Reverse Engineering – Noise

Details about the iOS Inactivity Reboot Feature

Bruce Schneier — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 12:08:40 +0000

I recently wrote about the new iOS feature that forces an iPhone to reboot after it’s been inactive for a longish period of time. Here are the technical details, discovered through reverse engineering. The feature triggers after seventy-two hours...

Reverse-Engineering Ticketmaster’s Barcode System

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 16:27:46 +0000

Interesting: By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure tha...

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

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 24 May 2022 11:11:23 +0000

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...

Hacking the Sony Playstation 5

Bruce Schneier — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 12:17:41 +0000

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 ...

Apple’s NeuralHash Algorithm Has Been Reverse-Engineered

Bruce Schneier — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 16:51:17 +0000

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

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 11:34:40 +0000

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 reali...

Hacking a Coffee Maker

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 11:16:12 +0000

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...