jor-el

You can take a look at SiMBA++ -> https://github.com/pgarba/SiMBA-

It is a C++ implementation of SiMBA [1] - a tool to handle linear MBAs, made available by Denuvo itself. Denuvo have another tool - Gamba for handling some variety of non-linear MBAs. And then further improvisation by another researcher - MSiMBA [3].

SiMBA++ since written in C++, it is fast and it integrates well into the LLVM passes to automatically identify the MBAs and replace them in the LLVM IR with simplified expressions. So no additional work required.

Shameless plug - me and my colleague (author of SiMBA++) recently gave a talk about using LLVM for deobfuscation of WASM, where we talk about MBAs, SiMBA++ etc. The idea is not limited to WASM, it is language agnostic once you have a binary lifted to LLVM IR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKRdOcuXbYI

[1] SiMBA - https://github.com/DenuvoSoftwareSolutions/SiMBA [2] Gamba - https://github.com/DenuvoSoftwareSolutions/GAMBA [3] MSiMBA - https://github.com/mazeworks-security/MSiMBA

I have an iPad from 2012 with retina display, still a good device, but on slower side. The battery backup is still mighty good (can last around 6-8 hours easily with constant use). It is running iOS 9.5 (probably?). It is a potential security risk too, so I dont use it for browsing random internet stuff. Instead I mostly use it for consuming media content - like podcasts, youtube videos etc, which I pre-download on my homeserver setup.

I put my old laptop and hard disks to use as a homeserver, I have scripts running which download podcasts and youtube channels I view often, and at night I can just use my iPad to consume this. Another plus with this setup is, I dont need to see those annoying YT ads, and I always have the videos backed-up with me even if the channel is taken down or the author removes videos.

I also use my iPad as a roku remote over WiFi. Overall I am able to extract utility than just throwing it away.

With software-as-a-service becoming widespread and the practice of micro-transactions starting to become common, soon people might start questioning that was digital payment revolution worth it? If made life easy in the starting, but now its turning out to create more headaches. The old way of paying hard cash and walking off was much better.

Some I see are surprised to see the level of obfuscation used in the application. Many pointed, many ingredients for the obfuscation used in the app are off-the-shelf and few of them can be said to be well known in the industry, but still there is a cost in integrating them into a product. Obfuscation is notorious in breaking things which should work normally (normal compilation process) and as a own goal making it hard to debug as well. Integrating, testing, debugging and difficulty in debugging production crash logs is a considerable cost.

That said, obfuscation is increasingly being used in mobile applications now. Check your banking application or some government applications, you will find obfuscation being used. With mobile applications getting richer and lot of code executing on the client side, makes it compelling case to secure applications by using obfuscation (as a defense-in-depth approach).

Open standards like OWASP MSTG [1] MSTG-RESILIENCE-9 recommend such approach.

  Obfuscation is applied to programmatic defenses, which in turn impede de-obfuscation via dynamic analysis.

And my PC is using water for cooling it. I am thinking on your points now :)

Does electricity/water spread misinformation over it?

I am curious to know how the Uber/Lyft drivers operate with such laws. Often they need to access maps, how does the law apply to such drivers?

The author of the blog post is my friend, I will ask him to fix it. The funny thing is, he don't even knows about HN at all and he has no idea that his post is trending. :P

Super thinking: The big book of mental models, it has been discussed on HN before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20211572.

Haven't completed it yet, so far I am finding it good.

I second this. It is very well written and among the top fantasy books I have read. The only frustrating part is the release of third book is no where near in the horizon.

In my personal experience getting started with cybersecurity career is tricky. Many companies want cybersecurity professionals, but most of them are not willing to train one. It creates the dreaded situation - companies dont hire you because you dont have experience, but you need a job to get experience.

A good way to get started is to take up any opportunity you get (and of course, of your interest), so you get a foot in the door. Other comments have talked about internships and certifications, I would like to highlight OSCP certification. It is hands on certification, and it will give you a good feel about the whole pentesting process. It is fairly respected certification in the industry and getting one will surely help you in getting a good starting job.

Also, keep honing your skills on various aspects of security, on job, you might not be dealing with all security topics all the time, but they show up and it helps to know about them. For example, you might be evaluating a C codebase with some applied cryptography. You may have all your focus on improper memory handling, but knowledge about applied cryptography can be helpful to contribute better.

Thinking, fast and slow - by Daniel Kahneman

It is a great book and talks about two systems in which we can divide the working of our brain. Kahneman also talks exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-a...

For me the main takeaway from the article is that the robbers have become sophisticated enough to perform phishing attacks to get iCloud credentials.

Also, the author says using Authy is a good alternative as it provides encrypted backup, but account authentication is via OTP to the registered phone number, so it brings back to the same problem. Is there other alternatives to this?

I have come across many pentesting labs using these tools to deal with obfuscated binaries. You can check Quakslab's blog, they have articles on this [0]. Another interesting project is of cracking Tigress VM using Symbolic execution [1]. The use has dramatically increased in past few years as many new tools are available and also hardware is more performant now. I am also using these tools in my day-to-day job to deal with obfuscated binaries and reverse engineering. I use Miasm [2].

PS: My company is hiring for such roles https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/b90hep/rnetsecs_q2_...

[0] https://blog.quarkslab.com/deobfuscation-recovering-an-ollvm... [1] https://blog.quarkslab.com/deobfuscation-recovering-an-ollvm... [2] https://github.com/cea-sec/miasm

Last time I took such overnight train in Europe was Frankfurt to Copenhagen in 2013 by DB, and it was nice and comfortable. Trains always have more leg space and moving around areas than an airplane. With budget airlines they are trying to cram in as many people as possible, almost to the point of making you feel claustrophobic.

With trains there is no hassle of going to the airport, as they are mostly around city center. Also, I found people to be more friendly in trains, unlike in airplane, where most people have their headphones on, and do-not-disturb expressions.

Its very much same in Singapore as well. In supermarket, more often than not, cashier puts one item in one plastic bag, so if you are buying a weeks grocery, you easily get 10-12 plastic bags just like that. The vegetables are pre-packed covered with plastic. Some fruits are packed with another harder plastic - apart from the laminated plastic. And the thing that bothered me the most is during chinese new year, each mandarin is covered in plastic individually. Why do you want to cover each mandarin, for a fruit which already has a thick peel!!

With developed countries, with all educated residents, are finding hard to curb plastic use (or lack of effort), it looks humanity is still some distance away to make a serious dent to use of plastic overall.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michel Lewis. [0]

It is about the one of the greatest paternship between Nobel laureate Danny Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky.

Kahneman and Tversky’s extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. [1]

The book is very well written and if you have read Kahneman's Thinking fast and slow, then you should also read this one.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/Undoing-Project-Friendship-Changed-Mi... [1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35631386-the-undoing-pro...

Gemalto | Software Engineer | Singapore | C Developer for iOS Platform | Full Time | Visa/Relocation

Position: C developer for iOS platform

Gemalto provides mobile platform solutions to various industries, including governments and banks, across the globe.

This role is very specific to C developers who have a good understanding of the iOS platform, and have a past experience in writing secure code.

For more details: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/995878745/

Personally for me PoC||GTFO fills up the void. They have some good articles and explaining in very friendly way.

[0] https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

Can someone throw some light on why Google is not using ARM Trustzone technology? Many current Android OEMs are using it, particularly Samsung KNOX is security mechanism all built around trustzone technology.

What advantages does these Titan chips offer over the existing trustzone technology.

Thomas Dullien (halvarflake) on security, moore's law and anomaly of cheap complexity. In the talk Thomas discusses the idea why simplicity is important and how increasing complexity increases attack surface.

https://www.err.ee/836236/video-google-0-projekti-tarkvarain...

Kudos! This a great work. I remember few years back when I was exploring TLS, there were no such resources and it took many months of trial and error to get some reasonable understanding. I tried doing a similar thing, but was only able to do for couple of packets [0]. Surely such an illustration will go a long way to help newbies to understand a complicated protocol.

[0] https://serializethoughts.com/2014/07/27/dissecting-tls-clie...

I am interested to understand how does these attacks work. The article states, after the victim disclosed the CC number there were ATM transactions performed using it.

How are scammers able to generate a physical card in first place to perform ATM transaction? Is it something similar to card skimming with cards having magnetic stripe? Can this attack be performed with cards using chips?

Also I often come across a fraudulent transaction being performed even if only credit card number is disclosed, while cvv and expiry date are not. As per my understanding all 3 info is needed to perform a transaction.

Do anyone have some resource where these attacks are discussed in detail and how they are carried out.

Gemalto Pte Ltd | Singapore | Mobile Security Researcher/Pentester | Singapore Full-time | ONSITE| Visa/Relocation

Position: Mobile Security Researcher/Pentester (Android and iOS)

Job Description:

Gemalto provides mobile platform solutions to various industries, including governments and banks, across the globe. This role is very specific to mobile platforms- Android & iOS. The core responsibilities are:

- Perform pentesting on mobile products - source code reviews - Risk Assessment - Researching on new attack and defense techniques for mobile applications. - Act as consultant to internal teams and provide advise for best security practices, applied crypto, authentication, secure programming etc. - Reverse Engineering mobile application (native, Java, ObjC).

Desired Skillset: - Understanding of the attack paths on mobile applications - Understanding about common OS exploits: Jailbreaking/Rooting/Flashing a device, custom kernels, custom ROMs, hooking frameworks - Comfortable with ARM/Aarch64 assembly . - Knowledge of classic attacking techniques: data cloning, reverse engineering, traffic interception, hooking, debugging (like gdb, jdb, other tools like Burp suite, Substrate, Frida, Cycript, IDA etc.) - Knowledge of iOS/Android security frameworks – their implementation and mitigation controls - Knowledge about applied cryptography and best practices. - Experience with reversing obfuscated code (C, Java, ObjC) using tools/techniques like symoblic execution, unicorn etc, is a plus.

It is a small well managed team, with challenging work and mostly involves working independently. Training and attending conferences opportunity is provided.

If you are interested to learn more about the role, feel free to contact me at vikas.gupta@gemalto.com.

On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/729732099/

I completed the series a month back. I found 1st book to be a bit slow and need to force myself to read sometimes. But 2nd book thoroughly caught my imagination and I would say the best of the 3 books in the series.

Till now I have found this to be the best summary for someone who is technical, but does not understand all gory details of CPU working.

I once seen this [1] lecture by Swami Sarvapriyananda on Flow. I found it very interesting and easy to understand.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGswR0tMqCM

Cydia performs dynamic hooking, and patches the function in the runtime. In theory app's signature should be intact (I have never come across this scenario in practice, so might be wrong). Generally, application implement additional checks for function hooking and dynamic library injections to prevent such attacks.

Xposed module patching only works when SSLPinning is performed in the Java code of the application, as Xposed provides a mechanism for intercepting Java method calls only. Unlike in this case, the code is in C/C++ layer, hence can't be used.

Is it common for a customer assistance to ask for your Credit Card number over the phone? Or they are having a secure telephone payment system?