Tag Archives: Reverse Engineering

The Justice Department Will No Longer Charge Security Researchers with Criminal Hacking

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/05/the-justice-department-will-no-longer-charge-security-researchers-with-criminal-hacking.html

Following a recent Supreme Court ruling, the Justice Department will no longer prosecute “good faith” security researchers with cybercrimes:

The policy for the first time directs that good-faith security research should not be charged. Good faith security research means accessing a computer solely for purposes of good-faith testing, investigation, and/or correction of a security flaw or vulnerability, where such activity is carried out in a manner designed to avoid any harm to individuals or the public, and where the information derived from the activity is used primarily to promote the security or safety of the class of devices, machines, or online services to which the accessed computer belongs, or those who use such devices, machines, or online services.

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The new policy states explicitly the longstanding practice that “the department’s goals for CFAA enforcement are to promote privacy and cybersecurity by upholding the legal right of individuals, network owners, operators, and other persons to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information stored in their information systems.” Accordingly, the policy clarifies that hypothetical CFAA violations that have concerned some courts and commentators are not to be charged. Embellishing an online dating profile contrary to the terms of service of the dating website; creating fictional accounts on hiring, housing, or rental websites; using a pseudonym on a social networking site that prohibits them; checking sports scores at work; paying bills at work; or violating an access restriction contained in a term of service are not themselves sufficient to warrant federal criminal charges. The policy focuses the department’s resources on cases where a defendant is either not authorized at all to access a computer or was authorized to access one part of a computer—such as one email account—and, despite knowing about that restriction, accessed a part of the computer to which his authorized access did not extend, such as other users’ emails.

News article.

Hacking the Sony Playstation 5

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/11/hacking-the-sony-playstation-5.html

I just don’t think it’s possible to create a hack-proof computer system, especially when the system is physically in the hands of the hackers. The Sony Playstation 5 is the latest example:

Hackers may have just made some big strides towards possibly jailbreaking the PlayStation 5 over the weekend, with the hacking group Fail0verflow claiming to have managed to obtain PS5 root keys allowing them to decrypt the console’s firmware.

[…]

The two exploits are particularly notable due to the level of access they theoretically give to the PS5’s software. Decrypted firmware ­ which is possible through Fail0verflow’s keys ­ would potentially allow for hackers to further reverse engineer the PS5 software and potentially develop the sorts of hacks that allowed for things like installing Linux, emulators, or even pirated games on past Sony consoles.

In 1999, Adam Shostack and I wrote a paper discussing the security challenges of giving people devices that included embedded secrets that needed to be kept from those people. We were writing about smart cards, but our lessons were general. And they’re no less applicable today.

Apple’s NeuralHash Algorithm Has Been Reverse-Engineered

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/08/apples-neuralhash-algorithm-has-been-reverse-engineered.html

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.

Reverse-Engineering the Redactions in the Ghislaine Maxwell Deposition

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/10/reverse-engineering-the-redactions-in-the-ghislaine-maxwell-deposition.html

Slate magazine was able to cleverly read the Ghislaine Maxwell deposition and reverse-engineer many of the redacted names.

We’ve long known that redacting is hard in the modern age, but most of the failures to date have been a result of not realizing that covering digital text with a black bar doesn’t always remove the text from the underlying digital file. As far as I know, this reverse-engineering technique is new.

EDITED TO ADD: A similar technique was used in 1991 to recover the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Hacking a Coffee Maker

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/09/hacking-a-coffee-maker.html

As expected, IoT devices are filled with vulnerabilities:

As a thought experiment, Martin Hron, a researcher at security company Avast, reverse engineered one of the older coffee makers to see what kinds of hacks he could do with it. After just a week of effort, the unqualified answer was: quite a lot. Specifically, he could trigger the coffee maker to turn on the burner, dispense water, spin the bean grinder, and display a ransom message, all while beeping repeatedly. Oh, and by the way, the only way to stop the chaos was to unplug the power cord.

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In any event, Hron said the ransom attack is just the beginning of what an attacker could do. With more work, he believes, an attacker could program a coffee maker — ­and possibly other appliances made by Smarter — ­to attack the router, computers, or other devices connected to the same network. And the attacker could probably do it with no overt sign anything was amiss.