Synode: understanding and automatically preventing injection attacks on Node.js Staicu et al., NDSS’18 If you’re using JavaScript on the server side (node.js), then you’ll want to understand the class of vulnerabilities described in this paper. JavaScript on the server side doesn’t enjoy some of the same protections as JavaScript running in a browser. In particular, ... Continue Reading

Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0 Bernstein, 2007 I find security much more important than speed. We need invulnerable software systems, and we need them today, even if they are ten times slower than our current systems. Tomorrow we can start working on making them faster. That was written by Daniel ... Continue Reading

Spectre attacks: exploiting speculative execution Kocher et al., 2018 Yesterday we looked at Meltdown and some of the background on how modern CPUs speculatively execute instructions. Today it’s the turn of Spectre of course, which shares some of the same foundations but is a different attack, not mitigated by KAISER. On a technical front, Spectre ... Continue Reading

Meltdown Lipp et al., 2018 I’m writing this approximately one week ahead of when you get to read it, so it’s entirely possible by this time that you’ve already heard more than you can stand about Meltdown and Spectre! Behind the news headlines though, there’s a lot of good information in the accompanying papers, and ... Continue Reading

Economic factors of vulnerability trade and exploitation Allodi, CCS’17 Today we’re going on a tour inside a prominent Russian cybercrime market, identified in the paper as ‘RuMarket’ (not its real name). The author infiltrated the market using a fake identity, and was subsequently able to collect data on market activities from 2010 to 2017. RuMarket ... Continue Reading

The dynamics of innocent flesh on the bone: code reuse ten years later van der Veen et al., CCS’17 It’s been ten years since the publication of “The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone,” the paper that introduce the notion of Return Oriented Programming and use of gadgets to craft exploits. In the intervening ... Continue Reading