10
votes
Accepted
What does the NSA's Recently Leaked "The Equation Group" Files do?
There's been four top-notch analyses so far regarding incident with the free files (40 percent of what is claimed to be released). Nobody has the password to the auction files yet, which represent ...
- 19k
4
votes
Accepted
Running a brief asm script inline for dynamic analysis
Is there a reason you can't just study the code? 30 lines of ASM should be easy to understand. Just add comments explaining what each line does, and you'll understand it in no time. This will be even ...
- 66.5k
3
votes
Is there any way to estimate the safety of arbitrary binaries, which are usually released with unofficial patches?
I suppose that it is hardly possible to include malware by arbitrarily changing a few bytes in the executable; so this should be safe;
Viruses can easily be as small as about 50 bytes of code, so ...
- 5,734
3
votes
Accepted
ROP Attack :Force the program to manipulate an instruction as a gadget
Short answer: yes.
Long answer:
Instructions on x86 processors vary in their length between 1 and many bytes.
(This works because no instruction can be a prefix of another instruction. Much like ...
- 1,111
3
votes
Is there a way to verify a binary against the sources?
The concept of reproducible builds seems to offer a solution for this problem. At least a theoretical one.
It means that every run of a build (or compilation) process should return the identical ...
- 381
2
votes
Accepted
Is there any ability to determine the exploit used by compiled binary?
Based on further discussion with the OP, the answer to this question is that there isn't enough information to determine the exploit this payload was used in.
The best bet would be to forensically ...
- 5,175
2
votes
Decrypting binary code from a base64 string
The prefix Salted__ almost certainly means this either is the output of the openssl enc command or something designed to be compatible with it. There are many other password-based derivation, hashing, ...
- 10.6k
2
votes
Does recompiling a binary from source code make it more secure/obscure?
In general, modern compilers are deterministic. That is, for most sets of options, given the same inputs, they will produce the same outputs. That's why reproducible builds are even possible.
...
- 9,284
2
votes
Accepted
256-bit Symmetric Keys As Passwords
The encoding of the value (32 bytes of binary, 256 bytes of ASCII ones and zeros, 64 bytes of hex, 44 bytes of base64, etc.) does not affect the security of the key in any way.
The important ...
- 8,434
1
vote
256-bit Symmetric Keys As Passwords
Without considering any other factors (like how the bits are generated), any encoding of 256 bits should be equally difficult to brute force as any other encoding, and your 256-bit string as just ...
- 353
1
vote
How is it possible to simply a decode Bluetooth communications from a medical device?
Bluetooth is what one's engineering department makes of it. Marble can be made a statue or a pebble in one's shoe.
Shouldn't all communication over Bluetooth be encrypted so that it cannot be ...
- 2,017
1
vote
What can I do with reverse engineering
Based on the phrasing of your question, I suspect you might be conflating reverse engineering with exploit development.
Reverse engineering, in the context of software, is taking some implementation ...
- 135k
1
vote
What technologies used in a web browser, if any, can be used to push a binary from a server to a client machine?
Browsers are specifically designed to prevent this.
There have been exploits in the past that found a security hole and there may be exploits found in the future, but by design Browsers are designed ...
- 8,118
1
vote
Accepted
Is there any way to get a unicode character that has a byte of 23?
According to the UTF-8 wikipedia page, you will not be able to send a byte that would be interpreted as a # on its own as part of a larger UTF character. The chart showing the encoding structure ...
- 173
1
vote
How can I find out what's in this NASA JPL "Spy" command line program for macOS and how safe it is?
spy.ug is a readme-like text file that displays in my browser, but spy downloads what Finder tells me is a text document.
It is not a text document. It is a Mach-O 64-bit x86_64 executable.
How can ...
- 5,001
1
vote
Protect password from apache user by making file executable-only
You cannot prevent whoever must execute the binary from reading the binary into memory, since this is a prerequisite of execution.
You can have the binary execute from a different user, and ...
- 22.8k
1
vote
1
vote
Bash function manipulation explained
The program nightmare has the stickybits set, which means any user that executed this command effectively has their UID set to 0, for purposes of this command.
The strings command shows the binary ...
- 244
1
vote
Accepted
SAT (Satisfiability) it is security risk?
The symbolic execution technique, as used in KLEE, is just a way to ask a SAT-solver to validate/invalidate possible runs in the software without executing it for real. It allows to focus on feasible ...
- 853
1
vote
How to Check Compilation Options For SO File - Android Application VA
To determine if stack-smashing detection has been compiled into the binary, after decompilation with apktool, your shared object libraries as you know can be located in <apktool_outdir>/lib/<...
1
vote
Unidirectional Data Transmission to a Smartphone
You can use for example Soft Modem for Android, such as one based on this library. This can be made completely unidirectional if you do not connect the L/R pins and only connect PC audio output to ...
- 3,524
1
vote
Give only execute permissions to a Linux binary (prevent inspection)?
This is a partial answer as I've got little time...
Your approach would prevent plain reading of the file but students could still cheat, e.g. by LD_PRELOADing, and changing any of your internal ...
- 6,848
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible