleted existing techniques for program analysis for these platforms, like method swizzling and “class-dump”. In this paper we discuss features of Swift binaries that help in reverse engineering the functionality of the contained code: We document the memory layout of compound data types and the calling convention used by the Swift compiler, as well as the runtime type information that is used by runtime and debugger when data types are not known statically. This

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ROOTS 2018: How Android’s UI Security is Undermined by Accessibility – Anatoli Kalysch

Sanna/ November 9, 2018/ Conference, ROOTS

Android’s accessibility API was designed to assist users with disabilities, or temporarily preoccupied users unable to interact with a device, e.g., while driving a car. Nowadays, many Android apps rely on the accessibility API for other purposes, including apps like password managers but also malware. From a security perspective, the accessibility API is precarious as it undermines an otherwise strong principle of sandboxing in Android that separates apps. By means of an accessibility service, apps can interact with the UI elements of another app, including reading from its screen and writing to its text fields. As a consequence, design shortcomings in the accessibility API and other UI features such as overlays have grave security implications. This talk will provide a critical perspective on the current state of Android accessibility and selected UI security features.

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DeepINTEL 2018 Talk: Risk Management in Complex Scenarios – Oscar Serrano

Sanna/ November 8, 2018/ Conference, DeepIntel, Security

ICT risk management is a well-stabilized practice and as such is supported by international security standards and guidelines. But, despite advances in the legal and policy areas and the maturation of standardized frameworks for efficient risk management, it has still not become a controlled, systematic process in the cyber security domain of most organizations. One of the problems preventing organizations from having an enterprise approach to cyber security risk management is that these efforts have not been supported by commensurate investment to produce robust, technical implementations of suitable risk management methodologies and supporting systems. Although some tools do exist, such as PILAR, CRAMM, Ebios, Mehari, or Octave, they all implement different risk management methodologies and all of them are implemented to satisfy the need of specific users. None of them is a truly enterprise

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DeepSec 2018 Training: Advanced Infrastructure Hacking – Anant Shrivastava

Sanna/ November 5, 2018/ Conference, Training

Whether you are penetration testing, Red Teaming or trying to get a better understanding of managing vulnerabilities in your environment, understanding advanced hacking techniques is critical. This course covers a wide variety of neat, new and ridiculous techniques to compromise modern Operating Systems and networking devices. We asked Anant a few more questions about his training. Please tell us the top 5 facts about your training. Constantly evolving course: Every year each iteration has something new added to it. (Minimum 25%, maximum 50% of the course gets an upgrade every year). Developed by Practitioners: The course is developed by regular pentesters deriving challenges from real life pen-testing scenarios. All of our trainers are full time pentesters and part time trainers. Covers a whole breadth of infrastructure: From IPv4/v6 to databases, to OSINT, Windows, Linux,

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DeepINTEL 2018 Talk: Cyber Threat Intelligence – The Next Era of Cyber Security? – Markus Auer

Sanna/ November 5, 2018/ DeepIntel, Security Intelligence

The DeepINTEL security intelligence conference focuses on threats, indicators of compromise, and strategic counter measures. Information security is more than superficial. This is why we have asked Markus Auer to hold a presentation at DeepINTEL (28 November 2018). He explains his ideas in short: We are tired of adding new products to our ever-growing security structure. Although this has been a common practice for years, it does not bring lasting success. Attacks continue to occur – faster, more comprehensively and with much greater impact and rising costs. Despite all protection levels and measures, the current security approach fails. We want to stop the expansion and purchase of more reactive products that are targeted to the recent attack. Instead, security operations should be improved by aligning existing security technologies and teams and using the information

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: Suricata and XDP, Performance with an S like Security – Eric Leblond

Sanna/ November 2, 2018/ Conference, Security

extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) and eXtreme Data Path (XDP) technologies are gaining in popularity in the tracing and performance community in Linux for eBPF and among the networking people for XDP. After an introduction to these technologies, this talk proposes to have a look at the usage of the eBPF and XDP technology in the domain of security. A special focus lies on Suricata that uses this technology to enhance its performance and by consequence on the accuracy of its network analysis and detection. We asked Eric a few more questions about his talk. Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk. Packet loss really matters. A threat detection engine like Suricata is losing 10% of IDS alerts if it misses 3% of traffic. And there are 10% of incomplete file

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DeepSec2018 Talk: Manipulating Human Memory for Fun and Profit – Stefan Schumacher

Sanna/ October 31, 2018/ Conference, Discussion

Manipulating the Human Memory for Fun and Profit, or: Why you’ve never met Bugs Bunny in DisneyLand Hacking is not limited to technical things — like using a coffee machine to cook a soup — but also makes use of social engineering. Social engineering is the (mis)use of human behaviour like fixed action patterns, reciprocity or commitment and consistency. Simple social engineering attacks like phishing mails do not require much preparation, but more complex ones do so. Especially when one wants to set up some kind of advanced persistent threat in the psychological domain. So, besides the psychological fundamentals of social engineering we also did research on human memory, how it works, how it pretty much fails to store what really happened, and how it can be misused for a sinister purpose. The fundamental

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DeepSec 2018 Talk: Mapping and Tracking WiFi Networks / Devices without Being Connected – Caleb Madrigal

Sanna/ October 30, 2018/ Conference

Sure, WiFi hacking has been around for a while, and everyone knows about tools like airmon-ng, Kismet, et al. But what if you just want to view a list of all networks in your area along with all the devices connected to them? Or maybe you want to know who’s hogging all the bandwidth? Or what if you want to know when a certain someone’s cell phone is nearby? Or perhaps you’d like to know if your Airbnb host’s IP Camera is uploading video to the cloud? For all these use-cases, I’ve developed a new tool called “trackerjacker”. In this talk we’ll use this tool to explore some of the surprisingly informative data floating around in radio space, and you’ll come away with a new skill or two adding to your radio hacking skill

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