Happy New Year and happy ten year anniversary to this blog, which I totally forgot back in October :-/. Blogging activity here has been so slow that I almost forgot how to work with Hugo. We started 2018 with heavy speculation on critical CPU bugs that were under disclosure embargo. Luckily for us, Google decided to break the embargo and release some proper information about the bugs so speculation could stop and facts could finally flow in. The merits or not of disclosure embargos deserve a serious discussion but this post is not the place for it. This one was for sure a huge mess. The world was finally introduced to Meltdown and Spectre. ...

This is a guest post by a young and talented Portuguese exploiter, Federico Bento. He won this year’s Pwnie for Epic Achievement exploiting TIOCSTI ioctl. Days ago he posted a video demonstrating an exploit for CVE-2017-5123 and luckly for you I managed to convince him to do a write-up about it. I hope you enjoy his work. Thanks Federico! ...

American fuzzy lop aka AFL is one of the easiest and best fuzzers out there and should be part of your development cycle if you care at least one bit about the security of your code. Its performance in OS X is a bit of a let down because of issues at fork() system call. AFL warns you about this when compiling it: WARNING: Fuzzing on MacOS X is slow because of the unusually high overhead of fork() on this OS. Consider using Linux or *BSD. You can also use VirtualBox (virtualbox.org) to put AFL inside a Linux or *BSD VM. ...

So I finally decided to bite the bullet and migrate from Wordpress to Hugo. I wanted to migrate out of Wordpress for a while but the amount of work required to keep the site structure due to SEO and migrating content always stopped me from doing it. I also wanted to keep the site comments feature and since I don’t like to use cloud services such as Disqus it created another big obstacle to this operation. ...

Some time ago a friend received a mysterious USB pen with a note talking about some kind of heavily persistent malware. He had that USB pen stored untouched and of course my curiosity took over. Since one should never plug in unknown USB devices into a computer (well, any USB device we purchase is unknown but that is another story) and I didn’t want to “burn” a computer just to take a look at the contents I decided to use my USB armory to build an air gap sandbox that would be harder to infect and for malware to escape from it. ...