Entries Tagged "spoofing"

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Security Vulnerability of HTML Emails

This is a newly discovered email vulnerability:

The email your manager received and forwarded to you was something completely innocent, such as a potential customer asking a few questions. All that email was supposed to achieve was being forwarded to you. However, the moment the email appeared in your inbox, it changed. The innocent pretext disappeared and the real phishing email became visible. A phishing email you had to trust because you knew the sender and they even confirmed that they had forwarded it to you.

This attack is possible because most email clients allow CSS to be used to style HTML emails. When an email is forwarded, the position of the original email in the DOM usually changes, allowing for CSS rules to be selectively applied only when an email has been forwarded.

An attacker can use this to include elements in the email that appear or disappear depending on the context in which the email is viewed. Because they are usually invisible, only appear in certain circumstances, and can be used for all sorts of mischief, I’ll refer to these elements as kobold letters, after the elusive sprites of mythology.

I can certainly imagine the possibilities.

Posted on April 8, 2024 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

Successful Hack of Time-Triggered Ethernet

Time-triggered Ethernet (TTE) is used in spacecraft, basically to use the same hardware to process traffic with different timing and criticality. Researchers have defeated it:

On Tuesday, researchers published findings that, for the first time, break TTE’s isolation guarantees. The result is PCspooF, an attack that allows a single non-critical device connected to a single plane to disrupt synchronization and communication between TTE devices on all planes. The attack works by exploiting a vulnerability in the TTE protocol. The work was completed by researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

“Our evaluation shows that successful attacks are possible in seconds and that each successful attack can cause TTE devices to lose synchronization for up to a second and drop tens of TT messages—both of which can result in the failure of critical systems like aircraft or automobiles,” the researchers wrote. “We also show that, in a simulated spaceflight mission, PCspooF causes uncontrolled maneuvers that threaten safety and mission success.”

Much more detail in the article—and the research paper.

Posted on November 18, 2022 at 10:04 AM • View Comments

Finding the Location of Telegram Users

Security researcher Ahmed Hassan has shown that spoofing the Android’s “People Nearby” feature allows him to pinpoint the physical location of Telegram users:

Using readily available software and a rooted Android device, he’s able to spoof the location his device reports to Telegram servers. By using just three different locations and measuring the corresponding distance reported by People Nearby, he is able to pinpoint a user’s precise location.

[…]

A proof-of-concept video the researcher sent to Telegram showed how he could discern the address of a People Nearby user when he used a free GPS spoofing app to make his phone report just three different locations. He then drew a circle around each of the three locations with a radius of the distance reported by Telegram. The user’s precise location was where all three intersected.

[…]

Fixing the problem—or at least making it much harder to exploit it—wouldn’t be hard from a technical perspective. Rounding locations to the nearest mile and adding some random bits generally suffices. When the Tinder app had a similar disclosure vulnerability, developers used this kind of technique to fix it.

Posted on January 14, 2021 at 6:08 AM • View Comments

Split-Second Phantom Images Fool Autopilots

Researchers are tricking autopilots by inserting split-second images into roadside billboards.

Researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev … previously revealed that they could use split-second light projections on roads to successfully trick Tesla’s driver-assistance systems into automatically stopping without warning when its camera sees spoofed images of road signs or pedestrians. In new research, they’ve found they can pull off the same trick with just a few frames of a road sign injected on a billboard’s video. And they warn that if hackers hijacked an internet-connected billboard to carry out the trick, it could be used to cause traffic jams or even road accidents while leaving little evidence behind.

[…]

In this latest set of experiments, the researchers injected frames of a phantom stop sign on digital billboards, simulating what they describe as a scenario in which someone hacked into a roadside billboard to alter its video. They also upgraded to Tesla’s most recent version of Autopilot known as HW3. They found that they could again trick a Tesla or cause the same Mobileye device to give the driver mistaken alerts with just a few frames of altered video.

The researchers found that an image that appeared for 0.42 seconds would reliably trick the Tesla, while one that appeared for just an eighth of a second would fool the Mobileye device. They also experimented with finding spots in a video frame that would attract the least notice from a human eye, going so far as to develop their own algorithm for identifying key blocks of pixels in an image so that a half-second phantom road sign could be slipped into the “uninteresting” portions.

The paper:

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate “split-second phantom attacks,” a scientific gap that causes two commercial advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs), Telsa Model X (HW 2.5 and HW 3) and Mobileye 630, to treat a depthless object that appears for a few milliseconds as a real obstacle/object. We discuss the challenge that split-second phantom attacks create for ADASs. We demonstrate how attackers can apply split-second phantom attacks remotely by embedding phantom road signs into an advertisement presented on a digital billboard which causes Tesla’s autopilot to suddenly stop the car in the middle of a road and Mobileye 630 to issue false notifications. We also demonstrate how attackers can use a projector in order to cause Tesla’s autopilot to apply the brakes in response to a phantom of a pedestrian that was projected on the road and Mobileye 630 to issue false notifications in response to a projected road sign. To counter this threat, we propose a countermeasure which can determine whether a detected object is a phantom or real using just the camera sensor. The countermeasure (GhostBusters) uses a “committee of experts” approach and combines the results obtained from four lightweight deep convolutional neural networks that assess the authenticity of an object based on the object’s light, context, surface, and depth. We demonstrate our countermeasure’s effectiveness (it obtains a TPR of 0.994 with an FPR of zero) and test its robustness to adversarial machine learning attacks.

Posted on October 19, 2020 at 6:28 AM • View Comments

Security Vulnerability in Internet-Connected Construction Cranes

This seems bad:

The F25 software was found to contain a capture replay vulnerability—basically an attacker would be able to eavesdrop on radio transmissions between the crane and the controller, and then send their own spoofed commands over the air to seize control of the crane.

“These devices use fixed codes that are reproducible by sniffing and re-transmission,” US-CERT explained.

“This can lead to unauthorized replay of a command, spoofing of an arbitrary message, or keeping the controlled load in a permanent ‘stop’ state.”

Here’s the CERT advisory.

Posted on October 29, 2018 at 6:18 AM • View Comments

Detecting Phishing Sites with Machine Learning

Really interesting article:

A trained eye (or even a not-so-trained one) can discern when something phishy is going on with a domain or subdomain name. There are search tools, such as Censys.io, that allow humans to specifically search through the massive pile of certificate log entries for sites that spoof certain brands or functions common to identity-processing sites. But it’s not something humans can do in real time very well—which is where machine learning steps in.

StreamingPhish and the other tools apply a set of rules against the names within certificate log entries. In StreamingPhish’s case, these rules are the result of guided learning—a corpus of known good and bad domain names is processed and turned into a “classifier,” which (based on my anecdotal experience) can then fairly reliably identify potentially evil websites.

Posted on August 9, 2018 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.