In July 2020, the European Court of Justice invalidated an exchange of the personal data between the European Union and the United States. The times of the Safe Harbor and the Privacy Shield are over. Now what?
Information Security *
Data protection
The 2020 National Internet Segment Reliability Research
The National Internet Segment Reliability Research explains how the outage of a single Autonomous System might affect the connectivity of the impacted region with the rest of the world. Most of the time, the most critical AS in the region is the dominant ISP on the market, but not always.
As the number of alternate routes between AS’s increases (and do not forget that the Internet stands for “interconnected network” — and each network is an AS), so does the fault-tolerance and stability of the Internet across the globe. Although some paths are from the beginning more important than others, establishing as many alternate routes as possible is the only viable way to ensure an adequately robust network.
The global connectivity of any given AS, regardless of whether it is an international giant or regional player, depends on the quantity and quality of its path to Tier-1 ISPs.
Usually, Tier-1 implies an international company offering global IP transit service over connections with other Tier-1 providers. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that such connectivity will be maintained all the time. For many ISPs at all “tiers”, losing connection to just one Tier-1 peer would likely render them unreachable from some parts of the world.
The hunt for vulnerability: executing arbitrary code on NVIDIA GeForce NOW virtual machines
Introduction
Against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, the demand for cloud gaming services has noticeably increased. These services provide computing power to launch video games and stream gameplay to user devices in real-time. The most obvious advantage of this gaming type is that gamers do not need to have high-end hardware. An inexpensive computer is enough to run the client, spending time in self-isolation while the remote server carries out all calculations.
NVIDIA GeForce NOW is one of these cloud-based game streaming services. According to Google Trends, worldwide search queries for GeForce NOW peaked in February 2020. This correlates with the beginning of quarantine restrictions in many Asian, European, and North and South American countries, as well as other world regions. At the same time in Russia, where the self-isolation regime began in March, we see a similar picture with a corresponding delay.
Given the high interest in GeForce NOW, we decided to explore this service from an information security standpoint.
The world is sick: mass surveillance
How much does your privacy cost? Your medical information, your home address? How much is your browsing and search history? You might have never thought about that.
Dive into Email Security: MTA-STS Policies
In a nutshell: MTA-STS is a way to protect emails against interception (man-in-the-middle aka MitM attacks) between email servers. It partially resolves architectural issues in email protocols and is described in a recent RFC 8461 standard.
Static code analysis of the PMDK library collection by Intel and errors that are not actual errors
We were asked to check a collection of open source PMDK libraries for developing and debugging applications with NVRAM support by PVS-Studio. Well, why not? Moreover, this is a small project in C and C++ with a total code base size of about 170 KLOC without comments. Which means, the results review won't take much energy and time. Let's go.
EVVIS-QR1 USB Programmable TOTP hardware token
What is EVVIS-QR1?
EVVIS-QR1 is a hardware device developed primarily for Electronic visit verification (EVV) information systems (hence the name). It is a standards-based TOTP hardware token that can also be programmed over USB. The OTP generated is shown on the display both as regular digits as well as a QR image. Both features (OTP shown as QR code and HID keyboard emulation) are intended to make it possible to minimize typos when entering the OTP.
Y messenger Manifesto
We are a team of independent developers. We have created a new messenger, the purpose of which is to solve the critical problems of the modern Internet and the modes of communication it provides. We see users become hostages to the services they have grown accustomed to and we see corporations exploiting their users and controlling them. And we don’t like it. We believe the Internet should be different.
In this Manifesto, we disclose our vision of the Internet and describe what we have done to make it better. If you share our ideas — join us. Together we can achieve more than each of us can alone.
Looking back at 3 months of the global traffic shapeshifting
There would be no TL;DR in this article, sorry.
Those have been three months that genuinely changed the world. An entire lifeline passed from February, 1, when the coronavirus pandemics just started to spread outside of China and European countries were about to react, to April, 30, when nations were locked down in quarantine measures almost all over the entire world. We want to take a look at the repercussions, cyclic nature of the reaction and, of course, provide DDoS attacks and BGP incidents overview on a timeframe of three months.
In general, there seems to be an objective pattern in almost every country’s shift into the quarantine lockdown.
Safe-enough linux server, a quick security tuning
The case: You fire up a professionally prepared Linux image at a cloud platform provider (Amazon, DO, Google, Azure, etc.) and it will run a kind of production level service moderately exposed to hacking attacks (non-targeted, non-advanced threats).
What would be the standard quick security related tuning to configure before you install the meat?
release: 2005, Ubuntu + CentOS (supposed to work with Amazon Linux, Fedora, Debian, RHEL as well)
This is how you deal with route leaks
Here’s the beginning: for approximately an hour, starting at 19:28 UTC on April 1, 2020, the largest Russian ISP — Rostelecom (AS12389) — was announcing prefixes belonging to prominent internet players: Akamai, Cloudflare, Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Amazon AWS, and other famous names.
Before the issue was resolved, paths between the largest cloud networks were somewhat disrupted — the Internet blinked. The route leak was distributed quite well through Rascom (AS20764), then Cogent (AS174) and in a couple of minutes through Level3 (AS3356) to the world. The issue suddenly became bad enough that it saturated the route decision-making process for a few Tier-1 ISPs.
It looked like this:
With that:
SLAE — SecurityTube Linux Assembly Exam
SecurityTube Linux Assembly Exam (SLAE) — is a final part of course:
securitytube-training.com/online-courses/securitytube-linux-assembly-expert
This course focuses on teaching the basics of 32-bit assembly language for the Intel Architecture (IA-32) family of processors on the Linux platform and applying it to Infosec and can be useful for security engineers, penetrations testers and everyone who wants to understand how to write simple shellcodes.
This blog post have been created for completing requirements of the Security Tube Linux Assembly Expert certification.
Exam consists of 7 tasks:
1. TCP Bind Shell
2. Reverse TCP Shell
3. Egghunter
4. Custom encoder
5. Analysis of 3 msfvenom generated shellcodes with GDB/ndisasm/libemu
6. Modifying 3 shellcodes from shell-storm
7. Creating custom encryptor
New action to disrupt world’s largest online criminal network
Today, Microsoft and partners across 35 countries took coordinated legal and technical steps to disrupt one of the world’s most prolific botnets, called Necurs, which has infected more than nine million computers globally. This disruption is the result of eight years of tracking and planning and will help ensure the criminals behind this network are no longer able to use key elements of its infrastructure to execute cyberattacks.
A botnet is a network of computers that a cybercriminal has infected with malicious software, or malware. Once infected, criminals can control those computers remotely and use them to commit crimes. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, BitSight and others in the security community first observed the Necurs botnet in 2012 and have seen it distribute several forms of malware, including the GameOver Zeus banking trojan.
What would be the future of Android in 2020?
Source: Google Images
But before you took the plunge in exploring and riding on the waves of changes or hire an android app developer to develop an app, it is important to understand the trends and its implications on the android application development ecosystem.
Developing and deploying Python for secured environments with Kushal Das
The company of speakers at Moscow Python Conf++ 2020 is great, and it's not a good luck but thorough Program Committee's work. But who cares about achievements, it's much more interesting what the speaker thinks about our own questions. Conferences suits good to find it out, get insider information or advice from an experienced developer. But I got an advantage of being in Program Committee so I already asked our speaker Kushal Das some questions.
A unique feature of Kushal's speeches is that he often unveils «secret» ways to break Python code and then shows how to write code so that the NSA can't hack it. At our conference Kushal will tell you how to safely develop and deploy Python code. Of course I asked him about security.
Token2 C301-i, the first iOS-compatible programmable TOTP token
iOS 13 — coreNFC
The situation has improved a little bit with the release of iOS v13 when access to more features of coreNFC Developer API was introduced. Unfortunately, we discovered that it is not fully compatible with the NFC chips we are using. As there are little chances that Apple will make an effort to change this to adapt to our NFC chips, we had to do the opposite and develop a new, iOS13 compatible, NFC chip instead.
Token2 C301-i, the first iOS-compatible programmable TOTP token
Our first iOS-compatible token (model reference: “C301-i”) is currently being beta-tested and will start selling in a couple of months. Pre-orders are available here.
Are my open-source libraries vulnerable? (2 min reading to make your life more secure)
The explosion of open source and issues related to it
The amount of open source or other third party code used in a software project is estimated as 60-90% of a codebase. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, almost always run with full privileges. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defences and enable a range of possible attacks and impacts.
Conclusion: even if you perform constant security code reviews, you still might be vulnerable because of third-party components.
Some have tried to do this manually, but the sheer amount of work and data is growing and is time consuming, difficult, and error prone to manage. It would require several full time employees and skilled security analysts to constantly monitor all sources to stay on top.
Full disclosure: 0day vulnerability (backdoor) in firmware for Xiaongmai-based DVRs, NVRs and IP cameras
This is a full disclosure of recent backdoor integrated into DVR/NVR devices built on top of HiSilicon SoC with Xiaongmai firmware. Described vulnerability allows attacker to gain root shell access and full control of device. Full disclosure format for this report has been chosen due to lack of trust to vendor. Proof of concept code is presented below.
Authenticate me. If you can…
I frequently hear questions like "How to implement authentication in an Android app?", "Where to store a PIN?", "Hey man, will I be secure if I implement an authentication feature in such a way?" and a lot of the kind. I got really tired answering these questions so I decided to write all my thoughts about it once to share with all questioners.
How elliptic curve cryptography works in TLS 1.3
A couple of reader alerts:
In order to (somewhat) simplify the description process and tighten the volume of the article we are going to write, it is essential to make a significant remark and state the primary constraint right away — everything we are going to tell you today on the practical side of the problematics is viable only in terms of TLS 1.3. Meaning that while your ECDSA certificate would still work in TLS 1.2 if you wish it worked, providing backwards compatibility, the description of the actual handshake process, cipher suits and client-server benchmarks covers TLS 1.3 only. Of course, this does not relate to the mathematical description of algorithms behind modern encryption systems.
This article was written by neither a mathematician nor an engineer — although those helped to find a way around scary math and reviewed this article. Many thanks to Qrator Labs employees.
(Elliptic Curve) Diffie-Hellman (Ephemeral)
The Diffie–Hellman legacy in the 21 centuryOf course, this has started with neither Diffie nor Hellman. But to provide a correct timeline, we need to point out main dates and events.
There were several major personas in the development of modern cryptography. Most notably, Alan Turing and Claud Shannon both laid an incredible amount of work over the field of theory of computation and information theory as well as general cryptanalysis, and both Diffie and Hellman, are officially credited for coming up with the idea of public-key (or so-called asymmetric) cryptography (although it is known that in the UK there were made serious advances in cryptography that stayed under secrecy for a very long time), making those two gentlemen pioneers.
In what exactly?
Authors' contribution
alizar 21361.3marks 9200.7ptsecurity 8942.8LukaSafonov 6194.9GlobalSign_admin 5544.9ValdikSS 5478.6Kaspersky_Lab 4846.9esetnod32 3275.0zhovner 2947.0ru_vds 2748.4