XARA, deconstructed: An in-depth look at OS X and iOS cross-app resource attacks. Does the Indiana University XARA whitepaper make your head hurt?
Here's an in-depth look at what "cross-app resource attacks" actually mean for your iOS and OS X systems. This week, security researchers from Indiana University released details of four security vulnerabilities they discovered in Mac OS X and iOS. The researchers detailed their discoveries of what they call "cross-app resource attacks" (referred to as XARA) in a whitepaper released Wednesday. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of confusion surrounding their research. If you're not at all familiar with the XARA exploits or are looking for a high-level overview, start with Rene Ritchie's article on what you need to know. To start, while the vulnerabilities keep getting lumped into a single bucket as "XARA", there are actually four distinct attacks that have been outlined by the researchers. Malicious OS X Keychain entries How to check for malicious Keychain entries WebSockets: Communication between apps and your browser.
Feds Say That Banned Researcher Commandeered a Plane. A security researcher kicked off a United Airlines flight last month after tweeting about security vulnerabilities in its system had previously taken control of an airplane and caused it to briefly fly sideways, according to an application for a search warrant filed by an FBI agent.
Chris Roberts, a security researcher with One World Labs, told the FBI agent during an interview in February that he had hacked the in-flight entertainment system, or IFE, on an airplane and overwrote code on the plane’s Thrust Management Computer while aboard the flight. He was able to issue a climb command and make the plane briefly change course, the document states. “He stated that he thereby caused one of the airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of the plane during one of these flights,” FBI Special Agent Mark Hurley wrote in his warrant application (.pdf). “He also stated that he used Vortex software after comprising/exploiting or ‘hacking’ the airplane’s networks. The 1Password Emergency Kit. I am not entirely sure if this hasn’t been done somewhere else before, but as a 1Password user I find that what I’m about to offer you is incredibly valuable.1 Updated as of 10/31/13: There's a new version of The 1Password Emergency Kit.
The post that outlines what's new and download links for the new version can be found here. Imagine if something was to happen to you. Something that would keep you from accessing stuff on your computer that has passwords associated with it. It’s not a pleasant thing to think about, but we’d be foolhardy not to. But now that we spend so much time online – whether with online banking, email or earning a living – that having a failsafe in place isn’t just a good idea anymore. That’s why I came up with the 1Password Emergency Kit. I use 1Password to manage a lot of my personal information, for both online and offline credentials. While I hope you never have to use The 1Password Emergency Kit template, I hope you’ll have it at the ready in case you do. Use Tor to Browse the Web Anonymously & Access Blocked Websites.
Tor is a free anonymity network that aims to conceal a users location and browser usage from snoopers, in addition to allowing access to websites that are otherwise blocked or filtered out through firewalls.
The official description of the Tor browser and network is described as follows: The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked. Though that may sound complicated, using Tor is actually quite simple. We’re going to focus on Mac OS X, but there are Tor clients available for every significant OS, including Windows, Android, and Linux (there is currently no official iOS client). Before beginning you might be wondering what the point of using TOR is. Remote Code Exploitation through Bash. In a recent security filing CVE-2014-6271, a remote exploit has been discovered that can potentially be used to execute arbitrary code on environment variables that are passed to child processes.
This could include CGI scripts that are used to pass through environment variables from a web server to the child process and that is run by a bash script for vulnerable vesrions of bash. Debian and RedHat have provided updated binaries already and other operating system vendors are expected to follow suit shortly. Apple uses a very old version of Bash which is vulnerable to the attack and there is no word of an update from them at this stage.
The vulnerability comes from a value passed into an environment variable: The next time a /bin/bash process is launched, the code will be executed and displayed to the console. GPGTools - It's worth protecting what you love. Online Penetration Testing Tools.