Research Blog

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 […]

This blog post is part one in a short series on learning some basic game hacking techniques. I’ve chosen Warcraft 2 for a variety of reasons: With those things in mind, most older RTS games work in a similar manner, and you should be able to apply these techniques to other games, though maybe not […]

Introduction If you are a pentester and enjoy tinkering with Windows, you have probably come across the following post by Raphael Mudge: Windows Access Tokens and Alternate Credentials In this post, he explains how the Windows program runas works and how the netonly flag allows the creation of processes where the local identity differs from […]

Aaron Adams presented this talk at HITB Phuket on the 24th August 2023. The talk detailed how NCC Exploit Development Group (EDG) in Pwn2Own 2022 Toronto was able to exploit two different PostScript vulnerabilities in Lexmark printers. The presentation is a good primer for those interested in further researching the Lexmark PostScript stack, and also […]

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 […]

There is a specific type of cryptographic transformation that arises in storage-oriented blockchains. The transformation is a “slowable” 1-1 mapping which does not involve any secrets and is tradeoff-resistant in the following sense: it should not be possible to partially compute the function, store a fraction of the function’s state and then resume and finish […]

This is a four part blog post series that starts with Rustproofing Linux (Part 1/4 Leaking Addresses). Shared memory is often used to share data without the performance hit of copying. Whenever a shared resource is consumed by one component while being modified by another component, there is potential for Time-Of-Check-Time-Of-Use (TOCTOU) or Double Fetch […]

This is a four part blog post series that starts with Rustproofing Linux (Part 1/4 Leaking Addresses). In the C programming language, integer types can be a bit confusing. Portability issues can arise when the same code is used in multiple hardware architectures or operating systems. For example, int is usually 32-bit, but could also […]

Rust is a programming language guaranteeing memory and thread safety while still being able to access raw memory and hardware. This sounds impossible, and it is, that’s why Rust has an unsafe keyword which allows a programmer to dereference a raw pointer and perform some other dangerous operations. The dangerous code is effectively contained to […]

This blog post is the second in a series related to machine learning, and demonstrates exactly how a data poisoning attack might work to insert a backdoor into a facial authentication system. The simplified system has similarities to that which the TSA is running a proof of concept trial at the Detroit and Atlanta airports. As background, […]