Research Blog

Executive Summary NCC Group is pleased to open source a new tool built to help Red Teams log their activity for later correlation with the Blue Team’s own logging. What started as a simple internal web based data-collection tool has grown to integrate with Cobalt Strike and BloodHound to improve the accuracy and ease of […]

Pumping Iron on the Musl Heap – Real World CVE-2022-24834 Exploitation on an Alpine mallocng Heap Lua 5.1 Musl’s Next Generation Allocator – aka mallocng mallocng Cycling Offset Exploiting CVE-2022-24834 on the mallocng heap mallocng Heap Shaping Ensuring Correct Target Table->Array Distance Lua Table Confusion redis-server/libc ASLR Bypass and Code Execution Conclusion Resources Tools This […]

System Management Interrupts (SMI) provide a mechanism for entering System Management Mode (SMM) which primarily implements platform-specific functions related to power management. SMM is a privileged execution mode with access to the complete physical memory of the system, and to which the operating system has no visibility. This makes the code running in SMM an […]

This year’s Real World Cryptography Conference recently took place in Toronto, Canada. As usual, this conference organized by the IACR showcased recent academic results and industry perspectives on current cryptography topics over three days of presentations. A number of co-located events also took place before and after the conference, including the FHE.org Conference, the Real […]

In April 2024, Distrust engaged NCC Group’s Cryptography Services team to perform a cryptographic security assessment of keyfork, described as “an opinionated and modular toolchain for generating and managing a wide range of cryptographic keys offline and on smartcards from a shared mnemonic phrase”. The tool is intended to be run on an air-gapped system […]

Lolbins? Where we’re going, we don’t need lolbins. At NCC Group, as a consultant in our hardware and embedded systems practice1, I often get to play with various devices, which is always fun, but getting your own software to run on them can be a bit of a pain.This article documents a few realisations and […]

Written by: Steven van der Baan In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized various aspects of threat detection, prevention, and mitigation. Web penetration testing, a crucial component of ensuring the security posture of digital assets, has seen significant advancements through AI-powered tools. While AI undoubtedly offers numerous benefits […]

We are excited to announce the addition of a new provider in our open-source, multi-cloud auditing tool ScoutSuite (on GitHub)! In April, we received a remarkable pull request from Asif Wani, Product Security Lead at DigitalOcean APAC, to integrate DigitalOcean services into ScoutSuite. After reviewing the request, NCC Group not only accepted his proposal, but […]

Let’s kick this off with some examples. Here’s a seamless loop illustrating CBC-mode encryption: Here’s a clip showing a code block being rewritten to avoid leaking padding information in error messages: Here’s an illustration of a block cipher operating in CTS mode: You may be surprised to learn that each of these illustrations was generated […]

Hello and welcome back to the Cryptopals Guided Tour (previously, previously)! Today we are taking on Challenge 17, the famous padding oracle attack. For those who don’t know, Cryptopals is a series of eight sets of challenges covering common cryptographic constructs and common attacks on them. You can read more about Cryptopals at https://cryptopals.com/. There’s a […]