CVE-2023-23931 – cryptography (7th Feb 2023)

Preface: PyCrypto is no longer under active development (project is dead  – 2015). For details, see the link – https://github.com/pycrypto/pycrypto/issues/173
“cryptography” is a package which provides cryptographic recipes and primitives to Python developers. The goal is for it to be your “cryptographic standard library”. It supports Python 3.6+ and PyPy3 7.2+.

Background: “cryptography” is a package which provides cryptographic recipes and primitives to Python developers.
Unlike some OOP languages, Python is dynamically typed, which means that you don’t need to declare what kind of data (e.g. integer, array, etc) a variable can take before using it.
In computer science, a data buffer (or just buffer) is a region of a memory used to temporarily store data while it is being moved from one place to another.
Immutable buffers are allocated with an initial data content that may not be subsequently modified. This access model implies that all sharing of buffers is read-only.

Vulnerability details: cryptography is a package designed to expose cryptographic primitives and recipes to Python developers. In affected versions Cipher.update_into would accept Python objects which implement the buffer protocol, but provide only immutable buffers. This would allow immutable objects (such as bytes) to be mutated, thus violating fundamental rules of Python and resulting in corrupted output. This now correctly raises an exception. This issue has been present since update_into was originally introduced in cryptography 1.8.

My observation: According to CFFI technical manual, if require_writable is set to True, the function fails if the buffer obtained from python_buffer is read-only (e.g. if python_buffer is a byte string). The exact exception is raised by the object itself, and for things like bytes it varies with the Python version, so don’t rely on it. (Before version 1.12, the same effect can be achieved with a hack: call. Therefore it may need to take care of this cryptographic lib again when Python version update.

Official announcement: For details, see the link – https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-23931

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

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!

Whether it is the last round of remediation on CVE-2022-26373? Intel’s Enhanced Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (eIBRS) – 6th Feb 2023

Preface: CVE-2022-26373 technical detail has released to public on 9th Aug 2022. Till end of Jan, 2023 it still has update on this vulnerability. For example, Red Hat fixed this vulnerability in their product Enterprise Linux 7 on 3rd Nov 2022. Since then it conducting the remediation to their product line. Perhaps the remediation on 24th Jan 2023 to Red Hat Virtualisation 4 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the final round.
Looks like this is a CPU vendor specific bug. As a result, some vendors have stated that their products are not affected by this vulnerability. Whether it a absolute answer? All will depends on the use of CPU processor brand.

Background: From technical point of view, Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) is an indirect branch control mechanism that restricts speculation of indirect branches. See below for technical details.
CPUID.(EAX=7H,ECX=0): If EDX[26] is 1, it means support IBRS and IBPB,
OS can write IA32_SPEC_CTRL0 and IA32_PRED_CMD0 to control the behavior of indirect branch predictor.
IBRS finally failed to enter the kernel due to function problems, however when when the vm is switched. It can get into kernel. This weakness found in 2018 earlier stage.

Vulnerability details: A flaw was found in hw. In certain processors with Intel’s Enhanced Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (eIBRS) capabilities, soon after VM exit or IBPB command event, the linear address following the most recent near CALL instruction prior to a VM exit may be used as the Return Stack Buffer (RSB) prediction.
Non-transparent sharing of return predictor targets between contexts in some Intel(R) Processors may allow an authorized user to potentially enable information disclosure via local access.

Official announcement – For details, see URL – https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2022-26373

CVE-2022-31711 – VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.x prior to 8.10.2 (Updated On: 2023-01-31)

Preface: As time goes by, Log management is a mandatory setting in the digital world. Log management core architecture design involves a lot of software design. Therefore, you will be exposed to different forms of cyber attacks. So you need to watch out and protect yourself from harm.

Background: Log Insight includes the following key capabilities
• Integrates with VMware vRealize Operations™ to bring unstructured and structured data together, for significantly enhanced end-to-end operations management.

System Features:
Web Hooks supports additional alerting extensibility into Slack,etc.
• Simple Query API adds support for simple keyword search, complex queries, integration with CMDBs, external UI analysis,etc.
• Support for pure IPV6 environment – both server and agent side.
• Server side Agent upgrades – supports automatic agent upgrades

Remark: Working with webhooks exposes an HTTP endpoint that can be called from any actor on your server. Without appropriate measures, this could be extremely unsafe. For example: A man-in-the-middle attack is a vulnerability where a third party obtains access to your webhook data by capturing and reading the request.

Vulnerability details: VMware vRealize Log Insight contains an Information Disclosure Vulnerability. A malicious actor can remotely collect sensitive session and application information without authentication.

Affected Versions: VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.x prior to 8.10.2.

Consequence: Successful exploitation of the vulnerability may allow remote code execution and complete system compromise.

Official announcement: For more information please refer to – https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0001.html

CVE-2023-20532 – See what’s going on with this vulnerability? (1st Feb 2023)

Preface: As usual when you read a vulnerability bulletin. The vendor sometimes do not disclose technical details to the public. If you will read daily renewal CVE records. Maybe you feel the same way I do. CPU is one of the key topics of the vulnerability database. Since the supplier has the right to secrecy. As a computer user, all you have to do is patch.

Background: AMD engineers that made the “Zen” architecture powering every AMD processor available today, from AMD Ryzen™ desktop and mobile processors, to AMD EPYC™ CPUs, and AMD Threadripper™ CPUs. It all started with “Zen”. AMD Epyc CPU codenames follow the naming scheme of Italian cities, including Milan (3rd Gen 2021), Rome (2nd Gen 2019) and Naples (1st Gen 2017).
The system management unit (SMU) is tasked with the job of continuously sampling sensory data and making rapid corrections to various circuits on the chip.
Ryzen SMU is a Linux kernel driver that exposes access to the SMU (System Management Unit) for certain AMD Ryzen Processors.

Vulnerability details: Insufficient input validation in the SMU may allow an attacker to improperly lock resources, potentially resulting in a denial of service.

Reference: Traditionally, There are two main types of kernel locks. The fundamental type is the spinlock (include/asm/spinlock[.]h). The second type is a mutex (include/linux/mutex[.]h): it is like a spinlock, but you may block holding a mutex.

For official announcement on AMD Server Vulnerabilities – January 2023. Please refer to url – https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-1032

Remark: If you’re interested in the matter, see the diagram for details.

CVE-2023-0240 LINUX KERNEL until 5.10.160 IO_URING (IO_PREP_ASYNC_WORK) memory corruption  (30th Jan 2023)

Preface: The basic idea behind AIO is to allow a process to initiate a number of I/O operations without having to block or wait for any to complete.

Background: System calls are how a program enters the kernel to perform some task. Programs use system calls to perform a variety of operations such as: creating processes, doing network , file IO,…etc.
io_uring is an asynchronous I/O interface provided by Linux. The implementation of io_uring uses only three syscalls: io_uring_setup, io_uring_enter and io_uring_register.
io_uring gets its name from ring buffers which are shared between user space and kernel space.

There is a size limit of 1GiB per buffer. Currently, the buffers must be anonymous, non-file-backed memory, such as that returned by malloc(3) or mmap(2) with the MAP_ANONYMOUS flag set.
Do you think it is possible to launch a remote attack through this vulnerability (CVE-2023-0240)? Perhaps possible. It can exploit Kernel Driver mmap Handler Exploitation.

Ref: The use-after-free vulnerability exploits a mistake made by the original author of a software and can result in devastating effects that range from remote code execution to the leaking of sensitive data.

Vulnerability details: There is a logic error in io_uring’s implementation which can be used to trigger a use-after-free vulnerability leading to privilege escalation. In the io_prep_async_work function the assumption that the last io_grab_identity call cannot return false is not true, and in this case the function will use the init_cred or the previous linked requests identity to do operations instead of using the current identity. This can lead to reference counting issues causing use-after-free. We recommend upgrading past version 5.10.161.

Official announcement: For details, please refer to the URL – https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-0240

About CVE-2023-0394 (30th Jan 2023)

Preface: Believed that this design weakness already been fixed before CVE release to public. So do not worry about that.
To become secure, since a known Potential issues of IPv6 extension headers. Therefore , both stateful and stateless firewalls should do a deep inspection. Otherwise, it can do the evasion silently.

Background: From an early deployment aspect, IPv6 is seen as mandatory for specific 5G traffic flows, such as the 5G Control Plane (CP) and the 5G User Plane (UP). For the Management Plane (MP) and IPSec, IPv6 deployment in the early phase is not seen as mandatory but optional if available. But time will tell, IPv6 will have a major role to play in 5G, as IPv4 addresses, which are already in short supply, could never suffice the ever-growing connection demand further down the road.
IPv6 extension headers contains supplementary information used by network devices (such as routers, switches, and endpoint hosts) to decide how to direct or process an IPv6 packet. The length of each extension header is an integer multiple of 8 octets.

Vulnerability Details: A NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in rawv6_push_pending_frames in net/ipv6/raw.c in the network subcomponent in the Linux kernel. This flaw causes the system to crash.

Ref:In normal circumstances, Extension headers other than the Hop-by-Hop (HBH) options header are not processed, inserted, or removed by any node until the packet reaches the destination node, but this is a potential problem.

For the official announcement, please refer to the following URL: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-0394

Speculation – Cause of Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) Vulnerabilities (25th Jan 2023)

Preface: Edge was initially built with Microsoft’s own proprietary browser engine, EdgeHTML, and their Chakra JavaScript engine. In late 2018, it was announced that Edge would be completely rebuilt as a Chromium-based browser with Blink and V8 engines.

The new Microsoft Edge is based on Chromium and was released on January 15, 2020. It is compatible with all supported versions of Windows, and macOS.

Background: In Chromium, a renderer doesn’t run in the main browser’s process. Different sites will run in different renderers who have different processes. Last year it found flaw occurred. CVE-2022-1134 – bug got remote code execution in Chrome renderer. The bug exists in the super inline cache (SuperIC) feature.

Blink is Google Chrome’s rendering engine , V8 is the JavaScript Engine used within Blink. Inline cache is an optimization used in V8 for speeding up property accesses in bytecode generated by Ignition (the interpreter in V8). 

Edge and Chrome are both built on the Chromium open-source browser using the Blink rendering engine

Vulnerability details:

CVE-2023-21796: Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability. This CVE ID is unique from CVE-2023-21795.

CVE-2023-21795: Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability. This CVE ID is unique from CVE-2023-21796.

CVE-2023-21775: Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

CVE-2023-21719: Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability

Official announcement: See URL for details – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/DeployEdge/microsoft-edge-relnotes-security

Observation: Refer to CVE-2022-1134. A JavaScript object has its map as its first field. In V8, this field is used for determining the type of an object, so by putting the map of a double Array in our fake object, V8 will interpret it as a double array. So, code region overwritten.

Since no details release by vendor. But think it over, in Chromium, a renderer doesn’t run in the main browser’s process. Different sites will run in different renderers who have different processes. However if there is Remote Code Execution Vulnerability happened (similar CVE-2022-1134). Then the impact will be different.

The flaw display in diagram so called  type confusion vulnerability. When a memory buffer is accessed using the wrong type, it could read or write memory out of the bounds of the buffer, if the allocated buffer is smaller than the type that the code is attempting to access, leading to a crash and possibly code execution. Then Exploiting this flaw to get a Privileged Shell.

What is the value of the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) ? (20th JAN 2023)

Preface: Some said, found malware lets cybercriminal remotely manipulate your Android.

Background: The full name of TEE is trusted execution environment, which is an area on the CPU of mobile devices (smart phones, tablets, smart TVs). The role of this area is to provide a more secure space for data and code execution, and to ensure their confidentiality and integrity.

Other TEE operating systems are traditionally supplied as binary blobs by third-party vendors or developed internally. Developing internal TEE systems or licensing a TEE from a third-party can be costly to System-on-Chip (SoC) vendors and OEMs.

Trusty is a secure Operating System (OS) that provides a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for Android. A Trusty application is defined as a collection of binary files (executables and resource files), a binary manifest, and a cryptographic signature. At runtime, Trusty applications run as isolated processes in unprivileged mode under the Trusty kernel.

Technical details: According to headline news, a new Android malware named ‘Hook’ is being sold by cybercriminals, boasting it can remotely take over mobile devices in real-time using VNC (virtual network computing). said bleepingcomputer news.

For details, please refer to URL – https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-hook-android-malware-lets-hackers-remotely-control-your-phone/

Speculation: If this reported malware achieves their goals, do you think they will relies on vulnerability such as CVE-2023-21420?

Solution: To avoid Android malware, you should only install apps from the Google Play Store.

Here’s wishing you a Happy Chinese New Year 2023.

Potential threat of ChatGPT (Artificial intelligence) – 19th JAN 2023

Preface: OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman in Nov 2015. ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

Background: OpenAI GPT-3 is a machine learning model that can be used to generate predictive text via an API.

In GPT-3’s API, a ‘prompt’ is a parameter that is provided to the API so that it is able to identify the context of the problem to be solved. Depending on how the prompt is written, the returned text will attempt to match the pattern accordingly.

Security Focus: ChatGPT is being abused to build hacking tools, why? Programmed with the help of AI, even script kiddies might be lucky enough to craft malware. Experts say it’s a sinister allusion. What are the design flaws in AI itself under normal circumstances? Yes, there is a known issue with so-called prompt injection attacks. Prompt Injection is a new vulnerability that is affecting some AI/ML models and, in particular, certain types of language models using prompt-based learning. 

Additional details: ChatGPT can also code malicious software that can monitor users’ keyboard strokes and create ransomware. For your information, ChatGPT has been developed by OpenAI as an interface for its LLM (Large Language Model).

Moreover, scammers can also use ChatGPT to build bots and sites to trick users into sharing their information and launch highly targeted social engineering scams and phishing campaigns.

For details about Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3, please refer to this link – https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/12/prompt-injection/

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