Jeanne Moreau, noted French New Wave actress.
(I did not know that she was briefly married to William Friedkin.)
Obit watch: July 31, 2017.
July 31st, 2017DEFCON 25 updates: July 29, 2017.
July 29th, 2017Third round. I’m not proud. Or tired.
- Slides from Salvador Mendoza‘s “Exploiting 0ld Mag-stripe information with New technology” are here. I think this is the most current version, but I welcome correction.
- Here’s the slides for “macOS/iOS Kernel Debugging and Heap Feng Shui” (Min(Spark) Zheng).
- Mikhail Sosonkin has a series of blog posts up describing vulnerabilities in the HooToo TM6 travel router. I believe this is a longer version of the same material from his “Hacking travel routers like it’s 1999” talk, but I haven’t had a chance to sit down and compare the blog posts with the slides.
- I have yet to find new material on “Open Source Safe Cracking Robots – Combinations Under 1 Hour!” but there’s a BBC article here. Worthy of note, to me: “For example, if one dial is set to open at 14, using 15 and 13 will work as well. It meant the robot could check every third number, making it possible to quickly test the remaining combinations much faster than a human being.” No disrespect intended to the presenters, but that’s exactly the Feynman/Los Alamos technique. (I think they used a different method for getting the number off the third dial, to be fair.) “The only thing we learn from history, is that we learn nothing from history.”
- David Robinson and ZX Security have a GitHub repo up. Here’s NMEAsnitch, a Python tool to detect GPS spoofing. Here are some other related (and some unrelated) tools courtesy of ZX Security.
- GitHub repo for “Snide” Owen’s “Phone system testing and other fun tricks” containing the slides and extras.
- EFF whitepaper, “The Pregnancy Panopticon”, by Cooper Quintin. This is the basis for the Cooper Quintin/Kashmir Hill talk “The Internet Already Knows I’m Pregnant”.
Obit watch: July 28, 2017.
July 28th, 2017John Kelso, columnist for the Austin American-Statesman since Jesus was a corporal, passed away earlier today.
The staff of WCD extends our condolences to his family and friends.
DEFCON 25/Black Hat updates: July 28, 2017.
July 28th, 2017Round 2:
- The white paper for “Free-Fall: Hacking Tesla from Wireless to CAN Bus” (Ling Liu, Sen Nie, Yuefeng Du) is here. Slides here.
- Slides for “Exploiting Network Printers” (Jens Müller, Vladislav Mladenov, Juraj Somorovsky, Jörg Schwenk) are here.
- Found slides for “Breaking Electronic Door Locks Like You’re on CSI: Cyber” here. (I called this one wrong: no Bluetooth. Not a complaint, just an observation.)
- This is one that I saw, overlooked, and now am intrigued by: “All Your SMS & Contacts Belong to ADUPS & Others“. “Our research has identified several models of Android mobile devices that contained firmware that collected sensitive personal data about their users and transmitted this sensitive data to third-party servers in China – without disclosure or the users’ consent.” Slides. White paper.
- Slides for Vlad Gostomelsky’s “Hunting GPS Jammers”. I think this is one that really needs video, too.
- “Intercepting iCloud Keychain” (Alex Radocea) slides.
- And “The Future of ApplePwn – How to Save Your Money” (Timur Yunusov) slides.
- And (hattip to Mr. Yunusov) “Jailbreaking Apple Watch” (Max Bazaliy). I haven’t compared these slides to the onea on the presentations server, just FYI.
Okay, lunch time is almost over, and I feel like I’ve done enough damage to the security community today. I’ll try to have more updates later today or tonight.
DEFCON 25/Black Hat updates: July 27, 2017.
July 27th, 2017Round 1:
- Nitay Artenstein has a blog post up at the Exodus Intelligence site covering his “Broadpwn: Remotely Compromising Android and iOS via a Bug in Broadcom’s Wi-Fi Chipsets” talk at Black Hat.
- Slides from Jason Staggs’ Black Hat version of “Adventures in Attacking Wind Farm Control Networks” are up on the Black Hat site.
- I don’t see slides for Colin O’Flynn’s “Breaking Electronic Door Locks Like You’re on CSI: Cyber” yet, but he does have a blog post up talking about some of his findings.
- Slides and the white paper from Ruben Santamarta’s “Go Nuclear: Breaking Radiation Monitoring Devices” are up.
- This is one I kind of overlooked, but it could be interesting: Thomas Brandstetter’s “(in)Security in Building Automation: How to Create Dark Buildings with Light Speed”. White paper. Slides.
- No more conference CDs at DEFCON. But here’s the presentations directory on the DEFCON 25 media server. You can also torrent presentations and workshops.
- To save you a small amount of trouble: here’s the (preliminary) version of the slides for “Popping a Smart Gun”.
Edited to add more:
- Karla Burnett’s “Ichthyology: Phishing as a Science” is actually relevant to my professional life. White paper.
- Slides and the white paper for “Hacking Hardware with a $10 SD Card Reader” (Amir Etemadieh, CJ Heres, and Khoa Hoang) are here.
Obit watch: July 27, 2017.
July 27th, 2017June Foray, one of the greatest voice talents ever. (Edited to add 7/28: NYT obit.)
I’ll quote at length the A/V Club obit just to give you some idea of the scope of her work:
She was 99. What a life.
This isn’t quite an obit, but I want to put it up anyway:
The baby is Angelina Liu. She’s the daughter of Sanny Liu and Officer Wenjian Liu of the NYPD.
Officer Liu and his partner, Rafael Ramos, were ambushed and killed in their patrol car on December 20, 2014. The suspect later committed suicide. The Liu’s had been married for three months: Mrs. Liu asked the doctors to harvest and preserve her husband’s sperm so that she could have his child.
Awful lot of dust in the air, you know? F’ing allergies or something.
Here’s your hat.
July 26th, 2017Black Hat 2017 is just getting started.
There’s some overlap with DEFCON 25. For example, hacking wind farm control networks and the SHA-1 hash talk are on both schedules. But there are also a few things unique to the Black Hat 2017 schedule:
- “Breaking Electronic Door Locks Like You’re on CSI: Cyber“. (Hey, didn’t they cancel that?) I suspect there may be some Bluetooth involved here.
- “Hacking Hardware with a $10 SD Card Reader“. I would enjoy watching this, and will enjoy reading about it, but I lack the hardware skills to actually do this.
- “Go Nuclear: Breaking Radiation Monitoring Devices“
- “Intercepting iCloud Keychain“. The use of the words “would have” in the abstract makes me think Apple’s already patched this issue, but you never know…
- “The Future of ApplePwn – How to Save Your Money“. “We’ll present a specially developed opensource utilities which demonstrates how hackers can reconnect your card to their iPhone or make fraudulent payments directly on the victim’s phone, even without a jailbreak.”
- “Broadpwn: Remotely Compromising Android and iOS via a Bug in Broadcom’s Wi-Fi Chipsets“. If memory serves, this got a lot of recent attention.
- “Hunting GPS Jammers“. Radio. GPS. There.
- “Attacking Encrypted USB Keys the Hard(ware) Way“.
- “Exploiting Network Printers“.
- “Free-Fall: Hacking Tesla from Wireless to CAN Bus“. Based on the abstract, it looks like Tesla has already fixed the issues, but the process of finding and exploiting them might still be interesting.
The same rules for the DEFCON post apply here: if you’re a presenter who wants some love, or if you want me to follow a specific talk, leave a comment.
DEFCON 25: 0 day notes.
July 25th, 2017I’m not going again this year. Maybe next year, if things hold together. But if I were going, what on the schedule excites me? What would I go to if I were there?
Thursday: neither of the 10:00 panels really grab me. At 11:00, maybe “From Box to Backdoor: Using Old School Tools and Techniques to Discover Backdoors in Modern Devices” but I’m at best 50/50 on that. At 12:00, I feel like I have to hit the “Jailbreaking Apple Watch” talk. “Amateur Digital Archeology” at 13:00 sounds mildly interesting.
Not really exited by anything at 14:00. At 15:00, I suspect I would end up at “Real-time RFID Cloning in the Field” and “Exploiting 0ld Mag-stripe information with New technology“. And 16:00 is probably when I’d check out the dealer’s room again, or start getting ready for an earlyish dinner.
Friday: 10:00 is sort of a toss-up. THE Garry Kasparov is giving a talk on
“The Brain’s Last Stand” and as you know, Bob, chess is one of my interests. On the other hand, there’s also two Mac specific talks, and Kasparov’s talk is probably going to be packed: I suspect I’d hit “macOS/iOS Kernel Debugging and Heap Feng Shui” followed by “Hacking travel routers like it’s 1999” (because I’m all about router hacking, babe). Nothing grabs me at 11:00, but I do want to see “Open Source Safe Cracking Robots – Combinations Under 1 Hour!” at 12:00:
13:00: “Controlling IoT devices with crafted radio signals“, and “Using GPS Spoofing to control time” at 14:00. (I do want to give a shout-out to the Elie Bursztein talk, “How we created the first SHA-1 collision and what it means for hash security“, though.)
Do I want to go to “Phone system testing and other fun tricks” at 15:00? Or do I want to take a break before “Radio Exploitation 101: Characterizing, Contextualizing, and Applying Wireless Attack Methods“:
And then at 17:00, “Cisco Catalyst Exploitation” is relevant to my interests. However, I don’t want to dismiss “The Internet Already Knows I’m Pregnant“:
Saturday: Nothing at 10:00. At 10:30, maybe “Breaking Wind: Adventures in Hacking Wind Farm Control Networks” because why not?
I have to give another shout-out to “If You Give a Mouse a Microchip… It will execute a payload and cheat at your high-stakes video game tournament” but I’m personally more interested in “Secure Tokin’ and Doobiekeys: How to Roll Your Own Counterfeit Hardware Security Devices” at 11:00. (“All Your Things Are Belong To Us” sounds pretty cool, too, but I’d probably wait for the notes/repos/etc. to be released rather than attending in person.)
Oddly, there’s really nothing that grabs me between 12:00 and 15:00. At 15:00, “Tracking Spies in the Skies” mildly intrigues me (mostly for the ADS-B aspect), while at 16:00 I’m really excited by “CableTap: Wirelessly Tapping Your Home Network” (more home router hacking! Hurrah!)
At 17:00:
You have my attention.
(Related article from Wired. Presenter’s Twitter feed.)
Sunday: “I Know What You Are by the Smell of Your Wifi“, followed a little later by “Backdooring the Lottery and Other Security Tales in Gaming over the Past 25 Years“.
Weirdly, after that, there’s nothing that interests me until the closing ceremonies at 16:00. (Though I might go to “Man in the NFC” if I was there.)
This seems like a very low-key year, and I’m not sure why. I don’t see any Bluetooth related stuff, and very little lock related. Perhaps I should be glad I’m skipping this year.
Anyway, you guys know the drill: if you see a talk you’re interested in, leave a comment and I’ll try to run it down. If you’re a presenter who wants to promote your talk, leave a comment and I’ll try to give you some love.
Obit watch: July 25, 2017.
July 25th, 2017Ralph Regula, former congressman from Ohio.
Among his accomplishments: the creation of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
You may also remember him from the National First Ladies Library and Historic Site, previously blogged here.
Curses!
July 25th, 2017DEFCON 25 is this week, and it snuck up on me. I was expecting it to start next week.
I guess this means I have to get the schedule analysis up in a hurry. I think I can get it done by Wednesday night; or at least get the Thursday/Friday parts of it up, and Saturday/Sunday up by Thursday night.
Is there anything that leaps out at me from a quick once-over? No “hippie, please!” panels that I noticed this year. Also no badge contest or mystery challenge.
(Also, I’m reorging the DEFCON tags. I think this should be transparent to everyone.)
Reptile cults. Why did it have to be reptile cults?
July 24th, 2017Today’s headline of the day:
Police: Woman kills boyfriend after spat with reptilian cult
More:
And:
Sounds like David Icke, but the linked article doesn’t specify. Are there other reptile-based conspiracy theorists out there?
Hello, Dali.
July 22nd, 2017Headline of the day:
Exhumation of Dali's remains finds his mustache still intact
Programming note.
July 21st, 2017By way of Lee Goldberg, I have just now learned that “Coronet Blue” is out on DVD.
This is usually the point at which my younger readers look at me like I have three heads, I say something snarky about getting off my lawn, and then I provide a (sometimes condescending) explanation. But since I’ve only heard about “Coronet Blue”, have never seen it, it ran in the summer for one season when I was two years old, and only 11 out of 13 episodes actually aired…
There’s a TV show template that sees a certain amount of use. Premise: person wakes up having been mysteriously left in the middle of nowhere. Person has no idea who they are, or any memory of their past: basically total amnesia. Person, however, has some sort of skill set (like instant recall of obscure facts) that makes them useful to “the authorities”. Person spends the rest of the series assisting “the authorities” in their inquires, while trying to recover their memory and identity. Generally, there’s some sort of massive conspiracy involved, too.
Examples of this template:
- “John Doe“, which I never watched an episode of because it sounded stupid, and Wikipedia confirms my bias. (“A by-product of transcending his body during a near-death experience, traveling to a spiritual plane where all the universe’s questions are answered.” Said questions apparently including “How many dimples are on a golf ball?”)
- “Kyle XY“, which played a little with the idea by making the protagonist a teen (though one with “enhanced physicality, senses and intellect”).
- “Blindspot“, still on as of this writing, even though to me it sounds every bit as dumb as “John Doe”. (I do like me some Marianne Jean-Baptiste, though: she was great in “Without a Trace”. And for the record, “Blindspot” also varies the premise a little, in that the (female) amnesiac was left in a bag in the middle of Times Square.)
Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that “Coronet Blue” was patient zero for this television archetype. I’ve been wanting to see it, but never actually expected that it would show up on DVD. After all, it was a one-season show. (Turns out it was actually successful enough that CBS wanted more episodes: the problem was the series had been shot two years previously, for various reasons CBS delayed running it, and by the time it aired and was moderately successful, Frank Converse had a starring role in another show. Wikipedia entry.)
So, yeah, I’m delighted. And I’m also interested in “Decoy“: as everyone knows, I’m a sucker for cop shows. Plus: Beverly Garland!
And now that we’re wrapping up season one of “Elementary”, I figure I’ve got a better chance of talking Lawrence and RoadRich into watching these two series than I do of persuading them to sit through “Cop Rock“.
News/!News
July 21st, 2017Probably news, at least to some people: Texas A&M has a large science fiction archive.
Possibly news to more people: this includes George R.R. Martin’s stuff.
Probably not news, if you think about it: this includes a lot of “Game of Thrones” related stuff.
Quote that pushed me into posting this:
(Much like, “And then the murders began“, “But also, there are swords” makes anything better.)
Hookers, no blow (yet) watch.
July 21st, 2017Hugh Freeze, the football coach at Ole Miss, resigned “effective immediately” last night.
If he resigned, why am I spinning this as a firing? ESPN:
Clarion-Ledger:
“Moral turpitude” is another of those phrases that I love. But I digress: what happened here?
From what I’ve been able to put together reading the press coverage, Houston Nutt, the former Ole Miss coach, is suing the university. As part of the discovery in his lawsuit, his attorney was able to get six days worth of Freeze’s phone records from his university issued cellphone. Freeze was allowed to redact his personal calls from the records, but did not redact what’s being described as a “one minute” call to a 313 area code number “associated with websites that advertise a female escort business based in Tampa, Florida”.
Freeze’s initial explanation was that it was a wrong number call. That’s plausible to me, given how short the call was. But apparently the university dug deeper into Freeze’s phone records:
…
So that’s $12.15 million down the drain. Why? Because a highly paid football coach wasn’t smart enough to use a burner phone for his calls to escort services.