Blog migration to Hugo

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. ...

June 20, 2017 · 2 min · 418 words · fG!

Armory Sandbox – Building a USB analyzer with USB armory

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. ...

June 20, 2017 · 11 min · 2178 words · fG!

EFI Swiss Knife – An IDA plugin to improve (U)EFI reversing

Today I am finally releasing one of the EFI reversing tools I built when I was working on the SCBO post. Yesterday there were some tweets about IDA improving its support for EFI binaries (although I’m not sure it’s the same thing as in here) so I decided to finally release this one. ...

June 13, 2017 · 2 min · 230 words · fG!

Shut up snitch! – reverse engineering and exploiting a critical Little Snitch vulnerability

Little Snitch was among the first software packages I tried to reverse and crack when I started using Macs. In the past I reported some weaknesses related to their licensing scheme but I never audited their kernel code since I am not a fan of IOKit reversing. The upcoming DEF CON presentation on Little Snitch re-sparked my curiosity last week and it was finally time to give the firewall a closer look. ...

July 22, 2016 · 35 min · 7450 words · fG!

Apple EFI firmware passwords and the SCBO myth

My original goal when I started poking around Apple’s EFI implementation was to find a way to reset a MacBook’s firmware password. My preliminary research found references to a “magical” SCBO file that could be loaded onto a USB flash drive and booted to remove the password. The normal process workflow is to first contact Apple support. Since I don’t have the original sales receipt of this specific Mac, I assume this option isn’t possible, since anyone with a stolen Mac could get the password reset. Things got more interesting when I found a website that allegedly sold the SCBO files – just send them the necessary hash (more on this later), pay USD100, and get a working SCBO file in return. There are videos (in Portuguese but you can watch the whole process) of people claiming this works, and even some claims about an universal SCBO that unlocks multiple Macs. ...

June 25, 2016 · 24 min · 4933 words · fG!