Research Blog

This month, members of NCC Group will be presenting their work at the following conferences: Dirk-Jan Mollema, “Walking Your Dog in Multiple Forests: Breaking AD Trust Boundaries through Kerberos Vulnerabilities,” to be presented at Black Hat Asia 2020 (Virtual – October 1 2020) Sanne Maasakkers, “Improve Security Awareness Campaigns by Applying Phishing Research,” to be […]

The complexities of the heavy truck ecosystem poses challenges to the security of the ECU networks contained within the vehicles. This paper describes some of the major sources of complexity, and how each can be addressed to design and implement a secure robust ECU provisioning system. Such a system is required in order for the […]

Authored by Colin Brum At NCC Group, we like to give our interns real world hacking challenges. Over the course of a semester, we teach our students about software and hardware security. For a final project, we challenge our interns to apply what they’ve learned to find a vulnerability and develop an exploit against a […]

In the summer of 2018, Google engaged NCC Group to conduct a security assessment of the Android Cloud Backup/Restore feature, which premiered in Android Pie. This engagement focused on a threat model that included attacks by rogue Google employees (or other malicious insiders) with privileges up to and including root-in-production. The Android backup/restore feature is only one […]

NCC Group consultants Mason Hemmel and Jeff Dileo recently completed a one-week audit of the Kolide TUF client. The audit took place between August 28, 2017 and September 1, 2017. TUF, an acronym for The Update Framework, is a set-and-forget library for securing software updates. It combines a preponderance of current academic work on the […]

The Department for Transport, in conjunction with Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), has created eight key principles of cyber security for connected and autonomous vehicles. The guidance has been produced in response to the large (and growing) attack surface presented by connected and autonomous vehicle technology, as highlighted below: The guidance […]

Andy Davis, research director at NCC Group, delivered this presentation at the  escar Embedded Security in Cars Conference in Hamburg. His talk focused on how USB security affects embedded systems within vehicles. It covered an overview of USB basics and some classic examples of where vulnerabilities have been previously identified. Download Presentation

This presentation about maritime cyber security, delivered at the CIRM Annual Meeting in Cyprus, looks at the cyber threats to the maritime industry, an overview of the attack surface, the impact of some of the risks they face and a look at what solutions are available in the short, medium and long term. Download presentation […]

Matt Lewis, associate director at NCC Group presented a talk at the Oredev conference in Sweden on how self-driving cars is no longer science fiction. Investment is already being made into this area and commercially available vehicles will be available in the next decade. Matt’s talk discusses the possibilities and challenges that the automotive industry […]

Threat mitigation is an important part of the security development lifecycle (SDL) and at NCC Group we have been performing a number of threat modeling workshops focused specifically on the automotive sector. Considering the increasing research and media attention in relation to connected cars, it is fundamental to understand the threats affecting these new emerging systems […]