Conferences

Improvements in Rogue AP attacks – MANA 1/2

At Defcon 22 we presented several improvements in wifi rogue access point attacks. We entitled the talk “Manna from heaven” and released the MANA toolkit. I’ll be doing two blog entries. The first will describe the improvements made at a wifi layer, and the second will cover the network credential interception stuff. If you just want the goodies, you can get them at the end of this entry for the price of scrolling down.

DefCon 22 – Practical Aerial Hacking & Surveillance

Hello from Las Vegas! Yesterday (ed: uh, last week, my bad) I gave a talk at DefCon 22 entitled ‘Practical Aerial Hacking & Surveillance‘. If you missed the talk the slides are available here. Also, I’m releasing a paper I wrote as part of the talk entitled ‘Digital Terrestrial Tracking: The Future of Surveillance‘, click here to download it. Whiskey shot! The Snoopy code is available on our GitHub account, and you can join the mailing list here. Also, congratulations to @AmandersLPD for winning our #SnoopySensor competition! You can see the output of our *amazing* PRNG in action below: I’ll update this post to point to the DefCon video once they’re released. In the meantime, the specifications of my custom quadcopter I had on stage are below:

Botconf 2013

Botconf’13, the “First botnet fighting conference” took place in Nantes, France from 5-6 December 2013. Botconf aimed to bring together the anti-botnet community, including law enforcement, ISPs and researchers. To this end the conference was a huge success, especially since a lot of networking occurred over the lunch and tea breaks as well as the numerous social events organised by Botconf. I was fortunate enough to attend as a speaker and to present a small part of my Masters research. The talk focused the use of Spatial Statistics to detect Fast-Flux botnet Command and Control (C2) domains based on the geographic location of the C2 servers. This research aimed to find novel techniques that would allow for accurate and lightweight classifiers to detect Fast-Flux domains. Using DNS query responses it was possible to identify Fast-Flux domains based on values such as the TTL, number of A records and different ASNs. In an attempt to increase the accuracy of this classifier, additional analysis was performed and it was observed that Fast-Flux domains tended to have numerous C2 servers widely dispersed geographically. Through the use of the statistical methods employed in plant and animal dispersion statistics, namely Moran’s I and Geary’s C, new classifiers were created. It was shown that these classifiers could detect Fast-Flux domains with up to a 97% accuracy, maintaining a False Positive rate of only 3.25% and a True Positive rate of 99%. Furthermore, it was shown that the use of these classifiers would not significantly impact current network performance and would not require changes to current network architecture.

RAT-a-tat-tat

Hey all, So following on from my talk (slides, video) I am releasing the NMAP service probes and the Poison Ivy NSE script as well as the DarkComet config extractor. Rat a-tat-tat from SensePost nmap-service-probes.pi poison-ivy.nse extract-DCconfig-from-binary.py An example of finding and extracting Camellia key from live Poison Ivy C2’s: nmap -sV -Pn --versiondb=nmap-service-probes.pi --script=poison-ivy.nse <ip_address/range) Finding Poison Ivy, DarkComet and/or Xtreme RAT C2’s: nmap -sV -Pn --versiondb=nmap-service-probes.pi <ip_range>

Offence oriented defence

We recently gave a talk at the ITWeb Security Summit entitled “Offense Oriented Defence”. The talk was targeted at defenders and auditors, rather then hackers (the con is oriented that way), although it’s odd that I feel the need to apologise for that ;) The talks primary point, was that by understanding how attackers attack, more innovative defences can be imagined. The corollary was that common defences, in the form of “best practise” introduce commonality that is more easily exploited, or at least degrade over time as attackers adapt. Finally, many of these “security basics” are honestly hard, and we can’t place the reliance on them we’d hoped. But our approach doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the problem, and much like an AA meeting, it’s time we recognise the problem.

44CON 2013

In one week, it’s 44CON time again! One of our favourite UK hacker cons. In keeping with our desire to make more hackers, we’re giving several sets of training courses as well as a talk this year. Training: Hacking by Numbers – Mobile Edition If you’re in a rush, you can book here. We launched it at Blackhat USA, and nobody threw anything rotting, in-fact some said it went pretty well; our latest addition to the Hacking by Numbers training.

BlackHat Conference: Z-Wave Security

We are publishing the research paper and tool for our BlackHat 2013 USA talk on the Z-Wave proprietary wireless protocol security. The paper introduces our Z-Wave packet interception and injection toolkit (Z-Force) that was used to analyze the security layer of Z-Wave protocol stack and discover the implementation details of the frame encryption, data origin authentication and key establishment process. We developed the Z-Force module to perform security tests against the implementation of the Z-Wave security layer in encrypted home automation devices such as a door locks. The paper describes the details of a critical vulnerability discovered in a Z-Wave door lock that could enable an attacker to remotely take full control of the target device without knowledge of the network encryption key. The Z-Force download archive contains the GUI program and two radio firmware files for the receiver and transmitter TI CC1110 boards. This research will also be presented at 44Con 2013 in London next month, followed by the release of Z-Force source code and US frequency support (908.4 MHz) in the firmware.

Honey, I’m home!! – Hacking Z-Wave & other Black Hat news

You’ve probably never thought of this, but the home automation market in the US was worth approximately $3.2 billion in 2010 and is expected to exceed $5.5 billion in 2016. Under the hood, the Zigbee and Z-wave wireless communication protocols are the most common used RF technology in home automation systems. Zigbee is based on an open specification (IEEE 802.15.4) and has been the subject of several academic and practical security researches. Z-wave is a proprietary wireless protocol that works in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical radio band (ISM). It transmits on the 868.42 MHz (Europe) and 908.42MHz (United States) frequencies designed for low-bandwidth data communications in embedded devices such as security sensors, alarms and home automation control panels.

Snoopy Release

We blogged a little while back about the Snoopy demonstration given at 44Con London. A similar talk was given at ZaCon in South Africa. Whilst we’ve been promising a release for a while now, we wanted to make sure all the components were functioning as expected and easy to use. After an army of hundreds had tested it (ok, just a few), you may now obtain a copy of Snoopy from here. Below are some instructions on getting it running (check out the README file from the installer for additional info).

Black Hat Training Classes Update

Hey All, We’re about locked and loaded down here in ZA – ready to tackle the looooong journey to Vegas for Black Hat. If you’re headed to Black Hat but haven’t yet booked training there’s still time, so I thought I’d push out a brief update on what’s still available from our stable of courses. As many of our courses have sold out we opened second classrooms and as a result have plenty of space to accommodate late comers!