This post will guide you through all the steps it took me to support challenges that were released in 2016 by Riscure. From schematics review to an automation script, you will learn how to extend Chipwhisperer-lite, a versatile platform for side channel attacks and glitching and using it to crack an AES 128bit encryption key in less than a minute.

This post provides additional technical details about the physical part of the encrypted USB attacks that we demonstrated a few month back in our talk at BlackHat USA 2017. In particular I will cover how to remove the epoxy and how to reball a BGA chip. If you are considering auditing your own USB key or are curious about the challenges we faced, this article is for you.

Welcome to my electronic lab! Over the last few years or so many people asked me about my personal lab, so today I am giving you a virtual tour of it.

We will go over what gear I use and how I set everything up so I can do my experiment efficiently. Along the way I will answer the questions that has been asked about my setup in my various posts. In particular, I will provide a rationale of why I choose one type of hardware versus another.  The quantity of hardware described in this post might seems overwhelming but keep in mind here that it took me years to build this lab. I merely add a new piece here and there based of my needs and opportunity.

Disclaimer: I don’t claim my setup is the best but it works for my use-cases: tinkering with electronic, doing security research and repairing various pieces of equipment. If you have suggestions on how to improve it, let me know.

Well, I have to admit that it’s been a long time since I wrote here.

Lot of people complained during the past years that DPAPIck was only supporting Windows XP and Vista and basically wanted to know if one day we were going to support newer versions of Microsoft Windows.

Thanks to Francesco Picasso (@dfirfpi), this project now supports Windows versions from XP to the latest Windows 8.1 (sorry, we haven’t tested it on Windows 10 yet). He did the work and sent me a patch that allowed DPAPIck to run against Windows 7 blobs but it was also breaking XP support at the same time. So I took some extra time to give that a bit of polish and to improve a few things on how the tool was processing data.

During the previous part, we were able to use GNU Radio and a Software Defined Radio (SDR) in order to receive and demodulate RF packets.

Now is the time to go a bit further: extract and decode packets and then, the counterpart, encode and send packets back.

Even though I will use my robot vacuum as an example, this blog post can be considered as a simple how-to about writing a simple packet sink in GNU Radio.

First of all, I am pretty happy to write this article because I usually don’t have a lot of opportunities to write about forensics topics on this blog. The main reason for that situation is because I am almost always working on that field for my employer so this does not have a place on this blog . But this time it was related to a spare time project I did during my holidays!

You’re not going to have a lot of details about the whole project because it is still ongoing and moreover I am working on it with a friend and we hope to do a bigger publication once we are done. Anyway, I went through a lot a caveats so I thought it was worth writing about that step in our study.

Few times ago I have published an article about two RFID locks that I encountered while traveling and a rough blackbox analysis of these two technologies. Unfortunately, back then, I only had few samples of key cards regarding Vingcard’s locks and that led me to take false assumptions.

But I was lucky enough very recently as to meet this lock once more. And because it was a three weeks stay, it was pretty easy to purposely tell the reception that my card was not working anymore, a couple of times, in order to have them reprogram it (yay, I’m a bad guy!). The purpose here was, first, to check what values can change over time (they usually encode the duration of the stay instead of the checkout timestamp) and secondly, to ensure that there is not a kind of timestamp-dependant key.

For those who want to read the whole story from the beginning, here are Part 1 and Part 2.

I haven’t talked about this project for a while but I was still working on it. So, what took me so long that I didn’t write about it?

Well, as I told you in Part 1, my final goal is to be able to control the robot vacuum with a GoodFET and a transceiver. The robot relies on an A7105 transceiver which is not directly supported by the GoodFET project and I don’t want to add support for it as I have already written code to support a Chipcon CC2500 transceiver that might be radio-compatible with the Avantcom one.

Knowing all the parameters we need by spying the configuration phase on the SPI bus from the remote control should have been enough to build another remote. But sometimes things don’t go well!

This talk provides a step-by-step introduction on how to use deep learning to perform AES side-channel attacks. After providing a brief overview of what side channels and deep-learning are, we walk you through how to use Tensorflow to build an end-to-end attack that will recover TinyAES keys from SMT32F415 chips using deep learning. Along the way we will discuss what work and what doesn't based on our experience attacking many hardware AES implementations over the last few years.

Ever wondered if your new shiny AES hardware-encrypted USB device really encrypts your data - or is just a fluke? If you have, come to our talk to find out if those products live up to the hype and hear about the results of the audit we conducted on multiples USB keys and hard drives that claim to securely encrypt data.

In this talk, we will present our methodology to assess "secure" USB devices both from the software and the hardware perspectives. We will demonstrate how this methodology works in practice via a set of case-studies. We will demonstrate some of the practical attacks we found during our audit so you will learn what type of vulnerability to look for and how to exploit them. Armed with this knowledge and our tools, you will be able to evaluate the security of the USB device of your choice

The large adoption of wireless devices goes further than WiFi (smartmeters, wearable devices, Internet of Things, etc.).

The developers of these new types of devices may not have a deep security background and it can lead to security and privacy issues when the solution is stressed.

However, to assess those types of devices, the only solution would be a dedicated hardware component with an appropriate radio interface for each one of them.

That is why we developed an easy-to-use wireless monitor/injector tool based on Software Defined Radio using GNU Radio and the well-known scapy framework.

In this talk, we will introduce this tool we developed for a wide range of wireless security assessments: the main goal of our tool is to provide effective penetration testing capabilities for security auditors with little to no knowledge of radio communications.

You recovered a bunch of files from a used hard drive and now what ?

If you ever wanted to push Windows offline forensic to the next level, come to our talk where we will show you how to use our open source tool OWADE (Offline Windows Analyzer and Data Extractor) to recover many interesting information from a used hard drive including web credentials, instant messaging credentials and user habits information.

We will walk you through the entire recovery chain process and demonstrate how to use OWADE to handle Windows various level of encryption (Syskey, DPAPI…) and extract the maximum information from used drives. OWADE is based on our work on DPAPIck our tool to decrypt DPAPI secrets.

We will present various statistics we computed on the data we gathered from the eBay used hard drive we bought to test and develop OWADE.

At the end of the talk we will release OWADE so you can play with it.