Wladimir Palant's blog
One of the biggest sore points with Wayland is its focus stealing protection. The idea is good: an application should not be able to bring itself into focus at an unexpected time, only when the currently active application allows it. Support is still lacking however, which might also be due to Gtk/Glib implementing the required XDG activation protocol but not really documenting it. It took me a…
VStarcam is an important brand of cameras based on the PPPP protocol . Unlike the LookCam cameras I looked into earlier , these are often being positioned as security cameras. And they in fact do a few things better like… well, like having a mostly working authentication mechanism. In order to access the camera one has to know its administrator password. So much for the theory. When I looked into…
My first article on the PPPP protocol already said everything there was to say about PPPP “encryption” : Keys are static and usually trivial to extract from the app. No matter how long the original key, it is mapped to an effective key that’s merely four bytes long. The “encryption” is extremely susceptible to known-plaintext attacks, usually allowing reconstruction of the effective key from a…
One important player in the PPPP protocol business is VStarcam. At the very least they’ve already accumulated an impressive portfolio of security issues. Like exposing system configuration including access password unprotected in the Web UI (discovered by multiple people independently from the look of it). Or the open telnet port accepting hardcoded credentials (definitely discovered by lots of…
My previous article on IoT “P2P” cameras couldn’t go into much detail on the PPPP protocol. However, there is already lots of security research on and around that protocol, and I have a feeling that there is way more to come. There are pieces of information on the protocol scattered throughout the web, yet every one approaching from a very specific narrow angle. This is my attempt at creating an…
I’ve got my hands on an internet-connected camera and decided to take a closer look, having already read about security issues with similar cameras. What I found far exceeded my expectations: fake access controls, bogus protocol encryption, completely unprotected cloud uploads and firmware riddled with security flaws. One could even say that these cameras are Murphy’s Law turned solid: everything…
Two weeks ago I published an article on 63 malicious Chrome extensions . In most cases I could only identify the extensions as malicious. With large parts of their logic being downloaded from some web servers, it wasn’t possible to analyze their functionality in detail. However, for the Download Manager Integration Checklist extension I have all parts of the puzzle now. This article is a technical…
As noted last week I consider it highly problematic that Google for a long time allowed extensions to run code they downloaded from some web server, an approach that Mozilla prohibited long before Google even introduced extensions to their browser. For years this has been an easy way for malicious extensions to hide their functionality. When Google finally changed their mind , it wasn’t in form of…
Let’s make one thing clear first: I’m not singling out Google’s handling of problematic and malicious browser extensions because it is worse than Microsoft’s for example. No, Microsoft is probably even worse but I never bothered finding out. That’s because Microsoft Edge doesn’t matter, its market share is too small. Google Chrome on the other hand is used by around 90% of the users world-wide,…
This is a guest post by a researcher who wants to remain anonymous. You can contact the author via email . Recently, John Tuckner of Secure Annex and Wladimir Palant published great research about how BIScience and its various brands collect user data. This inspired us to publish part of our ongoing research to help the extension ecosystem be safer from bad actors. This post details what BIScience…