Does the Cyber Resilience Act Make Penetration Testing Mandatory?

Introduction

We regularly investigate the security of Customer Premises Equipment (CPEs), also known as SOHO routers. One important aspect of these investigations is to check for memory corruption vulnerabilities like buffer overflows. While these types of bugs were discovered in 1996[1] and secure coding practices as well as exploitation mitigation techniques should render these issues to a vanishing phenomenon, we still encounter them on today’s devices.
In August 2018, NSIDE investigated the O2 HomeBox 6441 in terms of memory corruption vulnerabilities and discovered a buffer overflow in the embedded webserver. Most of the time NSIDE doesn’t publish such findings, because we are bound by NDAs

The Vulnerability

Usually all parameters that are accepted by the webserver get sanitized and their length is checked or ceiled against/to an upper bound. […]

Introduction

While auditing the security of embedded devices we often face situations where the firmware of the system under test is either not publicly available or the vendor can’t provide it due to legal issues. Accessing the firmware gives a lot of insight on how the device actually works. Even in assessments, where scope is limited to Web Application Testing only, helpful information can be gathered by having access to the firmware.

This blog post depicts the general approach for retrieving the firmware from such devices by accessing the flash memory chip directly. Please note the provided information in this example is limited to the flash memory chip only, as the tested system cannot be disclosed due to legal constraints.

Accessing the hardware

After opening the housing […]

Introduction

Many people underestimate the possibilities a remote attacker has who managed to exploit a remote code execution vulnerability on Android devices.

On Windows systems, it is widely accepted that a vulnerability in one software can lead to the compromise of other software and, ultimately, to the infection of the whole system. The same is, in fact, also possible for Android, even though many people believe the attacker would be confined to the vulnerable app’s context (in the Android file system and UID/GID sandboxing sense).

In this blog post we will show how a vulnerability in one single app can lead to the permanent (and virtually irreversible) infection of an Android device with malware. To this end we will walk the reader through the single steps that lead […]