* Unauthenticated RCE vs all GNU/Linux systems (plus others) disclosed 3 weeks ago.
* Full disclosure happening in less than 2 weeks (as agreed with devs).
* Still no CVE assigned (there should be at least 3, possibly 4, ideally 6).
* Still no working fix.
* Canonical, RedHat and others have confirmed the severity, a 9.9, check screenshot.
* Devs are still arguing about whether or not some of the issues have a security impact.
I've spent the last 3 weeks of my sabbatical working full time on this research, reporting, coordination and so on with the sole purpose of helping and pretty much only got patronized because the devs just can't accept that their code is crap - responsible disclosure: no more.
The writeup is gonna be fun, not just for the technical details of it, not just because this RCE was there for more than a decade, but as a freaking example on how NOT to handle disclosures.
Like, I write software, I get it, I get how someone can be defensive about the stuff they write, I really do. But holy sh, if your software has been running on everything for the last 20 years, you have a freaking responsibility to own and fix your bugs instead of using your energies to explain to the poor bastard that reported them how wrong he is, even tho he's literally giving you PoC after PoC and systematically proving your assumptions about your own software wrong at every comment. This is just insane.
Just wanted to add for the sake of clarity, that i have *so much respect* for the people at Canonical that have been trying to help & mediate from the beginning, I really don't know how they manage to keep their cool like this.
This is going to be the writeup opening statement. It's an actual comment from the github conversation. I mean, it's not wrong ...
And YES: I LOVE hyping the sh1t out of this stuff because apparently sensationalism is the only language that forces these people to fix.
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You can force any v8/Electron process to execute arbitrary js code (child_process, http, etc) by forcefully enabling and abusing the builtin debug mechanism ... here's VS Code executing Calc, but I suspect any Electron app is susceptible 🔥 it works with SIP enabled on macOS
funnily i found out about this stuff while trying to hook vscode api calls in order to develop a security mechanism for the extensions ...
my dream project is connecting a plant or fungus with electrodes as inputs of an artificial neural network, the outputs would activate wheels to move the thing around. given enough NN complexity and proper model, would the thing start showing behaviours?
like: would some plants optimize actions over time to follow direct sunlight? would some maybe start going away from wifi signals or other RF that damages them? who knows what other kind of stuff these "neuro-augmented" plants would present!!! 🤯
the idea also includes using some sort of stress-signal to optimize the fitness function of a deep reinf. learning model, or something like that ... one day i'll throw a few bucks at the medical equipment that's being mentioned on the research and go entirely mad biologist ......
today i had some fun working on medusa, a fast and secure multi protocol honeypot that can mimic realistic devices running ssh, telnet, http or other tcp servers.
The plan is to implement tools like `medusa-shodan` that can "clone" a device from its shodan data. Aldo `medusa-nmap` to do the same by parsing an nmap scan report.
Oh, look at that! Two years of basically no in real life conferences and yet researches have been shared, cool hacks have been made and overall information didn't stop circulating ... so who's the real beneficiary of them, the hackers, the community or the sponsors/organizers?
i mean yeah it's cool having an excuse to meet with friends who live far from us, but that's all it is imo, and that could happen regardless of conferences organizers and sponsors ... so what's the point?
as someone who've learned from .txt files and who cares a lot about signal/noise ratio in information, i've been living the infosec conferences world for the last 5+ years and i do not believe that they actually add any value to the learning process. They slow it down actually.
By pure chance I just found a way to kernel panic my Mac via network packets. I can reproduce it every time ... I guess I’ll learn XNU debugging
how the hell do i debug this?
first thing i learn: in recent macOS versions kernel panic logs are not where every google result will tell you, however there's this nice hidden file that will point you to the right ones :D
training a new model on GB of data, for hours now, the GPUs work so hard i can smell them ... will it work? did i waste the last 2 weeks in a pointless feature engineering that'll lead to nowhere? the only thing i know is that i won't stop until i know if it works
this is real empowerment, learning new things and *creating* new things, either they'll work or not, it's better than just pontificating on twitter anyway</pontificating on twitter>