Successful mitigation of today’s security threats requires an approach that is both on the offensive and on the defensive. Here, we give our take on how to approach and handle specific security challenges, as well as our reaction to some of the latest industry topics.
12.06.23Chromecast with Google TV (1080P) Secure-Boot Bypass Introduction: Implications of These Findings This piece details the development of a chain of three exploits intended to allow an individual to run a custom OS/unsigned code on the Chromecast with Google (CCwGTV) 1080P. Security researchers Jan Altensen, Ray Volpe, and I developed this chain of vulnerabilities as… Read more »
08.24.23Welcome to a new series of DirectDefense blog posts about hardware and IoT penetration testing! The goal of this 101 series is to shed light on common hardware I/O interfaces, associated protocols, and the multitude of vulnerabilities that can arise when they are left unprotected. While hardware reconnaissance will be briefly discussed, this particular article… Read more »
03.08.23Smartphone Snooping Without Microphone Access Can your smartphone sensors still enable apps to eavesdrop on your conversations even after the app has been denied microphone access? It does seem possible. We dug into this question based on two research papers, “AccEar: Accelerometer Acoustic Eavesdropping with Unconstrained Vocabulary”, and “Side Eye: Characterizing the Limits of POV… Read more »
02.07.23Exploring Fake News Detection as a Service Automated or machine-learning solutions for fake news detection are both necessary and challenging in the fight against misinformation. This post explores the first automatic, content-agnostic approach to fake news detection, FNDaaS, which considers both new and unstudied website features. The Challenges of Fake News Detection Using Current Methods… Read more »
01.24.23The Pros and Cons of Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Code Development Using an AI coding assistant is rapidly becoming an attractive choice for developers. Instead of analyzing your own problem-solving processes and translating them into code, why not draw on the massive body of developed software that has likely solved your problem a hundred times?… Read more »
01.19.23How Safe are Electric Vehicle Charging Mobile Applications from Attack? This post provides a review of research on mobile EVCS app security and how vulnerable these apps are from attack. I have detailed my take on the research and findings, as well as what we learn from the research on improving security for mobile electric… Read more »
01.18.23Can These Languages Eliminate Memory-Handling Vulnerabilities for Programmers? Much has been made recently of the memory safety provided by programming languages like Rust and Go. These languages have been designed to eliminate some of the language weaknesses that make it so easy for C and C++ programmers to write vulnerable software. These memory-safe languages are… Read more »
01.17.23How Safe are Radar Sensors from Adversarial Attack? This post provides a review of research on radar security and how vulnerable a particular type of radar is to adversarial attack. I have detailed my take on the research and findings, as well as what we learn from the research on improving security within radar-based environments.… Read more »
01.16.23What We Can Learn From an Examination of the Misapplication of Cryptography In this post, I present my thoughts and learnings from a research paper focused on cryptography use cases demonstrating misapplication. The authors undertook a study building on some previous work by other authors, going further to study the prevalence of false positives in… Read more »
01.12.23A Deep Dive into ThirdEye and What Researchers Found In this post, I present my thoughts and learnings from a research paper about ThirdEye, an automated Android application testing tool that was created by the paper’s authors. While this tool does not appear to have been released to the public at the time of publication,… Read more »
