Posts Tagged ‘DefCon32’
[DefCon32] Listen to the Whispers: Web Timing Attacks that Actually Work
Timing attacks, long dismissed as theoretically potent yet practically elusive, gain new life through innovative techniques. James Kettle bridges the “timing divide,” transforming abstract concepts into reliable exploits against live systems. By amplifying signals and mitigating noise, Kettle unveils server secrets like masked misconfigurations, blind injections, hidden routes, and untapped attack surfaces.
Traditional hurdles—network jitter and server noise—once rendered attacks unreliable. HTTP/2’s concurrency, enhanced by Kettle’s single-packet method, synchronizes requests in one TLS record, eliminating jitter. Coalescing headers via sacrificial PING frames counters sticky ordering, making attacks “local” regardless of distance.
Server noise, from load variances to cloud virtualization, demands signal amplification: repeating headers for cumulative delays or denial-of-service tactics like nested XML entities. Repetition exploits caching, reducing variability; trimming requests minimizes unnecessary processing.
Parameter Discovery and Control Flow Insights
Kettle adapts Param Miner for time-based parameter/header guessing, uncovering hidden features on thousands of bug bounty sites. Timing reveals parameters altering responses subtly, like JSON-validated headers or cache keys signaling web cache poisoning risks.
Control flow changes, such as exceptions, emerge vividly. A Web Application Firewall (WAF) bypass exemplifies: repeated “exec” parameters trigger prolonged analysis, escalating to denial-of-service; excess parameters expose max-header limits, enabling evasion.
IP spoofing headers like “True-Client-IP” induce DNS caching delays, confirmed via pingbacks. Non-caching variants suggest third-party geo-lookups, bypassing with hostnames.
Server-Side Injection Vulnerabilities
Timing excels at blind injections in non-sleep-capable languages. Serde JSON injections manifest as microsecond differentials; combining with client-side reflections infers standalone processing, aiding exploitation.
Blind Serde parameter pollution contrasts reserved/unreserved characters, yielding exploits. Doppelgangers—non-blind equivalents—guide understanding, turning detections into impacts.
SQL injections via sleep evade WAFs but overlap existing tools; timing shines where sleep fails, though exploitation demands deep target insight.
Scoped Server-Side Request Forgery Detection
Overlooked for years, scoped SSRF—proxies accessing only target subdomains—defies DNS pingbacks. Timing detects via DNS caching or label-length timeouts: valid hostnames delay; invalids accelerate or prolong.
Automating exploration, Kettle probes subdomains directly and via proxies, flagging discrepancies like missing headers. Exploits span firewall bypasses, internal DNS resolutions uncovering staging servers, pre-launch consoles, and frontend circumventions.
Frontend impersonation leverages trusted internal headers for authentication bypasses, exploitable via proxies, direct backend access, or smuggling. Timing guesses header names, enabling severe breaches.
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EN_DEFCON32MainStageTalks_004_005.md
[DefCon32] Breaking Secure Web Gateways for Fun and Profit
Secure Web Gateways (SWGs), integral to enterprise Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Security Service Edge (SSE) frameworks, promise robust defenses against web threats. Vivek Ramachandran and Jeswin Mathai expose architectural flaws in these systems, introducing “Last Mile Reassembly Attacks” that evade detection across major vendors. Their findings underscore the limitations of network-level analysis in confronting modern browser capabilities.
SWGs intercept SSL traffic for malware scanning, threat prevention, URL filtering, and data loss prevention (DLP). Yet, as browsers evolve into sophisticated compute environments, attackers exploit client-side processing to reassemble threats post-proxy. Ramachandran highlights how SWGs lack context on DOM changes, events, and user interactions, operating blindly on flat traffic. Cloud constraints—file size limits (15-50 MB) and incomplete archive scanning—exacerbate vulnerabilities, often forcing blanket policies.
Vendors’ service level agreements (SLAs) claim 100% prevention of known malware, but these attacks shatter such guarantees. Pricing models ($2-4 per user/month) prioritize efficiency over exhaustive analysis, leaving gaps in protocol support and file handling.
Unmonitored Channels and Hiding in Plain Sight
Mathai demonstrates unmonitored protocols like WebRTC, WebSockets, gRPC, and Server-Sent Events smuggling malware undetected. These channels, essential for real-time apps, bypass interception; blocking them degrades user experience. Demos show seamless downloads of known malicious files via these vectors, indistinguishable from standard HTTP.
Further evasion involves embedding payloads in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or SVG, extracting them client-side for reconstruction. SWGs scan individual resources but miss browser-side assembly. Encryption/decryption and encoding/decoding (e.g., Base64, UUencode) transform binaries in memory, dropping unencrypted files without triggering content disposition headers.
Last Mile Reassembly Techniques
Core to their research, Last Mile Reassembly fragments files into chunks—straight splits, reverses, randomized sizes, or mixes—fetched via multiple requests and reassembled via JavaScript. SWGs analyze fragments independently, failing to detect malice. Extending to WebAssembly modules constructing documents (e.g., malicious Excel) locally, no file download occurs from the proxy’s view.
File uploads reverse this: insiders fragment sensitive data, sending as form submissions evading DLP rules. Overlapping fragments mimic historical network attacks, fully bypassing inspections.
Phishing sites, converted to MHTML archives and smuggled via reassembly, repaint via canvas, reusing known malicious pages undetected. SWGs fingerprint server-side but overlook client-side rendering.
Architectural Challenges and Vendor Responses
SWGs’ server-side nature precludes real-time browser syncing or per-tab emulation, unscalable amid millions of events. Ramachandran argues for browser-integrated security to access rich data, contrasting cloud-centric models’ economic allure with practical failures.
Vendor engagements yielded mixed results: some acknowledged issues and pursued fixes; others claimed partial detection or disengaged. Open-sourcing 25 bypasses at browser.security empowers testing, urging vendors to address rather than block the site.
Their toolkit facilitates red-team simulations, exposing SLAs’ fragility. Enterprises must rethink web threat defenses, prioritizing client-side visibility over network proxies.
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[DefCon32] Abusing Windows Hello Without a Severed Hand
In the realm of cybersecurity, exploring vulnerabilities in authentication mechanisms often reveals unexpected pathways for exploitation. Ceri Coburn and Dirk-jan Mollema delve into the intricacies of Windows Hello, Microsoft’s passwordless technology, highlighting how attackers can manipulate its components without relying on physical biometric data. Their presentation uncovers the architecture of Windows Hello, from key storage providers to protectors and keys, demonstrating real-world abuses that challenge the system’s perceived robustness.
Coburn begins by outlining the foundational elements of Windows Hello, emphasizing its role in generating keys for operating system logins, passkeys, and third-party applications. The distinction between Windows Hello and Windows Hello for Business lies primarily in the latter’s focus on certificate-based authentication for Active Directory environments. Both utilize key storage providers (KSPs), which serve as APIs for cryptographic operations. Traditional providers include software-based ones, TPM-backed platforms, and smart card integrations, but Windows Hello introduces the Passport KSP, acting as a proxy to these existing systems.
The Passport KSP comprises two services: the NGC service for application communication via RPC and the NGC controller service for metadata storage under the local service account, accessible only with system-level privileges. Each user enrollment creates a unique container folder identified by a GUID, housing protectors, key metadata, and recovery options. Protectors represent authentication methods like PINs or biometrics, encrypting intermediate PINs that unlock enrolled keys. These intermediate PINs—split into signing, decryption, and external variants—remain constant across protectors, allowing bypasses once accessed.
Unprivileged Attacks and Primary Refresh Tokens
Shifting focus, Mollema addresses attacks feasible without administrative privileges, centering on Primary Refresh Tokens (PRTs) in Windows Hello for Business scenarios. PRTs function as single sign-on tokens, requested via JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) signed by device certificates, ensuring trust from Entra (formerly Azure AD). When using Windows Hello, these requests incorporate data signed by private keys, including nonces to prevent replays.
A critical flaw arises from the ability to generate assertions without prompting for PINs or biometrics post-login, as keys are cached in sessions. Mollema demonstrates crafting “golden assertions” with extended validity, though Microsoft mitigated this by enforcing nonces server-side in May 2024. Nonetheless, within a five-minute window, attackers can request new PRTs on rogue devices, bypassing TPM protections and enabling persistence for up to 90 days.
This technique exploits RDP scenarios where PRTs on non-TPM devices expose credentials. Even with virtualization-based security or LSA protections, such attacks persist, underscoring the need for device compliance monitoring and restrictions on RDP to non-TPM systems.
Privileged Exploitation of Containers and Protectors
Under privileged access, Coburn dissects container structures, revealing metadata in .dat files detailing user SIDs, backing KSPs, and recovery keys. Protectors encrypt intermediate PINs differently: PIN protectors use PBKDF2 derivation for software KSPs or hex conversion for TPM unsealing. Biometric protectors, surprisingly, rely on system DPAPI keys, enabling reversal without actual biometrics via Vault decryption.
Recovery protectors, exclusive to business scenarios, involve Azure-encrypted blobs requiring MFA claims, yet their storage outside protector folders poses risks. Pre-boot and deprecated companion device protectors receive brief mentions, with further research needed.
Abuses include brute-forcing software-backed PINs via Hashcat masks, exploiting known lengths for rapid cracks—seconds for eight digits. TPM-backed PINs resist better, though four-digit variants succumb in months due to anti-hammering.
Key Types and Persistence Implications
Enrolled keys leverage intermediate PINs: vault keys decrypt local passwords in consumer setups, entry keys handle business enrollments and passkeys, and external keys support third-party apps like Okta FastPass. Software-backed keys allow extraction off-device, amplifying risks.
Mollema extends this to PRT theft, using cached keys for assertions on different devices, even without TPMs, facilitating identity persistence. Reported vulnerabilities led to CVE assignments, with server-side enforcements post-July 2023.
Endpoint mitigations include Windows Hello Extended Session Security (ESS), rewriting containers in JSON under secure processes. Detections monitor NGC metadata access, alerting on non-controller processes.
Their tools—Shay for Hello abuses and ROADtools for Azure AD—aid offensive and defensive efforts, drawing from blogs by Teal and others.
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[DefCon32] Taming the Beast: Inside Llama 3 Red Team Process
As large language models (LLMs) like Llama 3, trained on 15 trillion tokens, redefine AI capabilities, their risks demand rigorous scrutiny. Alessandro Grattafiori, Ivan Evtimov, and Royi Bitton from Meta’s AI Red Team unveil their methodology for stress-testing Llama 3. Their process, blending human expertise and automation, uncovers emergent risks in complex AI systems, offering insights for securing future models.
Alessandro, Ivan, and Royi explore red teaming’s evolution, adapting traditional security principles to AI. They detail techniques for discovering vulnerabilities, from prompt injections to multi-turn adversarial attacks, and assess Llama 3’s resilience against cyber and national security threats. Their open benchmark, CyberSecEvals, sets a standard for evaluating AI safety.
The presentation highlights automation’s role in scaling attacks and the challenges of applying conventional security to AI’s unpredictable nature, urging a collaborative approach to fortify model safety.
Defining AI Red Teaming
Alessandro outlines red teaming as a proactive hunt for AI weaknesses, distinct from traditional software testing. LLMs, with their vast training data, exhibit emergent behaviors that spawn unforeseen risks. The team targets capabilities like code generation and strategic planning, probing for exploits like jailbreaking or malicious fine-tuning.
Their methodology emphasizes iterative testing, uncovering how helpfulness training can lead to vulnerabilities, such as hallucinated command flags.
Scaling Attacks with Automation
Ivan details their automation framework, using multi-turn adversarial agents to simulate complex attacks. These agents, built on Llama 3, attempt tasks like vulnerability exploitation or social engineering. While effective, they struggle with long-form planning, mirroring a novice hacker’s limitations.
CyberSecEvals benchmarks these risks, evaluating models across high-risk scenarios. The team’s findings, shared openly, enable broader scrutiny of AI safety.
Cyber and National Security Threats
Royi addresses advanced threats, including attempts to weaponize LLMs for cyberattacks or state-level misuse. Tests reveal Llama 3’s limitations in complex hacking, but emerging techniques like “obliteration” remove safety guardrails, posing risks for open-weight models.
The team’s experiments with uplifting non-expert users via AI assistance show promise but highlight gaps in achieving expert-level exploits, referencing Google’s Project Naptime.
Future Directions and Industry Gaps
The researchers advocate integrating security lessons into AI safety, emphasizing automation and open-source collaboration. Alessandro notes the psychological toll of red teaming, handling extreme content like nerve gas research. They call for more security experts to join AI safety efforts, addressing gaps in testing emergent risks.
Their work, supported by CyberSecEvals, sets a foundation for safer AI, urging the community to explore novel vulnerabilities.
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[DefCon32] Securing CCTV Cameras Against Blind Spots
As CCTV systems underpin public safety, their vulnerabilities threaten to undermine trust. Jacob Shams, a security researcher, exposes a critical flaw in object detection: location-based confidence weaknesses, or “blind spots.” His analysis across diverse locations—Broadway, Shibuya Crossing, and Castro Street—reveals how pedestrian positioning impacts detection accuracy, enabling malicious actors to evade surveillance. Jacob’s novel attack, TipToe, exploits these gaps to craft low-confidence paths, reducing detection rates significantly.
Jacob’s research spans five object detectors, including YOLOv3 and Faster R-CNN, under varied lighting conditions. By mapping confidence levels to position, angle, and distance, he identifies areas where detection falters. TipToe leverages these findings, offering a strategic evasion tool with implications for urban security and beyond.
The study underscores the need for robust CCTV configurations, urging developers to address positional biases in detection algorithms to safeguard critical infrastructure.
Understanding Blind Spots
Jacob’s experiments reveal that pedestrian position—distance, angle, height—affects detector confidence by up to 0.7. Heatmaps from lab and real-world footage, including Shibuya Crossing, highlight areas of low confidence, persisting across YOLOv3, SSD, and others. These blind spots, independent of video quality or lighting, create exploitable gaps.
For instance, at Shibuya, TipToe reduces average path confidence by 0.16, enabling stealthy movement. This phenomenon, consistent across locations, exposes systemic flaws in current detection models.
The TipToe Evasion Attack
TipToe constructs minimum-confidence paths through CCTV scenes, leveraging positional data to minimize detection. Jacob demonstrates its efficacy, achieving significant confidence reductions in public footage. Unlike invasive methods like laser interference, TipToe requires no suspicious equipment, relying solely on strategic positioning.
This attack highlights the ease of exploiting blind spots, urging integrators to reassess camera placement and algorithm tuning.
Mitigating Detection Weaknesses
Jacob proposes recalibrating object detectors to account for positional variances, enhancing confidence in weak areas. Multi-angle camera setups and advanced models could further reduce blind spots. His open-source tools encourage community validation, fostering improvements in surveillance security.
The research calls for a paradigm shift in CCTV design, prioritizing resilience against evasion tactics to protect public spaces.
[DefCon32] Smishing Smackdown: Unraveling the Threads of USPS Smishing and Fighting Back
In an era where digital scams proliferate, SMS phishing, or smishing, has surged, exploiting trust in institutions like the United States Postal Service (USPS). S1nn3r, a red team operator and founder of Phantom Security Group, recounts her journey tackling the “Smishing Triad,” a sophisticated operation distributing scam kits. Motivated by personal encounters with these fraudulent texts, S1nn3r’s investigation uncovers vulnerabilities in the kits, enabling access to their admin panels and exposing over 390,000 stolen credit card details across 900 domains.
S1nn3r’s expertise in web application testing, honed through bug bounties, drives her to reverse-engineer these kits. Collaborating with peers, she identifies two critical flaws, granting entry to administrative interfaces. This access reveals not only victim data but also scammer details like login IPs and passwords. Her findings, shared with banks and the USPS Inspector’s Office, aid in protecting nearly 880,000 victims, highlighting the power of proactive cybersecurity.
The talk illuminates the technical ingenuity behind smishing campaigns and offers strategies to combat them, emphasizing client-side filtering to thwart future attacks.
Anatomy of the Smishing Triad
S1nn3r begins by dissecting the USPS smishing campaign, which spiked during the holiday season. These messages, mimicking USPS alerts, lure users to fraudulent sites via links. The Smishing Triad’s kit, a scalable tool sold to scammers, automates these attacks, capturing credentials and financial data.
Through meticulous analysis, S1nn3r uncovers the kit’s structure, leveraging web vulnerabilities to infiltrate admin panels. This access exposes databases containing victim information, revealing the campaign’s vast reach.
Exploiting Kit Vulnerabilities
The investigation reveals two pivotal weaknesses: insecure authentication and misconfigured APIs. By exploiting these, S1nn3r gains administrative control, extracting data from over 40 panels. This includes scammer metadata, such as IPs and cracked passwords, offering insights into their operations.
Her collaboration with a Wired journalist and law enforcement underscores the real-world impact, linking stolen credit cards to specific scams. This evidence strengthens investigations, despite challenges in victim identification.
Countermeasures and Future Defenses
S1nn3r advocates enhanced client-side filtering, suggesting AI-driven solutions to detect suspicious texts. Third-party integrations, like Truecaller, offer practical defenses by flagging non-official USPS links. She cautions against man-in-the-middle attacks on SMS, emphasizing scalable, user-friendly protections.
Her work, shared via open-source tools, invites further research to dismantle smishing ecosystems, urging collective action against evolving scams.
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[DefCon32] QuickShell: Sharing Is Caring About RCE Attack Chain on QuickShare
In the interconnected world of file sharing, Google’s QuickShare, bridging Android and Windows, presents a deceptively inviting attack surface. Or Yair and Shmuel Cohen, researchers at SafeBreach, uncover ten vulnerabilities, culminating in QuickShell, a remote code execution (RCE) chain exploiting five flaws. Their journey, sparked by QuickShare’s Windows expansion, reveals logical weaknesses that enable file writes, traffic redirection, and system crashes, culminating in a sophisticated RCE.
Or, a vulnerability research lead, and Shmuel, formerly of Check Point, dissect QuickShare’s Protobuf-based protocol. Initial fuzzing yields crashes but no exploits, prompting a shift to logical vulnerabilities. Their findings, responsibly disclosed to Google, lead to patches and two CVEs, addressing persistent Wi-Fi connections and file approval bypasses.
QuickShare’s design, facilitating seamless device communication, lacks robust validation, allowing attackers to manipulate file transfers and network connections. The RCE chain combines these flaws, achieving unauthorized code execution on Windows systems.
Protocol Analysis and Fuzzing
Or and Shmuel begin with QuickShare’s protocol, using hooks to decode Protobuf messages. Their custom fuzzer targets the Windows app, identifying crashes but lacking exploitable memory corruptions. This pivot to logical flaws uncovers issues like unauthenticated file writes and path traversals, exposing user directories.
Tools built for device communication enable precise vulnerability discovery, revealing weaknesses in QuickShare’s trust model.
Vulnerability Discoveries
The researchers identify ten issues: file write bypasses, denial-of-service (DoS) crashes, and Wi-Fi redirection via crafted access points. Notable vulnerabilities include forcing file approvals without user consent and redirecting traffic to malicious networks.
A novel HTTPS MITM technique amplifies the attack, intercepting communications to escalate privileges. These flaws, present in both Android and Windows, highlight systemic design oversights.
Crafting the RCE Chain
QuickShell chains five vulnerabilities: a DoS to destabilize QuickShare, a file write to plant malicious payloads, a path traversal to target system directories, a Wi-Fi redirection to control connectivity, and a final exploit triggering RCE. This unconventional chain leverages seemingly minor bugs, transforming them into a potent attack.
Demonstrations show persistent connections and code execution, underscoring the chain’s real-world impact.
Takeaways for Developers and Defenders
Or and Shmuel emphasize that minor bugs, often dismissed, can cascade into severe threats. The DoS flaw, critical to their chain, exemplifies how non-security issues enable attacks. They advocate holistic security assessments, beyond memory corruptions, to evaluate logical behaviors.
Google’s responsive fixes, completed by January 2025, validate the research’s impact. The team’s open-source tools invite further exploration, urging developers to prioritize robust validation in file-sharing systems.
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[DefCon32] Windows Downdate: Downgrade Attacks Using Windows Updates
The notion of a “fully patched” system crumbles under the weight of downgrade attacks, as revealed by Alon Leviev, a self-taught security researcher at SafeBreach. His exploration of Windows Updates uncovers a flaw allowing attackers to revert critical components—DLLs, drivers, kernels, and virtualization stacks—to vulnerable versions, bypassing verification and exposing privilege escalations. Alon’s tool, Windows Downdate, renders the term “updated” obsolete, compromising systems worldwide.
Alon, a former Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion, leverages his expertise in OS internals and reverse engineering to dissect Windows Update mechanisms. Inspired by the BlackLotus UEFI bootkit, which bypassed Secure Boot via downgrades, he investigates whether similar vulnerabilities plague other components. His findings reveal a systemic design flaw, enabling unprivileged attackers to manipulate updates and disable protections like Virtualization-Based Security (VBS).
The implications are profound: downgraded systems report as fully updated, evade recovery tools, and block future patches, leaving them exposed to thousands of known vulnerabilities.
BlackLotus and the Downgrade Threat
Alon traces the research to BlackLotus, which exploited a patched Secure Boot flaw by reverting components. Secure Boot verifies boot chain signatures, but BlackLotus’s downgrade bypassed this, prompting Alon to probe Windows Updates for similar weaknesses.
He discovers that update packages, lacking robust validation, allow crafted downgrades. By manipulating update manifests, attackers revert critical files, exploiting old vulnerabilities without triggering alerts.
Compromising the Virtualization Stack
Targeting Hyper-V, Secure Kernel, and Credential Guard, Alon achieves downgrades that expose privilege escalations. VBS, designed to isolate sensitive operations, relies on UEFI locks, yet his methods disable these protections, a first in known research.
The attack exploits design flaws allowing less privileged rings to update higher ones, a remnant since VBS’s 2015 debut. Demonstrations show downgraded hypervisors, undermining Windows’ security architecture.
Restoration Vulnerabilities
A secondary flaw in update restoration scenarios amplifies the threat. Unprivileged users can trigger rollbacks, embedding malicious updates that persist across reboots. Recovery tools fail to detect these, as the system registers as compliant.
Alon’s Windows Downdate tool automates this, crafting updates that downgrade entire systems, from drivers to kernels, without administrative rights.
Industry Implications and Mitigations
The research exposes a gap in downgrade attack awareness. Alon urges thorough design reviews, emphasizing that unexamined surfaces, like update mechanisms, harbor risks. Linux and macOS may face similar threats, necessitating preemptive scrutiny.
Mitigations include enhanced validation, privilege restrictions, and monitoring for anomalous updates. His findings, shared responsibly with Microsoft, highlight the need for systemic changes to restore trust in patching.
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[DefCon32] Your AI Assistant Has a Big Mouth: A New Side-Channel Attack
As AI assistants like ChatGPT reshape human-technology interactions, their security gaps pose alarming risks. Yisroel Mirsky, a Zuckerman Faculty Scholar at Ben-Gurion University, alongside graduate students Daniel Eisenstein and Roy Weiss, unveils a novel side-channel attack exploiting token length in encrypted AI responses. Their research exposes vulnerabilities in major platforms, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Cloudflare, threatening the confidentiality of personal and sensitive communications.
Yisroel’s Offensive AI Research Lab focuses on adversarial techniques, and this discovery highlights how subtle data leaks can undermine encryption. By analyzing network traffic, they intercept encrypted responses, reconstructing conversations from medical queries to document edits. Their findings, disclosed responsibly, prompted swift vendor patches, underscoring the urgency of securing AI integrations.
The attack leverages predictable token lengths in JSON responses, allowing adversaries to infer content despite encryption. Demonstrations reveal real-world impacts, from exposing personal advice to compromising corporate data, urging a reevaluation of AI security practices.
Understanding the Side-Channel Vulnerability
Yisroel explains the attack’s mechanics: AI assistants transmit responses as JSON objects, with token lengths correlating to content size. By sniffing HTTPS traffic, attackers deduce these lengths, mapping them to probable outputs. For instance, a query about a medical rash yields distinct packet sizes, enabling reconstruction.
Vulnerable vendors, unaware of this flaw until February 2025, included OpenAI and Quora. The team’s tool, GPTQ Logger, automates traffic analysis, highlighting the ease of exploitation in unpatched systems.
Vendor Responses and Mitigations
Post-disclosure, vendors acted decisively. OpenAI implemented padding to the nearest 32-byte value, obscuring token lengths. Cloudflare adopted random padding, further disrupting patterns. By March 2025, patches neutralized the threat, with five vendors offering bug bounties.
Yisroel emphasizes simple defenses: random padding, fixed-size packets, or increased buffering. These measures, easily implemented, prevent length-based inference, safeguarding user privacy.
Implications for AI Security
The discovery underscores a broader issue: AI services, despite their sophistication, inherit historical encryption pitfalls. Yisroel draws parallels to past side-channel attacks, where minor details like timing betrayed secrets. AI’s integration into sensitive domains demands rigorous security, akin to traditional software.
The work encourages offensive research to uncover similar weaknesses, advocating AI’s dual role in identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities. As new services emerge, proactive design is critical to prevent data exposure.
Broader Call to Action
Yisroel’s team urges the community to explore additional side channels, from compression ratios to processing delays. Their open-source tools invite further scrutiny, fostering a collaborative defense against evolving threats.
This research redefines AI assistant security, emphasizing meticulous data handling to protect user trust.
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[DefCon32] 1 for All, All for WHAD: Wireless Shenanigans Made Easy
In the ever-evolving landscape of wireless security, the proliferation of bespoke tools for protocol attacks creates a fragmented ecosystem. Romain Cayre and Damien Cauquil, seasoned researchers from Quarkslab, introduce WHAD, a unifying framework designed to streamline wireless hacking. By offering a standardized host/device communication protocol, WHAD enhances interoperability across diverse hardware, liberating researchers from the constraints of proprietary firmware. Their presentation unveils a solution that fosters collaboration and innovation, making wireless exploits more accessible and sustainable.
Romain, maintainer of the Mirage tool for Bluetooth and beyond, and Damien, creator of BtleJack, share a passion for dissecting wireless protocols. Their work addresses a critical pain point: the reliance on specialized, often obsolete hardware for attacks on smartphones, peripherals, and vehicles. WHAD consolidates these efforts, supporting protocols like Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Zigbee, and Logitech Unifying, while enabling researchers to focus on exploits rather than hardware compatibility.
The framework’s extensible architecture allows seamless integration with devices like Nordic nRF boards, ensuring longevity as hardware evolves. By presenting WHAD’s capabilities through practical demonstrations, Romain and Damien showcase its potential to transform wireless security research.
The Problem with Wireless Tools
Wireless security tools, while effective, often tie researchers to specific hardware and custom protocols. Damien highlights the chaos of tools like BtleJack, Mirage, and GATTacker, each requiring unique firmware and communication methods. This fragmentation forces researchers to reinvent protocols, limiting scalability and accessibility.
WHAD addresses this by providing a unified protocol stack, abstracting hardware complexities. It supports multiple devices through a single interface, reducing the need for redundant development. For instance, a researcher targeting BLE can use WHAD with any compatible dongle, avoiding the need to craft bespoke firmware.
WHAD’s Architecture and Capabilities
Romain details WHAD’s modular design, comprising a host-side Python library and device-side firmware. The framework supports sniffing, injection, and interaction across protocols. Demonstrations include BLE relay attacks, where WHAD discovers services and manipulates devices like smart bulbs, altering colors or states.
Its flexibility extends to hardware CTFs, with WHAD emulating BLE challenges and LoRa gateways. Integration with tools like Scapy enhances packet manipulation, while firmware availability on GitHub encourages community contributions.
Real-World Applications and Impact
Damien shares WHAD’s internal use at Quarkslab, where it facilitated a BLE GATT fuzzer, uncovering CVEs in expressive controllers. Research into screaming channel attacks leveraged WHAD to instrument custom link-layer traffic, showcasing its versatility.
The framework’s open-source release, available via PyPI and GitHub, invites contributions for new protocols and hardware support. Romain emphasizes its role in democratizing wireless research, reducing barriers for newcomers and veterans alike.
Future Potential and Community Engagement
WHAD’s vision extends beyond current protocols, with plans to incorporate emerging standards. By fostering a collaborative ecosystem, Romain and Damien aim to unify disparate tools, ensuring resilience against hardware obsolescence.
Their call for contributors underscores the community-driven ethos, encouraging bug reports, documentation, and firmware development. WHAD’s potential lies in its adaptability, empowering researchers to explore new attack surfaces efficiently.