Friday, June 2, 2023

Hacktivity 2018 Badge - Quick Start Guide For Beginners

You either landed on this blog post because 
  • you are a huge fan of Hacktivity
  • you bought this badge around a year ago
  • you are just interested in hacker conference badge hacking. 
or maybe all of the above. Whatever the reasons, this guide should be helpful for those who never had any real-life experience with these little gadgets. 
But first things first, here is a list what you need for hacking the badge:
  • a computer with USB port and macOS, Linux or Windows. You can use other OS as well, but this guide covers these
  • USB mini cable to connect the badge to the computer
  • the Hacktivity badge from 2018
By default, this is how your badge looks like.


Let's get started

Luckily, you don't need any soldering skills for the first steps. Just connect the USB mini port to the bottom left connector on the badge, connect the other part of the USB cable to your computer, and within some seconds you will be able to see that the lights on your badge are blinking. So far so good. 

Now, depending on which OS you use, you should choose your destiny here.

Linux

The best source of information about a new device being connected is
# dmesg

The tail of the output should look like
[267300.206966] usb 2-2.2: new full-speed USB device number 14 using uhci_hcd [267300.326484] usb 2-2.2: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=6001 [267300.326486] usb 2-2.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [267300.326487] usb 2-2.2: Product: FT232R USB UART [267300.326488] usb 2-2.2: Manufacturer: FTDI [267300.326489] usb 2-2.2: SerialNumber: AC01U4XN [267300.558684] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic [267300.558692] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for generic [267300.639673] usbcore: registered new interface driver ftdi_sio [267300.639684] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device [267300.639713] ftdi_sio 2-2.2:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected [267300.639741] usb 2-2.2: Detected FT232RL [267300.643235] usb 2-2.2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

Dmesg is pretty kind to us, as it even notifies us that the device is now attached to ttyUSB0. 

From now on, connecting to the device is exactly the same as it is in the macOS section, so please find the "Linux users, read it from here" section below. 

macOS

There are multiple commands you can type into Terminal to get an idea about what you are looking at. One command is:
# ioreg -p IOUSB -w0 -l

With this command, you should get output similar to this:

+-o FT232R USB UART@14100000  <class AppleUSBDevice, id 0x100005465, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (712 ms), retain 20>     |   {     |     "sessionID" = 71217335583342     |     "iManufacturer" = 1     |     "bNumConfigurations" = 1     |     "idProduct" = 24577     |     "bcdDevice" = 1536     |     "Bus Power Available" = 250     |     "USB Address" = 2     |     "bMaxPacketSize0" = 8     |     "iProduct" = 2     |     "iSerialNumber" = 3     |     "bDeviceClass" = 0     |     "Built-In" = No     |     "locationID" = 336592896     |     "bDeviceSubClass" = 0     |     "bcdUSB" = 512     |     "USB Product Name" = "FT232R USB UART"     |     "PortNum" = 1     |     "non-removable" = "no"     |     "IOCFPlugInTypes" = {"9dc7b780-9ec0-11d4-a54f-000a27052861"="IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOUSBLib.bundle"}     |     "bDeviceProtocol" = 0     |     "IOUserClientClass" = "IOUSBDeviceUserClientV2"     |     "IOPowerManagement" = {"DevicePowerState"=0,"CurrentPowerState"=3,"CapabilityFlags"=65536,"MaxPowerState"=4,"DriverPowerState"=3}     |     "kUSBCurrentConfiguration" = 1     |     "Device Speed" = 1     |     "USB Vendor Name" = "FTDI"     |     "idVendor" = 1027     |     "IOGeneralInterest" = "IOCommand is not serializable"     |     "USB Serial Number" = "AC01U4XN"     |     "IOClassNameOverride" = "IOUSBDevice"     |   } 
The most important information you get is the USB serial number - AC01U4XN in my case.
Another way to get this information is
# system_profiler SPUSBDataType
which will give back something similar to:
FT232R USB UART:            Product ID: 0x6001           Vendor ID: 0x0403  (Future Technology Devices International Limited)           Version: 6.00           Serial Number: AC01U4XN           Speed: Up to 12 Mb/sec           Manufacturer: FTDI           Location ID: 0x14100000 / 2           Current Available (mA): 500           Current Required (mA): 90           Extra Operating Current (mA): 0

The serial number you got is the same.

What you are trying to achieve here is to connect to the device, but in order to connect to it, you have to know where the device in the /dev folder is mapped to. A quick and dirty solution is to list all devices under /dev when the device is disconnected, once when it is connected, and diff the outputs. For example, the following should do the job:

ls -lha /dev/tty* > plugged.txt ls -lha /dev/tty* > np.txt vimdiff plugged.txt np.txt

The result should be obvious, /dev/tty.usbserial-AC01U4XN is the new device in case macOS. In the case of Linux, it was /dev/ttyUSB0.

Linux users, read it from here. macOS users, please continue reading

Now you can use either the built-in screen command or minicom to get data out from the badge. Usually, you need three information in order to communicate with a badge. Path on /dev (you already got that), speed in baud, and the async config parameters. Either you can guess the speed or you can Google that for the specific device. Standard baud rates include 110, 300, 600, 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600, 14400, 19200, 38400, 57600, 115200, 128000 and 256000 bits per second. I usually found 1200, 9600 and 115200 a common choice, but that is just me.
Regarding the async config parameters, the default is that 8 bits are used, there is no parity bit, and 1 stop bit is used. The short abbreviation for this is 8n1. In the next example, you will use the screen command. By default, it uses 8n1, but it is called cs8 to confuse the beginners.

If you type:
# screen /dev/tty.usbserial-AC01U4XN 9600
or
# screen /dev/ttyUSB0 9600
and wait for minutes and nothing happens, it is because the badge already tried to communicate via the USB port, but no-one was listening there. Disconnect the badge from the computer, connect again, and type the screen command above to connect. If you are quick enough you can see that the amber LED will stop blinking and your screen command is greeted with some interesting information. By quick enough I mean ˜90 seconds, as it takes the device 1.5 minutes to boot the OS and the CTF app.

Windows

When you connect the device to Windows, you will be greeted with a pop-up.

Just click on the popup and you will see the COM port number the device is connected to:


In this case, it is connected to COM3. So let's fire up our favorite putty.exe, select Serial, choose COM3, add speed 9600, and you are ready to go!


You might check the end of the macOS section in case you can't see anything. Timing is everything.

The CTF

Welcome to the Hacktivity 2018 badge challenge!  This challenge consists of several tasks with one or more levels of difficulty. They are all connected in some way or another to HW RE and there's no competition, the whole purpose is to learn things.  Note: we recommend turning on local echo in your terminal! Also, feel free to ask for hints at the Hackcenter!  Choose your destiny below:    1. Visual HW debugging   2. Reverse engineering   3. RF hacking   4. Crypto protection  Enter the number of the challenge you're interested in and press [
Excellent, now you are ready to hack this! In case you are lost in controlling the screen command, go to https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-use-linux-screen/.

I will not spoil any fun in giving out the challenge solutions here. It is still your task to find solutions for these.

But here is a catch. You can get a root shell on the device. And it is pretty straightforward. Just carefully remove the Omega shield from the badge. Now you see two jumpers; by default, these are connected together as UART1. As seen below.



But what happens if you move these jumpers to UART0? Guess what, you can get a root shell! This is what I call privilege escalation on the HW level :) But first, let's connect the Omega shield back. Also, for added fun, this new interface speaks on 115200 baud, so you should change your screen parameters to 115200. Also, the new interface has a different ID under /dev, but I am sure you can figure this out from now on.




If you connect to the device during boot time, you can see a lot of exciting debug information about the device. And after it boots, you just get a root prompt. Woohoo! 
But what can you do with this root access? Well, for starters, how about running 
# strings hello | less

From now on, you are on your own to hack this badge. Happy hacking.
Big thanks to Attila Marosi-Bauer and Hackerspace Budapest for developing this badge and the contests.

PS: In case you want to use the radio functionality of the badge, see below how you should solder the parts to it. By default, you can process slow speed radio frequency signals on GPIO19. But for higher transfer speeds, you should wire the RF module DATA OUT pin with the RX1 free together.



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Thursday, June 1, 2023

Stop Using MD-5, Now!

TL;DR: Don't use MD-5 to identify malware samples. Believe me, it is a bad idea. Use SHA-256 or a stronger hash function.

This post is dedicated to all malware researchers, still using MD-5 to identify malware samples.

Before deep-diving into the details, let me explain my view on this topic. Whenever you want to identify a malware, it is only OK to publish the MD-5 hash of the malware if you post at least the SHA-256 hash of the malware as well. Publishing only the MD-5 hash is unprofessional. If you want to understand why, please continue reading. If you know about the problem, but want to help me spread the word, please link to my site www.stopusingmd5now.com.

By writing articles/posts/etc. and publishing the MD-5 hash only, it is the lesser problem that you show people your incompetency about hash functions, but you also teach other people to use MD-5. And it spreads like a disease... Last but not least, if I find a sample on your blog post, and you use MD-5 only, I can't be sure we have the same sample.

Here is a list to name a few bad examples (order is in Google search rank order):


Introduction to (cryptographic) hash functions

A long time ago (according to some sources since 1970) people started designing hash functions, for an awful lot of different reasons. It can be used for file integrity verification, password verification, pseudo-random generation, etc. But one of the most important properties of a cryptographic hash function is that it can "uniquely" identify a block of data with a small, fixed bit string. E.g., malware can be identified by using only the hash itself, so everybody who has the same malware sample will have the same hash; thus they can refer to the malware by the hash itself.

It is easy to conclude that there will always be collisions, where a different block of data has the same result hashes. The domain (block of data) is infinite, while the codomain (possible hash values) is finite. The question is how easy it is to find two different blocks of data, having the same hash. Mathematicians call this property "collision resistance." Proper cryptographic hash functions are collision-resistant, meaning it is impractical or impossible to find two different blocks of data, which have the same hash.

In 1989 Ronald Rivest (the first letter in the abbreviation of the RSA algorithm) designed the MD-2 hashing algorithm. Since 1997 there are publications about that this hashing algorithm is far from perfect.

In 1990 Ronald Rivest designed the MD-4 algorithm, which is considered as broken at least from 1991. But MD-4 is still in use from Windows XP until Windows 8 in the password protocol (NTLM). Unfortunately, there are more significant problems with NTLM besides using MD-4, but this can be the topic of a different blog post.

In 1991 (you might guess who) designed yet another hashing algorithm called MD-5, to replace MD-4  (because of the known weaknesses). But again, in from 1993 it has been shown many times that MD-5 is broken as well. According to Wikipedia, "On 18 March 2006, Klima published an algorithm [17] that can find a collision within one minute on a single notebook computer, using a method he calls tunneling". This means, that with the 8 years old computing power of a single notebook one can create two different files having the same MD-5 hash. But the algorithms to generate collisions have been improved since, and "a 2013 attack by Xie Tao, Fanbao Liu, and Dengguo Feng breaks MD-5 collision resistance in 2^18 time. This attack runs in less than a second on a regular computer." The key takeaway here is that it is pretty damn hard to design a secure cryptographic hash function, which is fast, but still safe. I bet that if I would develop a hash function, Ron would be able to hack it in minutes.

Now, dear malware researcher, consider the following scenario. You as, a malware analyst, find a new binary sample. You calculate the MD-5 hash of the malware, and Google for that hash. You see this hash value on other malware researchers or on a sandbox/vendor's site. This site concludes that this sample does this or that, and is either malicious or not. Either because the site is also relying solely on MD-5 or because you have only checked the MD-5 and the researcher or sandbox has a good reputation, you move on and forget this binary. But in reality, it is possible that your binary is totally different than the one analyzed by others. The results of this mistake can scale from nothing to catastrophic.

If you don't believe me, just check the hello.exe and erase.exe on this site from Peter Sellinger. Same MD-5, different binaries; a harmless and a (fake) malicious one... And you can do the same easily at home. No supercomputers,  no NSA magic needed.

On a side-note, it is important to mention that even today it can be hard to find a block of data (in generic), if only the MD-5 hash is known ("pre image resistance"). I have heard people arguing this when I told them using MD-5 as a password hash function is a bad idea. The main problem with MD-5 as a password hash is not the weaknesses in MD-5 itself, but the lack of salt, lack of iterations, and lack of memory hardness. But still, I don't see any reason why you should use MD-5 as a building block for anything, which has anything to do with security. Would you use a car to drive your children to the school, which car has not been maintained in the last 23 year? If your answer is yes, you should neither have children nor a job in IT SEC.

Conclusion

If you are a malware researcher, and used MD-5 only to identify malware samples in the past, I suggest to write it down 1000 times: "I promise I won't use MD-5 to identify malware in the future."

I even made a website dedicated to this problem, www.stopusingmd5now.com . The next time you see a post/article/whatever where malware is identified by the MD-5 hash only, please link to this blog post or website, and the world will be a better and more professional place.


PS: If you are a forensics investigator, or software developer developing software used in forensics, the same applies to you.
PS 2: If you find this post too provocative and harsh, there is a reason for this ...

Update: I have modified two malware (Citadel, Atrax) with the help of HashClash, and now those have the same MD-5. Many thanks for Marc Stevens for his research, publishing his code, and help given during the collision finding.

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BEST PASSWORD MANAGERS FOR IOS

As I said, Apple's iOS is also prone to cyber attacks, so you can use some of the best password managers for iOS to secure your online accounts.

BEST PASSWORD MANAGERS FOR IOS

Here I have streamlined few of the best password managers for iOS including Keeper, OneSafe, Enpass, mSecure, LastPass, RoboForm, SplashID Safe and LoginBox Pro.

1. ONESAFE PASSWORD MANAGER (CROSS-PLATFORM)

OneSafe is one of the best Password Manager apps for iOS devices that lets you store not only your accounts' passwords but also sensitive documents, credit card details, photos, and more.
OneSafe password manager app for iOS encrypts your data behind a master password, with AES-256 encryption — the highest level available on mobile — and Touch ID. There is also an option for additional passwords for given folders.
OneSafe password manager for iOS also offers an in-app browser that supports autofill of logins, so that you don't need to enter your login details every time.
Besides this, OneSafe also provides advanced security for your accounts' passwords with features like auto-lock, intrusion detection, self-destruct mode, decoy safe and double protection.
Download OneSafe Password Manager: iOS | Mac | Android | Windows

2. SPLASHID SAFE PASSWORD MANAGER (CROSS-PLATFORM)

SplashID Safe is one of the oldest and best password management tools for iOS that allows users to securely store their login data and other sensitive information in an encrypted record.
All your information, including website logins, credit card and social security data, photos and file attachments, are protected with 256-bit encryption.
SplashID Safe Password Manager app for iOS also provides web autofill option, meaning you will not have to bother copy-pasting your passwords in login.
The free version of SplashID Safe app comes with basic record storage functionality, though you can opt for premium subscriptions that provide cross-device syncing among other premium features.
Download SplashID Safe Password Manager: Windows and Mac | iOS | Android

3. LOGIN BOX PRO PASSWORD MANAGER

LoginBox Pro is another great password manager app for iOS devices. The app provides a single tap login to any website you visit, making the password manager app as the safest and fastest way to sign in to password-protected internet sites.
LoginBox Password Manager app for iOS combines a password manager as well as a browser.
From the moment you download it, all your login actions, including entering information, tapping buttons, checking boxes, or answering security questions, automatically completes by the login box Password Manager app.
For security, the login box Password Manager app uses hardware-accelerated AES encryption and passcode to encrypt your data and save it on your device itself.
Download LoginBox Password Manager: iOS | Android

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WHY WE DO HACKING?

Purpose of Hacking?
. Just for fun
.Show-off
.Steal important information 
.Damaging the system
.Hampering Privacy
.Money Extortion 
.System Security Testing
.To break policy compliance etc

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