Attacks on the SHA-1 hashing algorithm just got a lot more dangerous last week with the discovery of a cheap “chosen-prefix collision attack,” a more practical version of the SHA-1 collision attack first carried out by Google two years ago. Two years ago, academics from Google and CWI produced two files that had the same SHA-1 hash, in the world’s first ever SHA-1 collision attack — known as “SHAttered.” Image: Google
SHA-1 chosen-prefix attacks

But last week, a team of academics from France and Singapore has taken the SHAttered research one step further by demonstrating a SHA-1 “chosen-prefix” collision attack, in a new research paper titled “From Collisions to Chosen-Prefix Collisions – Application to Full SHA-1.”

RIDL (Rogue In-Flight Data Load) shows attackers can exploit MDS vulnerabilities to mount practical attacks and leak sensitive data in real-world settings. By analyzing the impact on the CPU pipeline, we developed a variety of practical exploits leaking in-flight data from different internal CPU buffers (such as Line-Fill Buffers and Load Ports), used by the CPU while loading or storing data from memory. We show that attackers who can run unprivileged code on machines with recent Intel CPUs – whether using shared cloud computing resources, or using JavaScript on a malicious website or advertisement – can steal data from other programs running on the same machine, across any security boundary: other applications, the operating system kernel, other VMs (e.g., in the cloud), or even secure (SGX) enclaves.

When the operating system schedules two threads from completely different applications on the logical cores of the same physical core, data of both applications is processed at the same time in the shared execution resources. It turns out that on Intel processors this wrong data may be data from outside the current process but still loaded by the physical CPU core for whatever reason, which can be:

An important detail is that the attacker has no direct control over what data is read here. In this scenario, the attacker executes unprivileged code on one logical CPU core, while a victim application runs on the other logical (but same physical) core.

Federal law (the Communications Decency Act) protects social media giants from the responsibilities by which traditional media must abide. There is no doubt Facebook wields enormous power in subtle and dangerous ways that the public does not realize. — RKNJ, New Jersey

In terms of deleting Facebook entirely, what has been a deterrent for me is that many community groups that apply to my life use it as a message board: our HOA, my mom’s group, the neighborhood newsletter.

The so-called Energiewende, the shift away from nuclear in favor of renewables, the greatest political project undertaken here since Germany’s reunification, is facing failure. In Sweden — the Energiewende world champion, according to the International Energy Agency — a high CO2 tax, of almost 120 euros per ton, is driving people and companies to pay more attention to how they heat, drive and do business. Why Germany’s Energiewende Might Fail

The German government made a key mistake when it announced the end of the nuclear era in Germany eight years ago: It announced it was turning away from nuclear power, without simultaneously initiating the end of coal.

We can now use SM’s verifier to verify assertions about properties that should hold across interactions between two contracts: the example contract and a hypothetical – machine generated – contract. This particular example demonstrates a bug type commonly known as re-entrancy, and it gets automatically rediscovered (without explicit pattern encodings) due to: 1) synthesis exploring contracts that can fit , 2) expressive verification that tracks storage and msgs precisely, and 3) a global assertion over the combination of and . In the next post, we will continue discussing smart contract safety and also discuss additional features of SM: evaluating liveness properties that help identify denial-of-service, custom business logic checks, and low level property checks.

That isn’t the case with Tesla’s eMMC chip, which according to a number of complaints that allege when the chip fails out of warranty, owners lose access to the vehicle’s media control unit and bricks the car. On the specific issue, the eMMC chip in older Teslas is based within the car’s media control unit and used to log data collected by the media system. However, until the company starts stocking parts like the eMMC chip, as well as release detailed service manuals to the public, Tesla is going to be looking at a number of newish cars dead in a junkyard real soon.

San Francisco Considers Ban On Government’s Use Of Facial Recognition Technology

San Francisco may become the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by police and city agencies. Similar legislation is under consideration in nearby Oakland, and Massachusetts Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Creem introduced a bill that would impose a moratorium on facial recognition software in the state until the technology improves. The proposed legislation in San Francisco forbids the technology’s use by police but allows its use at San Francisco International Airport and the Port of San Francisco, which are controlled by the federal government.

More hours worked doesn’t mean more problems solved. In the age of thought-work and automation, a rested mind can lead to better work performance and work-life balance. 30 Hour Jobs is a job board for job seekers and employers who believe that shorter workweeks can lead to increased productivity and higher job satisfaction.

By exploiting normal speculative execution operations that work within these microarchitectural structures, an MDS attack can infer data that is being processed in the CPU by other apps, to which an attacker shouldn’t normally have access to. Furthermore, newer processors aren’t impacted, as they already include protections against speculative execution attacks –such as the MDS attacks– since last year when Meltdown and Spectre first hit, and Intel modified the way its CPU’s worked. Additional reading material is available below (some links will be added as they become public):
Website dedicated to all MDS attacks
Zombieload website
Zombieload research paper
Bitdefender technical paper
Intel on MDS attacks
Intel security updates
Windows, Mac, Linux, Red Hat, and Google products security updates
More vulnerability reports: