Articles

UART stands for Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter, however in the context of Hardware Hacking we’re generally looking for an serial interface which will give us text output from the system and possibly allow for command input. The general intention from the manufacturers point of view – is to allow easy debugging, ...

A follower sent me a suspicious looking file recently to get my opinion on its behavior and to see if I could pull out a little detail on how it’s working. “Suspicious looking” because at the time, it was getting a zero score on VirusTotal but it appeared to be ...

Recently during a CTF I found a few users were unfamiliar with abusing setuid on executable on Linux systems for the purposes of privilege escalation. If an executable file on Linux has the “suid” bit set when a user executes a file it will execute with the owners permission level ...

I previously mentioned dumping memory contents using SPI, with a BusPirate. Sometimes that’s not feasible – such as if the flash memory module is a little inaccessible and you’re not feeling like deconstructing the board just yet. An alternative is to pull memory over JTAG. I talked about accessing JTAG ...

HTTP Header Injection vulnerabilities occur when user input is insecurely included within server responses headers. Specifically they are based around the idea that a threat actor can cause the server to generate a response which includes carriage-return and line-feed characters (or %0D and %0A respectively in their URI encoded forms) within the ...

I’m currently writing up a series on hardware hacking fundamentals, and before I get into the specifics – I thought it sensible to add a piece on why hardware security is important and to lay out the major themes of what I’ll be discussing. Firstly, with physical devices, threat actors have more options when ...

I wanted to talk a little bit about the British Airways breach; I won’t be focusing on the intention to fine from the ICO. I’ll just be talking a little about vulnerabilities, how they can be addressed, and the issues mitigations may bright. I’ll also be talking about a security ...

In 2017 Equifax were breached, the breach was discovered on July 29[5] and an announcement was published on Sept 7.[5] It wasn’t the largest breach of all time, and not even of 2017, but it was big and the data was sensitive. Over the two weeks following the announcement, Equifax stock fell ...

When penetration testing Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments there are different perspectives the assessment could consider, some are very similar to external infrastructure/web application assessments and some are different. I’ll separate the things that are the same from the things that are different to traditional penetration testing by considering the ...