Excellent Write-up of the SolarWinds Security Breach
Robert Chesney wrote up the Solar Winds story as a case study, and it’s a really good summary.
Page 142
Friday Squid Blogging: Tentacle Doorknob
It’s pretty.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Details of the Recent T-Mobile Breach
Seems that 47 million customers were affected. Surprising no one, T-Mobile had awful security.
I’ve lost count of how many times T-Mobile has been hacked.
Interesting Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
If you plug a Razer peripheral (mouse or keyboard, I think) into a Windows 10 or 11 machine, you can use a vulnerability in the Razer Synapse software—which automatically downloads—to gain SYSTEM privileges.
It should be noted that this is a local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability, which means that you need to have a Razer devices and physical access to a computer. With that said, the bug is so easy to exploit as you just need to spend $20 on Amazon for Razer mouse and plug it into Windows 10 to become an admin.
Surveillance of the Internet Backbone
Vice has an article about how data brokers sell access to the Internet backbone. This is netflow data. It’s useful for cybersecurity forensics, but can also be used for things like tracing VPN activity.
At a high level, netflow data creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. It can show which server communicated with another, information that may ordinarily only be available to the server owner or the ISP carrying the traffic. Crucially, this data can be used for, among other things, tracking traffic through virtual private networks, which are used to mask where someone is connecting to a server from, and by extension, their approximate physical location.
In the hands of some governments, that could be dangerous.
Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Brains
Interesting National Geographic article.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
More on Apple’s iPhone Backdoor
In this post, I’ll collect links on Apple’s iPhone backdoor for scanning CSAM images. Previous links are here and here.
Apple says that hash collisions in its CSAM detection system were expected, and not a concern. I’m not convinced that this secondary system was originally part of the design, since it wasn’t discussed in the original specification.
Good op-ed from a group of Princeton researchers who developed a similar system:
Our system could be easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship. The design wasn’t restricted to a specific category of content; a service could simply swap in any content-matching database, and the person using that service would be none the wiser.
EDITED TO ADD (8/30): Good essays by Matthew Green and Alex Stamos, Ross Anderson, Edward Snowden, and Susan Landau. And also Kurt Opsahl.
EDITED TO ADD (9/6): Apple is delaying implementation of the scheme.
T-Mobile Data Breach
It’s a big one:
As first reported by Motherboard on Sunday, someone on the dark web claims to have obtained the data of 100 million from T-Mobile’s servers and is selling a portion of it on an underground forum for 6 bitcoin, about $280,000. The trove includes not only names, phone numbers, and physical addresses but also more sensitive data like social security numbers, driver’s license information, and IMEI numbers, unique identifiers tied to each mobile device. Motherboard confirmed that samples of the data “contained accurate information on T-Mobile customers.”
Apple’s NeuralHash Algorithm Has Been Reverse-Engineered
Apple’s NeuralHash algorithm—the one it’s using for client-side scanning on the iPhone—has been reverse-engineered.
Turns out it was already in iOS 14.3, and someone noticed:
Early tests show that it can tolerate image resizing and compression, but not cropping or rotations.
We also have the first collision: two images that hash to the same value.
The next step is to generate innocuous images that NeuralHash classifies as prohibited content.
This was a bad idea from the start, and Apple never seemed to consider the adversarial context of the system as a whole, and not just the cryptography.
Tetris: Chinese Espionage Tool
I’m starting to see writings about a Chinese espionage tool that exploits website vulnerabilities to try and identify Chinese dissidents.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.