Last week, I live tweeted some reverse engineering of the Meitu iOS app, after it got a lot of attention on Android for some awful things, like scraping the IMEI of the phone. To summarize my own findings, the iOS version of Meitu is, in my opinion, one of thousands of types of crapware that you’ll find on any mobile platform, but does not appear to be malicious. In this context, I looked for exfiltration or destruction of personal data to be a key indicator of malicious behavior, as well as performing any kind of unauthorized code execution on the device or performing nefarious tasks… but Meitu does not appear to go beyond basic advertiser tracking. The application comes with several ad trackers and data mining packages compiled into it – which appear to be primarily responsible for the app’s suspicious behavior. While it’s unusually overloaded with tracking software, it also doesn’t seem to be performing any kind of exfiltration of personal data, with some possible exceptions to location tracking. One of the reasons the iOS app is likely less disgusting than the Android app is because it can’t get away with most of that kind of behavior on the iOS platform.
The new Touch Bar is often marketed as a gimmick, but one powerful capability it has is to function as a lockdown mechanism for your machine in the event of a physical breach. By changing a few power management settings and customizing the Touch Bar, you can add a button that will instantly lock the machine’s screen and then begin a countdown (that’s configurable, e.g. 5 minutes) to lock down the entire system, which will disable the fingerprint reader, remove power to the RAM, and discard your FileVault keys, effectively locking the encryption, protecting you from cold boot attacks, and prevent the system from being unlocked by a fingerprint.
One of the reasons you may want to do this is to allow the system to remain live while you step away, answer the door, or run to the bathroom, but in the event that you don’t come back within a few minutes, lock things down. It can be ideal for the office, hotels, or anywhere you feel that you feel your system may become physically compromised. This technique offers the convenience of being able to unlock the system with your fingerprint if you come back quickly, but the safety of having the system secure itself if you don’t.
Original Date: April, 2016
A clear technical definition of the term backdoor has never reached wide consensus in the computing community. In this paper, I present a three-prong test to determine if a mechanism is a backdoor: “intent”, “consent”, and “access”; all three tests must be satisfied in order for a mechanism to meet the definition of a backdoor. This three-prong test may be applied to software, firmware, and even hardware mechanisms in any computing environment that establish a security boundary, either explicitly or implicitly. These tests, as I will explain, take more complex issues such as disclosure and authorization into account.
The technical definition I present is rigid enough to identify the taxonomy that backdoors share in common, but is also flexible enough to allow for valid arguments and discussion.
Social media is ripe with analysis of an FBI joint report on Russian malicious cyber activity, and whether or not it provides sufficient evidence to tie Russia to election hacking. What most people are missing is that the JAR was not intended as a presentation of evidence, but rather a statement about the Russian compromises, followed by a detailed scavenger hunt for administrators to identify the possibility of a compromise on their systems. The data included indicators of compromise, not the evidentiary artifacts that tie Russia to the DNC hack.
One thing that’s been made clear by recent statements by James Clapper and Admiral Rogers is that they don’t know how deep inside American computing infrastructure Russia has been able to get a foothold. Rogers cited his biggest fear as the possibility of Russian interference by injection of false data into existing computer systems. Imagine the financial systems that drive the stock market, criminal databases, driver’s license databases, and other infrastructure being subject to malicious records injection (or deletion) by a nation state. The FBI is clearly scared that Russia has penetrated more systems than we know about, and has put out pages of information to help admins go on the equivalent of a bug bounty.