Research Blog

During August and September of 2023, Microsoft engaged NCC Group to conduct a security assessment of Caliptra v0.9. Caliptra is an open-source silicon IP block for datacenter-focused server-class ASICs. It serves as the internal root-of-trust for both measurement and identity of a system-on-chip. The main use cases for Caliptra are to assure integrity of mutable […]

AWS allows tags, arbitrary key-value pairs, to be assigned to many resources. Tags can be used to categorize resources however you like. Some examples: In an account holding multiple applications, a tag called “application” might be used to denote which application is associated with each resource. A tag called “stage” might be used to separate […]

To ensure security of new 5G telecom networks, NCC Group has been providing guidance, conducting code reviews, red team engagements and pentesting 5G standalone and non-standalone networks since 2019. As with any network various attackers are motivated by different reasons. An attacker could be motivated to either gain information about subscribers on an operator’s network […]

Introduction Long time has passed since Microsoft implemented the first Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) approach in Azure Active Directory with the Per-user MFA functionality [1]. However, this simple on/off mechanism has been replaced over time by the Conditional Access Policy (CAP) feature, which was released on July 2016. A conditional access policy is a set of conditions which, if matched, enforces its access […]

tl;dr You can now have Scout Suite scan not only your cloud environments, but your Kubernetes clusters. Just have your kubeconfig ready and run the following commands: $ pip3 install ScoutSuite $ scout kubernetes Background NCC Group’s Container Orchestration Security Service (COSS) practice regularly conducts Kubernetes cluster configuration reviews spanning platform-managed Kubernetes clusters across different […]

Modern organizations evolved and took the next step when they became digital. Organizations are using cloud and automation to build a dynamic infrastructure to support more frequent product release and faster innovation. This puts pressure on the IT department to do more and deliver faster. Automated cloud infrastructure also requires a new mindset, a change […]

We are excited to announce the release of a new version of our open-source, multi-cloud auditing tool ScoutSuite (on Github)! This version includes multiple bug fixes, dependency updates and feature enhancements for AWS, Azure and GCP. It also adds and updates several rules for these three cloud providers, alongside improved finding templates and descriptions. The […]

Robust exception handling is one of the tenets of best practice for development, no matter what the coding language. This blog post explores the curious circumstances in which a developer trying to do the right thing – but without appreciating the full effects – could lead to data integrity issues in a Salesforce Organization. As […]

As one of the proud contributors to the newest version of the CIS Google Cloud Platform Foundation Benchmark, I wanted to raise awareness about the new version release of this benchmark [1] by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and how it can help a company to set a strong security baseline or foundation for […]

We’re proud to announce the release of a new version of our open-source, multi-cloud auditing tool ScoutSuite (on Github)! The most significant improvements and features added include: Core Improved CLI options, test coverage and some dependencies AWS Added new findings for multiple services Bug fixes Added ARNs for all resources Azure Added new findings Bug […]