brute force
Latest
Google Wallet gets prepaid security fix, but 'brute-force' issue still hangs in the air
Google says it's fixed a Wallet security flaw that potentially allowed a phone thief to spend a user's prepaid balance. The ability to provision new prepaid cards had been suspended pending the update, but has now been restored. Things aren't quite back to normal in the Big G's world of mobile money, however. Users still find themselves caught between two competing arguments over an entirely different vulnerability, which involves a 'brute-force' attack on rooted devices. Google insists that this isn't a major concern, so long as Wallet users refrain from rooting, and that the system still "offers advantages over the plastic cards and folded wallets in use today." On the other hand, the company that discovered this issue -- zvelo -- has come back at Google with an equally blunt response. It acknowledges that a handset must be rooted to be vulnerable, but crucially its researchers also say that a device doesn't have to be rooted before it's stolen. In other words, they allege that a savvy thief can potentially steal a phone and then root it themselves, and they won't be happy with Wallet until it requires longer PIN number. Whichever argument sways you, it's worth bearing in mind that there's no evidence that anyone has yet managed to exploit these weaknesses for criminal purposes.
PSA: Google Wallet vulnerable to 'brute-force' PIN attacks (update: affects rooted devices)
Security hounds over at zvelo have discovered a vulnerability in Google Wallet that means your precious PIN can be "easily revealed." Digging through the app's code and using Google's open resources to reveal its contents, they uncovered a piratical treasure trove of data: unique user IDs, Google account information, and the PIN stored as a SHA256 hex-encoded string. Since this string is known to carry four digits, it only takes a "trivial" brute-force attack involving a maximum of 10,000 calculations to decode it. To prove their point, the researchers made a Wallet Cracker app -- demoed after the break -- that does the job quicker than you can say "unexpected overdraft."Google has been receptive to these findings, but its attempts at a fix have so far been hampered by the need to coordinate with the banks, since changing the way the PIN is stored could also change which agency is responsible for its security. In the meantime, zvelo advises that there are some measures users can take themselves, aside from putting a protective hand over their pockets: refrain from rooting your phone, enable your lock screen, disable USB debugging, enable Full Disk Encryption and keep your handset up-to-date.Update: Google has responded by emphasizing that it's only users of rooted devices who are at risk. In a statement to TNW it said: "We strongly encourage people to not install Google Wallet on rooted devices and to always set up a screen lock as an additional layer of security for their phone."[Thanks to everyone who sent this in.]
Researcher finds vulnerability in WPS protocol, looks for manufacturers to offer fix
On the plus side, your router's mostly secure. Security researcher Stefan Viehbock has just discovered a major security hole which allowed him to use a brute force technique to access a WPS PIN-protected network in about two hours. According to Viehbock, a design flaw allows the WPS protocol's 8-digit PIN security to fall dramatically as additional attempts are made. With each attempt, the router will send a message stating whether the first four digits are correct while the last digit of the key is used as a checksum and then given out by the router in negotiation. As a result, the 100,000,000 possibilities that the WPS should represent becomes roughly to 11,000. The US-CERT has picked up on this and advised users to disable WPS on their routers. Viehbock, in turn, claims to have attempted to discuss the vulnerability with hardware vendors such as Buffalo, D-Link, Linksys, and Netgear, but says he has been roundly ignored and that no public acknowledgement of the issue has been released. As a possible final step, Viehbock has promised to release a brute force tool soon, thereby pushing the manufacturers to work to resolve the issue. In other news, that evil supercomputer from the movie War Games just got a few more digits of the nuclear launch codes -- maybe one of Stefan's pals can look into that one.
PSA: Change your old Amazon.com password for better security
Amazon's allegedly got an security flaw where hackers can find your password much easier than they would otherwise, and there's already a fix in place. But get this -- you'll probably need to change your password for the fix to take effect, if you haven't already done so in the last couple of years. According to Reddit users, the Amazon.com login system will actually accept any phrase so long as it begins with your password, such as "password123" when the magic word is simply "password" by itself. That apparently makes it that much easier for a computer to guess your password via brute force methods, no matter how counter-intuitive that seems, so if you simply change it immediately -- and to something other than "password," please -- you'll have much sounder dreams.
GPUs democratize brute force password hacking
It seems that the availability of increasingly powerful GPUs, when combined with brute-force password cracking tools, is making it increasingly easy to crack passwords -- even if they're extremely well thought out, with symbols and quirky capitalization and all that. How short is too short? According to computer scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, "a seven-character password is hopelessly inadequate, and as GPU power continues to go up every year, the threat will increase." A better alternative, he suggested, would be a 12-character combination of upper and lower case letters, symbols and digits. Of course, processors are only getting more powerful and hardware less expensive -- soon even seven-plus character passwords may become the digital equivalent of unlocked doors. And if that weren't bad enough, a recent study by an Internet security company called BitDefender has determined that some 250,000 user names, email addresses, and passwords used for social networking sites are freely available online -- and seventy-five percent of these folks use the same password for their email and social networking. So, when dreaming up fancy new twelve character passwords, make sure you're creating unique passwords for all your various accounts. It would be a shame if your Starsky & Hutch FanFicForum account left you vulnerable to identity theft.
Steam rolls out the red carpet for DLC
Valve wants you to know that Steam, its client for PC gamers, now has support for in-game DLC. The first game to feature DLC through Steam is Twisted Pixel's The Maw, which already has two packs available to Xbox 360 owners. These same two packs, Brute Force and River Redirect, are currently on Xbox Live Marketplace and will be available on Steam by the time you're done reading this sentence.
The Maw takes on Brute Force expansion this Wed.
Twisted Pixel Games just announced that The Maw's Brute Force expansion - the first of three "deleted scenes" - will release to the Xbox Live Marketplace this Wednesday, February 18th.For 100 ($1.25), the Brute Force downloadable content embiggens The Maw experience by adding new puzzles, new cinematics and new characters including the robotic Brute Soldier. We fell in love with the overeating purple blob when it released last month, so it's good to see Twisted Pixel supporting the game with relatively affordable DLC. Inexpensive content is always welcome. Overpriced DLC can continue to stay away.%Gallery-44927%
