Usb

Making the Perfect Red Team Dropbox (Part 1)

As part of our preparations for our upcoming RingZer0 “Q Division” Training, I have been working on making a software image for the FriendlyArm NanoPi R1S Single Board Computer (SBC) that we’ll be using to demonstrate some close quarters techniques. I will detail the process of configuring an R1S by installing the Armbian distribution as well as P4wnP1 ALOA. We will also take a quick look at getting USBProxy configured to act as a keylogger.

Obtaining shells via Logitech Unifying Dongles

In this post, I will recap some of the security research conducted on wireless keyboards and mice, and eventually show how current wireless keyboards and mice can be used to obtain a covert shell on a target computer. Around 2009, Max Moser realised that most wireless keyboards were simply transmitting the keystrokes in clear text. His initial research targeted systems using 27MHz radios. In 2010, he presented followup research targeting systems using 2.4GHz radios, which suffered from similar vulnerabilities. Manufacturers responded (eventually!) by encrypting the keystrokes, but most elected not to encrypt the mouse movements, because that would introduce latency and increase power consumption for no real benefit.

Universal Serial aBUSe

Last Saturday, at Defcon 24, we gave a talk entitled “Universal Serial aBUSe: Remote Physical Access Attacks” about some research we had performed into USB attacks. The talk was part of a research theme we’ve been pursuing related to hardware bypasses of software security. We decided to look into these sorts of attacks after noting their use in real world attacks. For example, you have “Apex predators” such as the NSA’s extensive use of sophisticated hardware implants, most notably for this work, the COTTONMOUTH devices. On the other end of the scale, we noticed real world criminals in the UK and ZA making use of unsophisticated hardware devices, such as hardware keyloggers, drive imagers and physical VPN devices and successfully making off with millions. This led us to hypothesise that there’s probably a large series of possible attacks in between these two extremes. We also noted that there’s not many decent defences against these sorts of attacks, it’s 2016, and the only decent defence against decent hardware keyloggers is still to “manually inspect all USB ports” (assuming this stuff is even visible).