Bloom filters are one of those simple and handy engineering tools that any engineer should have in their toolbox.
It is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure that represents a set and allows you to test if an element is in it.
They are really simple to construct and look like this:
The cool thing is that to achieve such space-efficiency Bloom filters allow for errors with an arbitrarily small probability!
Nexus 9’s kernel (tegra kernel tree) exposes a debugfs file entry that
allows a privileged attacker write arbitrary values within kernel space.
The root cause is unsanitized input to the dangerous writel() function.
A similar vulnerability
was discovered by Marco Grassi earlier this year.
TLDR: Took a week off, jumped to SF to work on Let’s Encrypt with the Electronic Frontier Foundation!
For quite some time now I’ve been contributing code to Let’s Encrypt and more specifically Certbot. For those of you who never heard of it - Let’s Encrypt is an automated CA that securely validates domain ownership and offers FREE certificates.
The nvhost GPU driver for the Tegra kernel contains a heap overflow in the
NVHOST_IOCTL_CTRLL_MODULE_REGRDWR ioctl command. The bug results from an
integer overflow that makes the kernel allocate a small heap buffer, and
eventually overruns it with an attacker controllable payload. The current
SELinux sepolicy allows any untrusted_app to trigger it.
While reading on RSA I stumbled upon Dan Boneh’s Twenty Years of Attacks on the RSA Cryptosystem 1999 paper. In there, I found a trove of applied attacks against RSA; one of which, Wiener’s, employs continued fractions approximation to break RSA efficiently (under certain conditions).
The attack was interesting enough to make me want to learn about it and spread the word.
So, today we’re going to use simple math and Python to distill Wiener’s Attack :).
I had the opportunity of participating in Aviv Zohar’s Advanced Bitcoin Seminar at the Hebrew University.
My task was to review Christian Decker’s article Bitcoin Transaction Malleability and MtGox [[^1]].
It was a great read, I learned a lot! :)
Our paper was accepted to both Usenix WOOT and Blackhat Europe! So Nadja and I got to go to Amsterdam :) !
We wanted to exploit CVE-2014-3100 - a stack based buffer overflow in Android’s Keystore.
We needed to bypass the stack canary.
Long story short, we devised probablistic attacks that enables an attacker to
predict random bytes that are extracted from the
underlying entropy pool of /dev/urandom during device boot, such as Keystore’s canary value.
Given two sets $A$ and $B$ the Jacard simliarity coefficient is a commonly used indicator of the similarity the two.
$$Pr[h _{min} (A)= h _{min} (B)] = J(A,B)=\frac{|A\cap B|}{|A\cup B|}$$
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Nietzsche.
They can span multiple paragraphs, if you like.