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I wanted to build a personalized PCB badge for DEF CON, just for the heck of it. I’ve built wearable PCBs before, but this time I wanted to give LLMs a go. LLMs successfully designed hardware and firmware entirely, with human guidance, although they failed at detecting a loop between nets.
The security industry is catching up fast to AI agents. Most current work focuses on securing agents rather than using AI for security. Here are my takeaways from the first Real World AI Security conference at Stanford.
This is the second post in a series on how to design, debug, reverse engineer, and deliver talks that land with impact in the high-stakes world of cybersecurity.
This is the first post in a series on how to design, debug, reverse engineer, and deliver talks that land with impact in the high-stakes world of cybersecurity. At the end of each post, you’ll find a ‘How to Coach for This?’ section.
I’ve embarked on a brief journey to learn RISC-V and I ended up finding a niche of interesting material on security research on fuzzing, so I pivoted my attention to that. Here’s a brief summary of what I found.
My son was asked to build a compound machine as science project. The machine is expected to dispense cards as a way to celebrate Valentine’s Day with classmates. I decided to “STEM+ the heck out of this project” and involve my son to let him practice with logic and fine manipulation skills.
Yesterday, the news broke that firmware code leaked from Lenovo, which included Intel Alder Lake reference code. While I leave you to this great post by Binarly.io’s REsearch team for the details , I want to focus on how to check if firmware images are affected.
I want to release my very personal and opinionatedly organized infosec/cybersec sources in one OPML file. I don’t know to what extent I’ll be able to curate it, but for now I wanted to get it out.
I guess it’s not unique to the cyber-security world, but research and media move pretty fast here, so it’s easy to end up with hundreds of seemingly interestingly articles or blog posts to read every day. Of course, that’s not humanly possible. Let me tell you how I deal with this.
Despite this little beast known as COVID-19 pandemic is about to turn 1 year old, many people still feel strange when wearing masks. While wearing a face mask we can’t speak properly and we can’t see others’ mouth, so our experience of a conversation can change, especially if speaking is central in our lives (think of any public figure). Wearing a face mask impacts how we…
Reading long texts has always been a daunting task to me. A rocky mountain I seldom find myself brave enough to start climbing (unless forced to). I’ve never had good reading habits, except for a few, very intriguing novels with a powerful storyline, which I could actually read quite fast. But most of the readings I wish I could get done quickly are damn hard. In the era of book-summarizing…
How do we secure a smart manufacturing system, or a smart factory? Recent incidents such as the ransomware infection that halted production at a major semiconductor foundry in 2018 have already shown the impact of IT-to-OT lateral movement. Moreover, while smart manufacturing systems are isolated from other networks, there is a trend toward less isolation between IT and OT systems.
RFQuack is the only versatile RF-analysis tool that quacks! 🦆 RFQuack is the evolution of a prototype to help me reverse engineer sub-GHz and 2.4GHz RF protocols based on digital packet radios.
After having analyzed the several RF protocols for industrial applications, distributed by global vendors, we discovered that none of them had sufficient security features to prevent an attacker from hijacking the communication and manoeuvre the controlled connected machines.
Given the multiple releases around this topic and project, I’ve decided to put together a summary. So far, there is: a tool, a white paper, an academic paper, and (spoiler alert) another white paper coming soon.
Many vulnerabilities in one shot, yet several pre-conditions for a target to be actually exploitable. Here’s simple flowchart to check whether your Dnsmasq deployments are vulnerable.
Industrial robots are complex cyber-physical systems used for manufacturing, and a critical component of any modern factory. Besides the mechanical arm, inside an industrial robot there are not just electromechanical components but a multitude of complex embedded controllers.
CAN-based protocols are vulnerable to bit-flipping attacks at the link layer. In this collaborative research, Politecnico di Milano’s NECSTLab and Trend Micro’s FTR analyze the protocol in depth and demonstrate the vulnerability on a real car, with PoC and so on.
The goal of this project is to extract signatures that capture the WebInject behavior of trojans. WebInject-based trojans are still the most popular e-crime tool.
Industrial routers play a very crucial role: a single vulnerability can grant the attacker access to an entire network of critical machines. In this research, I’ve looked at how easy it is for a hypothetical attacker to find and enumerate industrial routers, and the security posture of their vendors.
The day before the EyePyramid case exploded, I received a confidential email with a PDF. It was the scanned copy of the court order for the law enforcement to proceed and arrest the Occhionero brothers. In a few minutes, I noticed that this leaked document was also circulating on various private mailing lists and chat groups I’m part of. At some point, I received a non-redacted copy.
I’ve started this project while advising a Master student who was interested in machine learning. As I’ve been using machine learning since around 2006, I was immediately hooked by the idea of using it to determine whether an Android app was trying to lock the target device as part of a ransomware scheme.
We started this project because we wanted to analyze banking and credit-card transactions and, with as little knowledge as possible, predict whether new ones are fraudulent or not (e.g., due to a banking trojan working on the victim’s computer, made by a cyber criminal with stolen credentials).
We wanted to create a malware tracker similar to ZeusTracker, but for mobile bankers. So we built a tool, DroydSeuss, which uses static analysis to extract relevant C&C endpoints (e.g., phone number, web URLs) and monitors them by running each sample in a sandbox on a daily basis.
A simple and effective Java Library that you can easily add to your Android projects to perform secure dynamic class loading operations.
Sono stato invitato dal Garante per la Protezione dei Dati alla giornata europea della privacy , con richiesta di fare un po’ di chiarezza sul fenomeno IoT. Questo articolo è una versione “verbosa” del mio intervento, che si incentra sui tre fattori che, secondo me, hanno contribuito a dar vita a questo fenomeno: tecnologia accessibile a basso costo, moltitudine di scenari…
The main goal of this project is to provide a dashboard to analyze and monitor the spreading of Android malware in marketplaces. AndRadar uses lightweight fingerprints to lookup malware samples without the need to download them from the markets.
Spying on a person is an easy and effective method to obtain sensitive information, even when the victim is well protected against common digital attacks. Modern mobile devices allow people to perform some information sensitive actions in unsafe places, where anyone could easily observe the victim while typing.