Research and Development

analysis

Consider the case of a setUID binary that runs as root and allows the caller to execute certain other scripts and binaries from a given restricted directory. The Portcullis Labs team recently spotted such a case and I was asked to take a look to determine exploitablity. What follows is a short analysis of what I found. Continue reading

Recently, researchers at Trustwave’s SpiderLabs spoke at Black Hat Europe on the dangers of simply reflecting data back to the requesting user as part of an HTTP request/response exchange. When you think about it, this stands to reason, after all, it’s what Cross-site Scripting attacks are born from. What’s interesting is that the new research discussed another way in which it could be exploited. Continue reading

Last night, researchers from Google released details of a new attack that they have called the Padding Oracle On Downgrade Legacy Encryption (POODLE) attack which has been assigned CVE-2014-3566.

The summary is, essentially, that SSLv3 uses a MAC-then-encrypt construction, which doesn’t authenticate the padding as it is applied on the plaintext message before padding or encryption are applied. This gives rise to a padding oracle bug, which is how BEAST worked too. Continue reading

Some bugs are so simple and so elegant that you wonder how it is possible that no one has found them until now. Those are my favorites. They are simple, they do not involve memory corruption and most of the time they do not even need an advanced exploit code to abuse it. Stéphane Chazelas’ Bash bug is one of these bugs. Continue reading

We recently announced our sponsorship of EMF Camp 2014, were ready to go Portcullis flags in tow and will be heading on over to Milton Keynes to help get EMF ready.

While there we will not only be sponsoring the Lounge where people can come and enjoy a space to relax and drink beer and setting up Portcullis Village where people can visit us and exchange ideas but we will be having members of Portcullis hosting talks throughout the weekend. Continue reading

Sophos provide Anti-Virus solutions for a number of platforms, including Windows, Mac and various flavors of Linux and Unix. This blog post however details a potential privacy concern when the “Web Protection” component is enabled within the Sophos Endpoint Security and Control software, which features within Sophos Anti-Virus for Windows (version 10.3.x). Continue reading