Category Archives: AI and ML

AI and ML, Application Development, Potential Risk of CVE

About CVE-2023-33962 – JStachio fails to escape single quotes in HTML (31st May 2023)

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Preface: About 20 years ago, people know java is unsafe. Perhaps of technology trend, so whatever the design appyling java language. The flexibility and easy to use will let people contempt about awareness of cyber security. While Java is considered relatively safe because it is a server side language, there are still multiple ways to attack and access secure code you’d like to remain private.

Background: The Spring Framework is an application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform. The framework’s core features can be used by any Java application, but there are extensions for building web applications on top of the Java EE platform.
Mustache is a logicless template engine and it is helpful for creating dynamic content like HTML and configuration files.
If your models are type based and not just Map then JStachio is good choice.

Ref:End-users only use JVM and JRE to execute the application program. JRE identifies all the helpful class libraries needed for execution, while JVM is a subclass of JRE that decodes the bytecode into machine language and other minor tasks. Each JVM server can have a maximum of 256 threads to run Java applications.

Vulnerability details: Prior to version 1.0.1, JStachio fails to escape single quotes ' in HTML, allowing an attacker to inject malicious code. This vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker to execute arbitrary JavaScript code in the context of other users visiting pages that use this template engine. This can lead to various consequences, including session hijacking, defacement of web pages, theft of sensitive information, or even the propagation of malware.

Solution: Version 1.0.1 contains a patch for this issue.

Workaround: To mitigate this vulnerability, the template engine should properly escape special characters, including single quotes. Common practice is to escape ' as &#39. As a workaround, users can avoid this issue by using only double quotes " for HTML attributes.

Official announcement: For details, please refer to the link – https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-33962

AI and ML, Cell Phone (iPhone, Android, windows mobile), Potential Risk of CVE

CVE-2023-32067 – c-ares is vulnerable to denial of service (30th May 2023)

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Preface: c-ares is a C language implementation of asynchronous request DNS. When using c-ares, you usually only need to reference the ares.h header file, and the related header files of the library are included.

Background: For some asynchronous DNS requests, Node[.]js uses a C library called c-ares.
So called Async DNS – This feature bypasses the normal operating system mechanisms for resolving domain names and uses the browser directly. In this mode, DNS requests will communicate directly own DNS servers and some third party providers.

Vulnerability details: c-ares is an asynchronous resolver library. c-ares is vulnerable to denial of service. If a target resolver sends a query, the attacker forges a malformed UDP packet with a length of 0 and returns them to the target resolver. The target resolver erroneously interprets the 0 length as a graceful shutdown of the connection. This issue has been patched in version 1.19.1.

According to the technical aspect of UDP packet with a length of 0 matter. Do you have below queries?
Writing a datagram of length 0 is acceptable. In the case of UDP, this results in an IP datagram containing an IP header (normally 20 bytes for IPv4 and 40 bytes for IPv6), an 8-byte UDP header, and no data. This also means that a return value of 0 from recvfrom is acceptable for a datagram protocol: It does not mean that the peer has closed the connection, as does a return value of 0 from read on a TCP socket. Since UDP is connectionless, there is no such thing as closing a UDP connection.

Official announcement: For details, please refer to the link – https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-32067

AI and ML, Application Development, Potential Risk of CVE

About CVE-2023-33252 – Similar concern for cyber security today, it also apply to future digital world Artificial intelligence zone. (22nd May 2023)

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Preface: Foreseeing the continuous development of artificial intelligence, use blockchain technology for network communication is a must.
A blockchain is a distributed database or ledger shared among nodes in a computer network. They are known for their key role in maintaining a secure and decentralized record of transactions in cryptocurrency systems, but they are not limited to the use of cryptocurrencies.

Background: IDEN3 is NOT an ICO (Initial Coin Offerings). It has no token at all. It is an open source permissionless identity layer built on top of Ethereum that we expect many projects will be able to use as a foundational layer for their own identity solution.
What are Initial Coin Offerings? ICOs are another form of cryptocurrency that businesses use in order to raise capital. Through ICO trading platforms, investors receive unique cryptocurrency “tokens” in exchange for their monetary investment in the business.

Ref: Circom is a compiler written in Rust for compiling circuits written in the circom language. The compiler outputs the representation of the circuit as constraints and everything needed to compute different ZK proofs.

Vulnerability details: iden3 snarkjs through 0.6.11 allows double spending because there is no validation that the publicSignals length is less than the field modulus.

References:
https://github.com/iden3/snarkjs/commits/master/src/groth16_verify.js
https://github.com/iden3/snarkjs/tags

AI and ML, Potential Risk of CVE

About Artificial Intelligence (NVIDIA® DGX-1): Closer look at CVE‑2023‑0209 (11th May 2023)

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Preface: NVIDIA DGX-1 is an integrated deep learning workstation with a large computing capacity, which can be used to run demanding deep learning workloads. It provides GPU computing power of 1 PetaFLOPS (1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second).

Background: Historically, both vendors and attackers have overlooked (pre)EFI boot process (in)security; pre-EFI Initialization (PEI) boot stage opens many doors and offers flexibility to attackers.
The Pre-EFI Initialization (PEI) phase provides a standardized method of loading and invoking specific initial configuration routines for the processor, chipset, and system board. The PEI phase occurs after the Security (SEC) phase. The primary purpose of code operating in this phase is to initialize enough of the system to allow instantiation of the Driver Execution Environment (DXE) phase.
The Driver Execution Environment (DXE) phase is where most of the system initialization is performed. Pre-EFI Initialization (PEI), the phase prior to DXE, is responsible for initializing permanent memory in the platform so that the DXE phase can be loaded and executed.

Note: Security (SEC) and Pre-EFI (PEI) phases – both are controlled by the firmware vendor.
SEC – Init CPU, clear caches, load BIOS ROM
PEI – Initialize chipset, RAM, devices, Secure Boot (Record Secure Boot in PCR 7)

Vulnerability details: NVIDIA DGX-1 SBIOS contains a vulnerability in the Uncore PEI module, where authentication of the code executed by SSA is missing, which may lead to arbitrary code execution, denial of service, escalation of privileges, information disclosure, data tampering, and SecureBoot bypass.

Official announcement: For details, please refer to the link – https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5458

AI and ML, Science

Do you know what AI thinking?But sooner or later he will become smarter than common people (8th May 2023).

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Preface: The 2012 Mayans doomsday prophecy perhaps is a joke.
However the poor weather havoc and unpredictable. The sudden weather change become more destructive. As a matter of fact, scientists urge that this extreme change of weather related to current environment.
What’s more, the prophecy does not record how nature will change immediately. Nor does it say that the specified date will be over on the same day.

Background: AI inventions, similar advent of the atomic bomb, will completely change the world, said Warren Buffett.
Going back two years, some speakers at the workshop said not to worry. AI won’t affect your job. In fact, artificial intelligence will replace low-level labor in the next few years. It does not substitute 100% immediately within the specified time.
Buffett said that Microsoft founder Bill Gates once showed him the latest version of ChatGPT, in which the program can check all legal opinions in a very short time, which impressed him. He believes the power of AI technology should be cause for concern.

Common Open Source AI Software: Before AI knows how to use his intelligence to protect itself well without relying on people. We should know who he is and receive a basic understand to him.

Acumos AI: Based on Linux, to help integrate other frameworks and develop cloud-based AI apps.
ClearML: ClearML announced a free hosted plan to give data scientists the freedom to manage AI/ML experiments and orchestrate workloads without investing in additional resources.
H2O.ai: Integration with Hadoop and Spark for big data-based AI modeling. Library of ML algorithms including supervised and unsupervised learning
Mycroft.ai: Mycroft powers various elements of the voice stack using open source AI technology. There is a large community of users, developers, and translators, to constantly improve the AI algorithms.
OpenCV: Proven applications across a variety of use cases, including facial recognition, human-computer interactions, object detection, motion tracking, and more.
ML library containing algorithms for decision tree learning, k-nearest neighbor algorithm, artificial neural networks, random forest, and deep neural networks (DNN), among others.
OpenNN: OpenNN is an open source AI software library for implementing neural networks and ML.
PyTorch: A production-ready environment powered by TorchServe for quickly deploying models. A distributed backend architecture to enable distributed training and performance optimization.
Rasa (Open Source): Natural language understanding to convert messages into structured data and analyze intent.
TensorFlow: Support for multiple languages, including JavaScript, which is relatively rare in the open source AI space.
Tesseract OCR: Tesseract is an OCR engine originally developed by Hewlett Packard as a proprietary technology in the 1980s. It launched as an open source AI software with sponsorship from Google in 2006. Its primary implementation is meant for unstructured data processing and text from image extraction, executed entirely from a common line interface.

Former CNBC article for reference: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/06/stephen-hawking-ai-could-be-worst-event-in-civilization.html

AI and ML

Your first quantum programming (24th Mar 2023)

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Preface: How much does a 1 qubit quantum computer cost? Commercial quantum computers like D-Wave One with 50 qubits – $10,000,000. D-Wave systems use a process called quantum annealing to search for solutions to a problem.

Background: The Microsoft Quantum Development Kit offers durable quantum application development on hardware-accelerated compute resources. Program your quantum algorithms and formulate optimization solutions to cope with your AI development. Perhaps this is a prelude before the development of a scalable quantum computer in the future. Quantum computers have great potential to process the large datasets often used in AI experiments. By using quantum computing techniques to analyze data sets faster and more accurately than ever before, AI researchers have been able to make significant advances in fields such as machine learning.
Because quantum computers are fundamentally different from classical computers, conventional techniques used to communicate electronic information do not directly translate to quantum devices.

Suggestion:
Learn quantum programming (Q# programming language) with Microsoft QUANTUM Development KIT. It can use simulation. API for quantum computing simulation using the .NET ecosystem and Python.

Quantum Development Kit (SDK) contains below basic components

  • The Q# programming language (pronounced like Q-Sharp)
    Remark: The Q# development tools are based on the Microsoft.NET ecosystem. Therefore, need to install the correct version of the .NET Software Development Kit (so called .NET SDK)
  • API for quantum computing simulation using the .NET ecosystem and.or Python
  • Tools to help you develop and simulate your quantum programs using commas-line tools, Visual Studio Code, or Microsoft Visual Studio

Please refer to this link for details- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/development-kit/quantum-computing/#overview

AI and ML, Potential Risk of CVE

All aspects of Spectre-BHB from vulnerability to mitigation (21st Feb 2023)

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Preface: Several companies are currently using Arm processors to create artificial intelligence-powered software to help make the driving experience safer. Some experts believe that artificial intelligence will affect human life. Yes it is real. The late Stephen Hawking speculated about this potential impact, but it looks like part of the process of human civilization. The man kind involves into automation life when smartphone and GUI was born. It was not possible to jump back. Perhaps this is the destinely. On the other hand, computer vulnerabilities is the effective way to against out of control AI. Perhaps it is a effective solution.

Background: Branch predictor hardware typically uses a form of cache to hold branch information. When vendor release announcement of their design weakness few years ago, a misunderstand was that it only appears on a single brand. But the truth is that properly not. When CPU designer intend improve the efficiency of CPU response time. It will be using it. The ARM architecture permits this branch predictor hardware to be visible to the functional behaviour of software, and so the branch predictor is not architecturally invisible.

The possible attack mechanism of Spectre-BHB: The branch target injection in the same software context (unlike Spectre v2, which injects branch targets across different exception levels) . If the attacker can poison branch history from user space to force the kernel to mispredict targets. When the victim executes an allegedly safe branch that is mis-predicted , redirecting the control flow to a gadget that, with attacker controlled registers. Therefore it triggered the vulnerability. For information on this attack mechanism and mitigations concept. Please refer to attached diagram.

Development in 2023: Arm announced a new generation of Armv9 CPUs, namely the Cortex-X3 and the Cortex-A715. The Armv9 CPU use L1 instruction cache Speculative memory accesses. The L1 instruction memory system provides an instruction stream to the decoder. To increase overall performance and reduce power consumption, the L1 instruction memory system uses dynamic branch prediction and instruction caching.
Whether is there any design weakness similar to branch prediction of this new design. Let’s keep our eyes open. stay tuned!

AI and ML, Potential Risk of CVE

CVE-2023-0405: Like a newborn. AI in some fields may have design weakness. (14th Feb 2023)

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Preface: Today is Valentine’s Day 2023, are you alone? But in the future artificial intelligence will be with you.


Background: With an AI content writer, all you need to do is enter your desired topic or keyword into the plugin settings, and then AI will immediately generate an article that reads as if it were written by a human. You’ll get unique, engaging stories without having to spend hours typing out paragraphs or researching facts. Plus, you’ll have a consistent style and tone that you can use for all of your content.


Vulnerability details: The GPT AI Power: Content Writer & ChatGPT & Image Generator & WooCommerce Product Writer & AI Training WordPress plugin before 1.4.38 does not perform any kind of nonce or privilege checks before letting logged-in users modify arbitrary posts.
Ref: CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-862. The software does not perform an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action. This is going to have an impact on integrity, and availability.


Solution: Upgrading to version 1.4.38 eliminates this vulnerability.


Official Announcement: For details, see the link – https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/3ca9ac21-2bce-4480-9079-b4045b261273

Before you enjoy it with your AI girlfriend, I wish you have a great Valentine’s Day today.

AI and ML, Potential Risk of CVE

CVE-2023-23625 Certain versions of Go-unixfs from Ipfs contain vulnerability (9th Feb 2023)

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Preface: AI system infrastructure may not have a mature model, it will continue forever, without end. Perhaps this is true sustainability. Since the key component is the computer. So the only thing that slows him down is software or hardware bugs.


Background: Cryptocurrency technology fully utilise the concept of Blockchain. Seems the advantage of cryptocurrency is easy misused and lead it become dangerous. Therefore many government hesitate to get involves and let it fail to original objective. However their related technology will be growth rapidly. Yes, it is the IFPS. AI requires heavy amounts of storage and compute. From technical point of view, Distributing storage will be an advantage. Since the data not place in the same area. It enhance overall reliability and efficiency. AI robots will communicate using 5G. Deal with distributed data storage. Machine learning operations and processes can be fully leveraged as it breaks down regional constraints.Perhaps the distributed cloud computing platform is the beginning of milestone to boots the world into artificial intelligence world.

Large models of deep learning are often shared by researchers via Google Drive links which have transfer limits and are not reliably online. IPFS provides a great decentralized solution to hosting data which can be downloaded via regular web links.
IPFS implementation in Go. “unixfs” is a tool in the Go Modules Packages category of a tech stack.
A Merkle DAG is a DAG where each node has an identifier, and this is the result of hashing the node’s contents. go-unixfs implements unix-like filesystem utilities on top of an ipld merkledag. MerkelDAG implementation in Python.

Vulnerability details: go-unixfs is an implementation of a unix-like filesystem on top of an ipld merkledag. Trying to read malformed HAMT sharded directories can cause panics and virtual memory leaks. If you are reading untrusted user input, an attacker can then trigger a panic. This is caused by bogus `fanout` parameter in the HAMT directory nodes.

Solution: Users are advised to upgrade to version 0.4.3 to resolve this issue. Users unable to upgrade should not feed untrusted user data to the decoding functions.

Official announcement: For details, see the link – https://github.com/ipfs/go-unixfs/security/advisories/GHSA-q264-w97q-q778

AI and ML

Who empower knowledge to AI (artificial intelligence). Perhaps the answer is you. (7th Feb 2023)

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Preface: Einstein’s formula e=mc2 opened the door to the world of science and the universe. Since the equation involves complex and advanced arithmetic. So no one can simply describe it.
Modern civilisation relies on digital computing. Our daily lives involve smartphones, smart cities and countless so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices. But who empower knowledge to AI (artificial intelligence). Perhaps the answer is you.

Background: Sometimes when you shop online, you don’t buy. But later, you get an email with a special price on the same product you viewed. Who do the magic? The magic is given by internet cookies.
A cookie is arbitrary data, usually selected and first sent by a web server, and stored on the client computer by the web browser. The browser then sends them back to the server with each request, introducing state (memory of previous events) into an otherwise stateless HTTP transaction.

Following are the type of cookies set by Google on a user’s hard disk.

  • Preference cookie (called PREF) – used to store users preference (like preferred language or any type of customisation).
  • Security cookies (SID and HSID) – used to protect users data from unauthorized access.
  • Process cookies (“Ibcs”) – used to maintain certain websites functionality
  • Advertising cookie (id) – used to serve personalized ads to users and to make advertising more effective
  • Conversion cookies – used to track users interaction with ads.
  • Analytics cookies (“_utma, _utmb, _ga, etc.) – used to collect Google Analytics data

Brief overview: Cookies is a data, whereby it is resources of data analytics.
Ref: The global total has grown by 1.8 percent over the past year, with 95 million new mobile users since this time last year. Global internet users: Global internet users have climbed to 4.95 billion at the start of 2022, with internet penetration now standing at 62.5 percent of the world’s total population.
Big data refers to data that is so large, fast or complex that it’s difficult or impossible to process using traditional methods.
Big data and AI have a synergistic relationship. Big data analytics leverages AI for better data analysis. In turn, AI requires a massive scale of data to learn and improve decision-making processes.

Because of AI and big data, it explain that even though you shop online, but you didn’t buy. But later, you get an email with a special price on the same product you viewed. It’s a simple concept where intelligence comes from.

If given the opportunity, is there room for other discussions in the future, focusing on cybersecurity for artificial intelligence. stay tuned!