Security

Abstract:

When a website is accessed, a connection is made using HTTPS to ensure that it ends with the website owner and that subsequent data traffic is secured. However, no further assurances can be given to a user. It is therefore a matter of trust that the site is secure and treats the information exchanged faithfully. This puts users at risk of interacting with insecure or even fraudulent systems. With the availability of confidential computing, which makes execution contexts secure from external access and remotely attestable, this situation can be fundamentally improved.

In this paper, we propose browser-based site attestation that allows users to validate advanced security properties when accessing a website secured by confidential computing. This includes data handling policies such as the data provided being processed only during the visit and not stored or forwarded. Or informs the user that the accessed site has been audited by a security company and that the audited state is still intact. This is achieved by integrating remote attestation capabilities directly into a commodity browser and enforcing user-managed attestation rules.

Some excerpts:

Such a secured context is encrypted at all times, but is decrypted within the CPU only when the context is about to be executed. Thus, code and data are now also protected from unwanted access during execution. In order to validate that confidential computing applies to a secured context, remote attestation must be performed. During this process, a request is sent to a secured context, which in turn requests an attestation report from a Hardware Root of Trust (HRoT) local to the platform.

We argue that end users could also benefit greatly from the extended guarantees of confidential computing when accessing a secured website. However, there are two main obstacles: First, there is no standardized way for users to detect a secured context and perform remote attestation. Second, if remote attestation is enabled, users must be able to interpret an attestation result to decide whether the remote site is trustworthy.

In this paper, we present site attestation, which takes advantage of confidential computing to improve trust and security when surfing the Web.

7 CONCLUSION

Today, when accessing websites, users have to trust that the remote system is secure, respects data protection laws, and is benevolent. With the availability of confidential computing, remote execution contexts can be secured from external access and become attestable. Site attestation proposes to secure websites through confidential computing and perform remote attestation with trustworthiness policies while surfing the Web, reducing the need to blindly rely on the website’s reputation.

GitHub repo with Nginx, httperf, and Firefox code

Long live Julian Assange.

Microsoft is creating new capabilities that will let security vendors operate outside of the root of Windows operating systems.

Researchers still don’t know the cause of a recently discovered malware infection affecting almost 1.3 million streaming devices running an open source version of Android in almost 200 countries.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18512730

DroidFS is an Android application providing rootless support for gocryptfs and CryFS encrypted file systems. It features an encrypted camera, biometric unlocking, integrated secure file viewers and allows decrypted files to be exposed to other applications. It is 100% FLOSS and developed voluntarily.

This new version...

• aims to improve the user interface
• implements a foreground service to keep volumes open in the background
• allows tweaking the file export method used for sharing content with other apps
• adds new Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Hebrew translations
• and of course, fixes a few bugs

Official APKs are available for download now. It should land on F-Droid very soon, with a new per-ABI APKs split which will reduce quite a bit the download as well as the installed app size.

Feel free to give some feedback, open bug reports, ask for help, contribute, or just discuss about the project!

Hey Community, I figured that I could strengthen existing automated unit test generation quality by integrating mutation testing results as a metric to determine the quality of my unit tests. Figured everyone should be unit testing their code now especially after the recent Crowdstrike fiasco.

Check it out here https://github.com/codeintegrity-ai/mutahunter

Please star if you like it :)

Caused by security firm CrowdStrike that issued an update.

Regression in signal handler.

This vulnerability is exploitable remotely on glibc-based Linux systems, where syslog() itself calls async-signal-unsafe functions (for example, malloc() and free()): an unauthenticated remote code execution as root, because it affects sshd's privileged code, which is not sandboxed and runs with full privileges.

Contrary to what is stated on the polyfill.io website, Cloudflare has never recommended the polyfill.io service or authorized their use of Cloudflare’s name on their website. We have asked them to remove the false statement, and they have, so far, ignored our requests. This is yet another warning sign that they cannot be trusted.

If it ain't 'murican we ban 'em!

Guess all foreign cars should be next, what with all the telemetry and all...

A 22-year-old man from the United Kingdom arrested this week in Spain is allegedly the ringleader of Scattered Spider, a cybercrime group suspected of hacking into Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and nearly 130 other organizations over the past two years.

im working on a decentralized chat app. i open sourced it to get feedback on the implementation.

for a project like this, its important for it to be open source in order to gain user confidence in the security. but i find that the project is too complicated for pro-bono security assessment work (which is understandable).

fiverr probably isnt the best place to find reputable support, but i wanted to see the prices. it seems to range from 50 to 5k+

i wont be getting the support any time soon, but id like guage an estimate. i havent done something like this before so any/all advice is appriciated.

i created a threat-model which may help: https://positive-intentions.com/docs/research/threat-model/

to explain my app in more detail: https://medium.com/@positive.intentions.com/introducing-decentralized-chat-377c4aa37978

github repo: https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat

KrebsOnSecurity has been in intermittent contact with LockBitSupp for several months over the course of reporting on different LockBit victims. Reached at the same ToX instant messenger identity that the ransomware group leader has promoted on Russian cybercrime forums, LockBitSupp claimed the authorities named the wrong guy.

LockBitSupp, who now has a $10 million bounty for his arrest from the U.S. Department of State, has been known to be flexible with the truth.