In this paper we describe a new type of threat in which adjacent IoT devices will infect each other with a worm that will spread explosively over large areas in a kind of nuclear chain reaction, provided that the density of compatible IoT devices exceeds a certain critical mass. In particular, we developed and verified such an infection using the popular Philips Hue smart lamps as a platform.
The worm spreads by jumping directly from one lamp to its neighbors, using only their built-in ZigBee wireless connectivity and their physical proximity. The attack can start by plugging in a single infected bulb anywhere in the city, and then catastrophically spread everywhere within minutes, enabling the attacker to turn all the city lights on or off, permanently brick them, or exploit them in a massive DDOS attack.
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To make such an attack possible, we had to find a way to remotely yank already installed lamps from their current networks, and to perform over-the-air firmware updates. We overcame the first problem by discovering and exploiting a major bug in the implementation of the Touchlink part of the ZigBee Light Link protocol, which is supposed to stop such attempts with a proximity test. To solve the second problem, we developed a new version of a side channel attack to extract the global AES-CCM key that Philips uses to encrypt and authenticate new firmware. We used only readily available equipment costing a few hundred dollars, and managed to find this key without seeing any actual updates.

Source: IoT Goes Nuclear – Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction

As explained in a paper titled A Formal Security Analysis of the Signal Messaging Protocol (PDF) from the International Association for Cryptologic Research, Signal has no discernible flaws and offers a well-designed and compromise-resistant architecture.

Signal uses a double rachet algorithm that employs ephemeral key exchanges continually during each session, minimising the amount of text that can be decrypted at any point should a key be compromised.

Signal was examined by a team of five researchers from the UK, Australia, and Canada, namely Oxford University information security Professor Cas Cremers and his PhDs Katriel Cohn-Gordon and Luke Garratt, Queensland University of Technology PhD Benjamin Dowling, and McMaster University Assistant Professor Douglas Stebila.
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The team finds some room for improvement which they passed on to the app’s developers, namely that the protocol can be further strengthened with negligible cost by using “constructions in the spirit of the NAXOS (authenticated key exchange) protocol” [PDF]” by or including a static-static Diffie-Hellman shared secret in the key derivation. This would solve the risk of attackers compromising communications should the random number generator become fully predictable.

The paper does, however, cover only a subsection of Signal’s efforts, as it ignores non-Signal library components, plus application and implementation variations. It should therefore be considered a substantial starting point for future analysis, the authors say, rather than the final world on Signal.

Source: ‘Trust it’: Results of Signal’s first formal crypto analysis are in

Cisco has fixed a vulnerability in its Professional Careers portal that may have exposed truckloads of personal information.

The networking giant has sent an email to affected users in which it says a “limited set of job application related information” was leaked from the mobile version of the website, blaming an “incorrect security setting” placed after system maintenance on a third party site.
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It says exposed data may have included real and login names; passwords; physical and email addresses, phone numbers; answers to security questions; users’ education and professions; cover letters and resumes.

Any hacker hoovering up that data would have also gained applicants’ voluntary information including gender, race, and veteran and disability status, and disability.

Source: Cisco’s job applications site leaked personal data