There have been some hilarious issues on mobile devices over the years. The HTC Dream had a hidden shell that was discovered when a phone rebooted after sending a text containing just the word “reboot”. iOS has gotten in on the fun from time to time, and this time it’s ""::. Type the double quotes, a colon, and any other character, and Apple’s Springboard service crashes.

Another hacker dug in a bit, and realized that Springboard is trying to jump execution to a null pointer, leading to a crash. It’s very odd that user input breaks the query parser badly enough to jump to null like that. There are a couple interesting questions that we have to ask. Given that the crash trigger is quite flexible, "anything goes":x, is it possible to manipulate that function pointer to be something other than null? And perhaps more importantly, why is the code crashing, instead of an invalid address error as one would expect from a Pointer Authentication Code (PAC) violation? Regardless, the bug seems to be fixed in the latest iOS 18 builds.

Typing “”:: in various search bars (e.g. in Settings .app) on iOS, will cause a crash! ☠️ (by: @lorenzofb)

….let’s dig into why 🧵

— Patrick Wardle (@patrickwardle) August 21, 2024

OpenBMC

OpenBMC is something of a reference Baseboard Management Controller, and as such it’s the upstream for other implementations. And it has a fairly serious issue, in the slpd-lite service, which just happens to be installed and enabled by default. SLP is the Service Location Protocol, a service discovery protocol, which is something of a predecessor to Zeroconf. Slpd-lite has a pair of issues that result in trivial heap reads and writes, beyond the intended buffer.

The slpd-lite project patched the issues about a week after disclosure, back in May. In June, the patch and an advisory was applied to OpenBMC itself. Nice and speedy action. Now to get all the downstream vendors to apply it, too.

WordPress LightSpeed Falls to Weak Hash

The LightSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress does something really clever, but in a way that managed to allow admin authentication bypasses. To cache pages that a logged-in user would see, the plugin’s crawler simulates each user loading the site, and caches that. To protect that cache, a random string is generated. The problem is that this random generation is seeded using the current time, only the microsecond portion of the time. So one of only a million possible values. And while a million is a lot when talking about physical objects, it’s not nearly enough when talking about cryptography.

To log in as a user using this weak hash, an attacker only has to guess te proper user ID (usually 1 is an admin) and then hit the right hash value. Lightspeed hash released a fix, but this is a severe issue, and we should expect to see exploitation attempts — And that didn’t take long. This one could be nasty, as something like 3.5 million sites are still running the vulnerable version of the plugin. Wordfence has already blocked 48,500 in the first 24 hours of this attack being publicly known.

Insulin, Privacy, and Firewalls

[Remy] fron Greynoise Labs is on a bit of a crusade against insecure Bluetooth. And make no mistake, Bluetooth can be a problem. Case in point, the FDA has issued a recall on a particular insulin pump, because the iOS app could enter a crash loop, and the continual Bluetooth re-connections drained the device’s batteries. Battery drain may seem like a mild inconvenience, but apparently over 200 people have reported injuries as a result.

So in this push for more secure use of Bluetooth, [Remy] mined a collection of Android applications for Bluetooth UUIDs. Those are unique identifiers of what kind of device is advertising Bluetooth. With this new treasure trove of identifiers, it was only natural to write a Bluetooth UUID scanner. And this is where a bit of a bizarre coincidence took place. At the some moment [Remy] fired up this scanner, his local Internet access dropped. As a result, his Firewalla firewall started advertising a Bluetooth Low Energy interface. The database returned a hit, and [Remy] had the Android APK to look at.

The Firewalla scheme for authenticating that BLE interface was lacking, with a handful of possible issues, like only checking the first 8 characters of a UUID key. And once past that initial hurdle, further administration tasks are secured using a JSON Web Token. That token’s signing key was global for all Firewally devices, and trivially derived from either firmware or the Android APK. And that’s not even all, since there were also command injection issues over the same Bluetooth link. Firewalla has released version 1.979 to address these issues.

Moar Bluetooth

If that wasn’t enough Bluetooth, the Zero Day Initiative has us covered, with coverage of a pair of flaws in the Autel Maxicharger vehicle charging station. The first was a simple buffer overflow in the Bluetooth data handling, leading to possible Remote Code Execution (RCE). The second issue was the presence of “Backup credentials” in the firmware’s WiFi handling.

Bits and Bytes

“Insufficient sanitization” is not a feature you want in your microservices. Spring’s Cloud Dataflow is a tool to plug data flows in to various other applications. Before a recent patch fixed it, Dataflow was doing some basic checks on file uploads, like looking for nulls or empty files. The problem was some very simple path traversal attacks. Name a package name with ../../../poc, and while the service may throw an error, it still creates the files as requested. 2.11.3 has shipped with the fix, so time to update!

And speaking of bypasses, ingress-nginx has a validation bypass, allowing unauthorized access to Kubernetes clusters using that controller. Kubernetes supports annotations as a sort of metadata system, and ingress-nginx was failing to properly validate those annotations, which could then be used for command injection.

And finally, I think I’ve played this video game. Except this time, someone actually tried to hack himself out of existence. The FBI discovered that a criminal had not only used stolen social security numbers to commit fraud, he had gone so far as to register his own death in a Government system, using stolen credentials. It didn’t turn out so well, as he was discovered alive, and sentenced to jail time for the effort.