Tuesday, May 3, 2016
"It is very likely that a large (15-20 cm in diameter), irregularly-shaped, cm-thick pancake with beveled edges, taped to the abdomen, would be invisible to this technology, ironically, because of its large volume, since it is easily confused with normal anatomy. Thus, a third of a kilo of PETN, easily picked up in a competent pat down, would be missed by backscatter "high technology". Forty grams of PETN, a purportedly dangerous amount, would fit in a 1.25 mm-thick pancake of the dimensions simulated here and be virtually invisible. Packed in a compact mode, say, a 1 cm×4 cm×5 cm brick, it would be detected."
Monday, May 2, 2016
Sunday, May 1, 2016
If you want to go serious on decrypt Subject Key Identifier (SKI) from a X509 certificate, meaning cloning ID EU cards and passaports...take a close and very careful reading:
How to validate the Subject Key Identifier (SKI) from a X509 certificate
In order to reproduce the problem I extracted the public key of the Root CA, converted to DER, hashed it with SHA1 and verified that indeed the hash did not match. Let’s do a demonstration of what I did with a public available Root CA:
Now let's calculate the SHA1 of the public key:
As reported, both hashes did not match!
At this point I was a bit confused and decided to read some documentation before moving forward. After some reading I found the answer in the 4.2.1.2 section of the the RFC3280 “Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure - Certificate and Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Profile ” (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3280.txt)
In our case we use method 1) for the SKI but in my calculations I was taking into consideration the whole public key, including tag, length, etc, while I should have used the key bits only.
With the following command I was able to locate the “BIT STRING” with the naked key:
And I only need to extract it and put it on a file in DER format:
The remaining part was to calculate the SHA1 hash which was the same as the SKI:
The same method was used to verify the SKI of a Root CA using SHA256 as a hashing algorithm.
http://certificateerror.blogspot.pt/2011/02/how-to-validate-subject-key-identifier.html
Friday, April 29, 2016
In the Cold War period of the 1950s, the CIA installed Radio Free Europe[21]
in Glória do Ribatejo, Portugal, and on June 7, 1956, officially
formalized the relation by inviting the new PIDE’s director, António
Neves Graça, to visit CIA headquarters.[22]
Here are two brief examples from a top-secret document with ten
articles and several sections and clauses, entitled “Proposed Agreement
Between the Policia International e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE) and the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)”
...
In 1957 one of the prisoners, Humberto de Lima Morais, stated in his affidavit that after being subjected to the statue torture for several days, he had begun to hear a familiar voice at night. Listening more closely, he had been able to discern the words of a dialogue, in which one voice was clearly his mother’s. She was saying: “‘I am alone and I have no one else, please.’ And the deep male voice of an agent, he thought, had replied, ‘It is only for a day or two, madam.’”[19] However, he could be inclined to admit that it may have been a hallucination, due to his weak physical state. The power of memory on our deepest perceptions and desires is paramount, so that each memory of a voice or other sound is always mediated, deferred and transformed, to a point that “we no longer know what we heard and what we think we’d heard.”[20] Nevertheless, based on similar cases and statements, such apparent hallucinations were actually the result of the use of manipulated sound materials, assembled to produce a state of emotional and psychological confusion through indirect listening, characteristic of acousmatic violence, with the aim of breaking and invading the prisoner’s subjectivity and morale.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mp/9460447.0009.101/--acousmatic-and-acoustic-violence-and-torture-in-the-estado?rgn=main;view=fulltext
...
In 1957 one of the prisoners, Humberto de Lima Morais, stated in his affidavit that after being subjected to the statue torture for several days, he had begun to hear a familiar voice at night. Listening more closely, he had been able to discern the words of a dialogue, in which one voice was clearly his mother’s. She was saying: “‘I am alone and I have no one else, please.’ And the deep male voice of an agent, he thought, had replied, ‘It is only for a day or two, madam.’”[19] However, he could be inclined to admit that it may have been a hallucination, due to his weak physical state. The power of memory on our deepest perceptions and desires is paramount, so that each memory of a voice or other sound is always mediated, deferred and transformed, to a point that “we no longer know what we heard and what we think we’d heard.”[20] Nevertheless, based on similar cases and statements, such apparent hallucinations were actually the result of the use of manipulated sound materials, assembled to produce a state of emotional and psychological confusion through indirect listening, characteristic of acousmatic violence, with the aim of breaking and invading the prisoner’s subjectivity and morale.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mp/9460447.0009.101/--acousmatic-and-acoustic-violence-and-torture-in-the-estado?rgn=main;view=fulltext
Friday, April 22, 2016
Sunday, April 17, 2016
What is Number26?
Number26 is a mobile first bank account interface for their own bank account (the actual bank license is provided by Wirecard Bank), which provides a full featured SEPA bank account and a couple of payment cards.This bank account uses a rather new method to verify that the initiated SEPA transactions were made by the correct owner of the bank account. To do so, the user first has to link their smartphone with the bank account, using information only known to the account holder. Once this initial pairing is done and a payment via the desktop browser is made, a push notification is sent to the mobile phone and the app is asking for confirmation showing this dialog:
For those not familiar with SEPA transfers I’ll quickly explain the information you have to provide to initiate a money transfer:
- The recipient’s name (just for reference. Validity is never verified)
- The recipient’s IBAN (International Bank Account Number) and BIC (Bank Identifier Code).
- The amount to be transfered
- A payment reference / subject
- The transfer release pin (which is set once by the user when the bank account was set up)
Where is the problem?
The theory
Look at the information you have to provide to initiate a bank transfer and then look at the screenshot above. Usually, common banks™ use SMS to send a TAN (Transaction Number) to the owner of the bank account, stating at least the amount and some sort of recipient info (usually the IBAN) and ask the user to enter the TAN into the desktop browser to finally release the transaction.This process has been streamlined with Number26. Instead of entering a TAN into the website received by the phone, the user has to release the transaction directly from the app, which opens once you tap on the notification you’ll receive. The app then shows the name of the recipient and the amount as shown in screenshot above. Once released the money is on it’s way to the recipient.
Stop right here… Let it sink in for a second…
So we just learned that common banks™ have their user verify their transactions. This is done by the user comparing the recipient’s info from the SMS with the info they have in their record, such as an invoice. However, with Number26, this verification is completely impossible as the recipient’s IBAN is never shown to the user once he initiates the transfer.
The attack
The attack on the desktop computer is rather simple. An attacker would install a malicious browser plugin or execute a man-in-the-middle attack exploiting computers with pre-installed insecure Certificate Authorities (see SuperFish on IBM or DELL). The attacking proxy or addon then waits for the user to initiate a bank transfer. It then secretly alters the IBAN and BIC in the background when sending the transaction request via the desktop site https://my.number26.de. Since the app does not show the modified IBAN (because it shows no IBAN at all), the user is in best belief that this transaction is legit and taps on release. In a sophisticated attack, the transaction history on the desktop would also be tampered with so the attack might go unnoticed for days.The temporary workaround
Luckily I was able to keep using my bank account without being vulnerable to this attack. As a workaround, the user would have to create a standing order which executes the payment in the future (Terminüberweisung). After releasing the transaction it is reviewable in the standing order section in their app.The Fix
After the update distributed on January 5th 2016, transactions have to be released with this new dialog:
Conclusion and personal note
What a clusterfail. It gets worse once you read Number26’s security information page. My favourite gem is this:
Partial screenshot of https://number26.eu/security/ taken on 2016-02-05
Fancy new user experience and a high security datacenter will never be able to protect the user if the design is flawed. Flawed? Broken beyond repair!
Communication with Number26
The support chat (a.k.a the bottomless pit)
Communication was always quite one-sided. I reported the issue to multiple support agentsover the course of six months, but all I ever heard was, “I am giving that to the developers”. I never heard back. So I upped the ante and told them that I am going to disclose my findings, when suddenly one support agent asked me to send a mail with the details to them, they will forward this mail to the developers. Success!For full transparency, this is the email I sent to the developers – as always with no reply coming back. It just went into a black hole. But this time, an update to the app came back. Hooray!
My Mail to the developers
Dear Developers, Dear Product Owner,
after studying your mobile app and transaction release mechanism for a while, I have found a severe design flaw which lead to me coming up with a proof of concept how to unknowingly redirect transactions to unwanted destinations with little to no effort.
I am a big advocate for using responsible disclosure, as putting your customers at risk is neither in my, nor in your interest. However, this design flaw is so apparent, that I am baffled that it is not being actively abused yet.
I will outline the problem for you, so you can take appropriate action to prevent abuse of this flaw after the full release of my findings on Feb-22 2016. I feel it is my responsibility to inform the public about the risks involved and how to minimize them. Should you feel that nothing has to be changed, I’ll be happy to get a mail from you stating so, so I can release my findings earlier.
Here are the details:
When creating a bank transfer via the desktop website on https://my.number26.de, you are asked to enter
* The recipient’s name
* The recipient’s IBAN and BIC
* The amount to be transfered
* A payment reference / subject
* The transfer release pin
In the next step, a push notification is sent to the owner’s smartphone. In my case, it is an android phone. The user is asked to either approve or delete the request. The information provided for this decision is:
* The recipient’s name
* The amount to be transfered
And here lies the severe design flaw. The user does not see the actual IBAN/BIC that has been sent to the server.
In my proof of concept, a browser plugin (which malicious software could install) can secretly alter the recipient’s IBAN and BIC in the HTTPS request so the money gets sent to the bank account of the “evil hacker”. When releasing the transaction on the Android phone, the user has no chance to see that the transaction has been tampered with. Other banks using mTAN verification methods include the recipient’s IBAN and BIC as this information is more crucial than the recipient’s name. They also state in their mTAN terms, that the IBAN in the SMS has to be checked against the IBAN from the invoice document.
Multiple test transfers have shown that with a completely wrong recipient’s name, transfers are still successful. Further, another point of intrusion could be a transparent proxy inbetween. Sure, there is SSL and certificates, but we are seeing manufacturers adding weird CAs to their computers (see superfish), so some computers might be vulnerable to this kind of attack.
I have reported this issue as a regular chat via the customer support half a year ago. Nothing happened since, so I am taking this to the next level. In my full disclosure on Feb-22 2016, I will advise your customers to only create one time standing orders for a date in the future (i.e. tomorrow), so the content of the transfer can be checked with the phone after it has been released, but before it has been executed.
If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to contact me. Unfortunately according to ***** [your support agent], you do not offer a pgp key for encryption, if someone else should pick up this conversation, I can not be held responsible for any earlier reporting about this issue. Should you use gpg nevertheless, we can upgrade the conversation anytime. Please use https://sks-keyservers.net/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0xCADA0055 as encryption key. I will also sign [my mails] with this key. Alternatively, you can call me at +xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Best Regards,
Christian Hawkins
No Comment
Unfortunately, Number26 was not available to me for a comment, whether or not there is an indication that this vulnerability has already been used.But worry not…
…your data was always protected. For your amusement, a statement on the security of Number26.
Partial screenshot of https://number26.eu/security/ taken on 2016-02-05
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Triacetone triperoxide (TATP) "Mother of Satan"
Triacetone triperoxide (TATP) is a highly unstable explosive prone to unintended detonation. Yet terrorists, such as those responsible for the March 22 bombings in Brussels and the November 2015 attacks in Paris, are increasingly using the compound to inflict carnage....
Acetone Peroxide is known as "Mother of Satan" because of its instability. This is a primary explosive, normally used as initiators. Storage of this chemical should be done with great care and in a cool, dark, and dry location. It is sensitive to shock, flame, or abrasion.
Materials
Hydrogen Peroxide
Acetone
Sulfuric Acid
Eye Dropper
Graduated Cylinder
Thermometer
Ice
NaCl (Salt)
Method
Acetone Peroxide is known as "Mother of Satan" because of its instability. This is a primary explosive, normally used as initiators. Storage of this chemical should be done with great care and in a cool, dark, and dry location. It is sensitive to shock, flame, or abrasion.
Materials
Hydrogen Peroxide
Acetone
Sulfuric Acid
Eye Dropper
Graduated Cylinder
Thermometer
Ice
NaCl (Salt)
Method
Add 30 ml acetone and 50 ml hydrogen peroxide into glass container and mix.
Cool the mixture in an ice/salt bath
Cool mixture to 5°C
While stirring, add dropwise 2.5 ml sulfuric acid, making sure temperature stays around 5°C and never above 10°C
Stir for 5 minutes after all the sulfuric acid is added
Cool mixture in some kind of ice bath or box for 12-24 hours.
Filter out the precipitate (white crystals) using paper towels or filter paper
Wash the crystals using small amounts of ice cold water, handling the crystals gently
Allow crystals to dry, store for use in a cool, dry, dark location.
*Note: Acetone peroxide is viable for aproximately 7 days after creation.
Cool the mixture in an ice/salt bath
Cool mixture to 5°C
While stirring, add dropwise 2.5 ml sulfuric acid, making sure temperature stays around 5°C and never above 10°C
Stir for 5 minutes after all the sulfuric acid is added
Cool mixture in some kind of ice bath or box for 12-24 hours.
Filter out the precipitate (white crystals) using paper towels or filter paper
Wash the crystals using small amounts of ice cold water, handling the crystals gently
Allow crystals to dry, store for use in a cool, dry, dark location.
*Note: Acetone peroxide is viable for aproximately 7 days after creation.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
X RAY FILM AND SILVER BROMIDE
After researching a bit, I found out that aluminum oxide is used in crystals for instance, missile guidance systems; this kind of crystals are also detemrine by chromium 51, anyway that gave me another clue, which was , this solubles in silver; what silver? its silver radioactive? well, silver 107 might be, than what's silver 107, well its silver bromide; which is an old x ray film; when exposure to light, however, we could say silver 107 becomes activated; what's activated? its that silver bromide on a gelatine base its not only active in light but also have too fast particles; what are fast particles? fast particles are unstable electrons; therefore atomic neutrons; therefore, radioactive; what's the conclusion? the conclusion is, the old film that gives the x ray image is impregnated of radioactive, which is silver bromide (when activated by sunlight)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
