Feeds
260323 items (0 unread) in 27 feeds
-
0day.today (was: 1337day, Inj3ct0r, 1337db)
-
OSVDB Vulnerabilities
-
Exploit-DB
-
SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities
-
Bugtraq
-
Full Disclosure
-
XSSed
-
Packet Storm Security Headlines
-
-
-
-
-
-
Sophos security news
-
-
Penetration Testing
-
SecuriTeam
-
BackTrack Linux Forums
-
Threatpost
-
SecDocs
-
carnal0wnage.attackresearch.com
-
Carnal0wnage
-
-
Darknet
-
The Exploitant
-
Hack a Day
-
Wirevolution
«
Expand/Collapse
Recent items
-
Hacker Conference Speaker Axed Over Abortion Views
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesHacker Conference Speaker Axed Over Abortion Views -
Exposed Database Dumps PII Of 1.6 Million Job Seekers
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesExposed Database Dumps PII Of 1.6 Million Job SeekersTags: headlineprivacydatabasedata loss
-
Telegram DDoS Attack Launched Mostly From China
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesTelegram DDoS Attack Launched Mostly From ChinaTags: headlinechinadenial servicesocial
-
U.S. Defense, Intelligence Ramps Up Efforts To Insert Malware In Russia's Grid
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesU.S. Defense, Intelligence Ramps Up Efforts To Insert Malware In Russia's GridTags: headlinegovernmentusarussiacyberwarscada
-
Automate the Freight: Autonomous Delivery Hits the Mainstream
» Hack a DayIt should come as no surprise that we here at Hackaday are big boosters of autonomous systems like self-driving vehicles. That’s not to say we’re without a healthy degree of skepticism, and indeed, the whole point of the “Automate the Freight” series is that economic forces will create powerful incentives for companies to build out automated delivery systems before they can afford to capitalize on demand for self-driving passenger vehicles. There’s a path to the glorious day when you can (safely) nap on the way to work, but that path will be paved by shipping and logistics companies with far deeper pockets than the average commuter.
So it was with some interest that we saw a flurry of announcements in the popular press recently regarding automated deliveries. Each by itself wouldn’t be worthy of much attention; companies are always maneuvering to be seen as ahead of the curve on coming trends, and often show off glitzy, over-produced videos and well-crafted press releases as a low-effort way to position themselves as well as to test markets. But seeing three announcements at one time was unusual, and may point to a general feeling by manufacturers that automated deliveries are just around the corner. Plus, each story highlighted advancements in areas specifically covered by “Automate the Freight” articles, so it seemed like a perfect time to review them and perhaps toot our own horn a bit.
We Deliver for YouOn any short list of most maligned public-sector institutions in the United States, the Postal Service would probably make an appearance. Sadly, a lot of the damage is self-inflicted by a damaged bureaucracy, but in general, the men and women of the USPS do good work, and those that bad-mouth the Postal Service would do well to remember that providing universal delivery in a country the size of the United States is not exactly an easy job.
US Mail truck making transfers between distribution centers is a common sight on American highways. [Image Source: Harsky’s Blog]Semi trucks carrying tons of bulk mail between gargantuan national distribution centers and smaller regional facilities are what form the backbone of the continent-wide postal network. These trucks are common sights on Interstate highways in the US, running fixed routes back and forth on a schedule as regular as clockwork. If a pilot program by the USPS bears fruit, those trucks may soon be driverless.According to Reuters, the USPS has teamed up with self-driving truck startup TuSimple to test self-driving trucks on the bulk-mail route between Phoenix and Dallas this month. The truck, with a safety driver and an engineer on board, will make the 2,000-mile (3200-km) round trip five times. Under normal conditions, the trip takes 45 hours to complete, which requires the use of team drivers. Paying one driver to drive while the other sleeps gets expensive, and with a shortage of drivers in the US it’s often hard to staff. The route is the perfect test bed, too — long, lonely stretches of highway with good visibility, and plenty of services along the way.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of this experiment, and how far it goes in terms of completely replacing long-haul drivers. TuSimple claims to have depot-to-depot capability, unlike some self-driving truck companies that only go driverless for the highway part of the route and let carbon-based drivers handle the surface streets. The video below is pretty convincing on that score — in foul weather, no less — and if they eventually start operating without safety drivers, the USPS and others might start to see some real benefits from autonomous trucking.
Close Air SupportAmazon made a big splash a few years back with some wildly optimistic plans for same-hour delivery of orders via drone. Much fun was poked at the company for its glitzy videos and contrived delivery scenarios, for the seemingly endless variety of UAVs they were willing to throw at the problem, and for patenting silly things like a shipping label that turns into a parachute.
But it seems like Amazon and others with a vested interest in speedy deliveries might have the last laugh. Deutsche Post DHL, the world’s largest logistics company, has begun its first regular UAV delivery service in an urban setting. The Chinese city of Dongguan in Guangdong province is the scene of the somewhat limited test, on a delivery route created especially for a DHL customer. The two facilities are only 8 km (5 miles) apart, but urban traffic and winding roads make that a 40 minute trip by delivery truck. The UAV, an EHang Falcon commercial drone in DHL livery, takes off from an automated hangar that looks a little like a pop-top shipping container. It flies autonomously between the two facilities in only eight minutes.
Again, this is a contrived route for a limited service, but full points to DHL for getting this far. Autonomous drone deliveries over populations and beyond line-of-sight of a safety pilot are probably still a long way off in the US and Europe, but when they get here, it’ll be because of what outfits like DHL learn with experiments like this.
Slow Walking ItDespite what Amazon may think, we doubt that UAV deliveries direct to residential consumers are ever likely to happen on a large scale. That means the “last 100-meter” problem will need to be tackled, to get packages from the back of a self-driving delivery van and to the customer’s door. It’s a thorny problem, and recent silly ideas aside, it hasn’t been tackled in a serious way yet.
That hasn’t stopped companies from trying, as the Ford Motor Company did recently with another fanciful video of Digit, the bipedal delivery robot. A product of Agility Robotics, Digit is a somewhat anthropomorphic robot, if you ignore legs bending the wrong way (and the whole decapitated thing). The idea is that Digit will ride in the back of a self-driving Ford van, stuffed with packages to drop off for waiting customers. When the vehicle arrives, Digit unfurls itself and navigates autonomously around obstacles to the door, package grasped between its stumpy arms.
The video is a little hard to swallow, and the faux fist bump at the end was just lame. But just like how automakers come up with silly concept cars that sometimes make it into production (looking at you, PT Cruiser), Digit or something like it could someday be a common sight in neighborhoods. Ford’s scenario looks quite similar to one we proposed a while back, although we still think the wheeled robot would be far more efficient for such a job.
One way or another, economic forces are going to push autonomous systems into the logistics chain. From picking and packing orders to moving them over the road and eventually dropping them off at our doors, people are going to disappear from deliveries in favor of robots. Dealing with the fallout from that will be a challenge, but it’s hard to see any other end to this story.
Tags: current Events
-
Wireless Mouse Power-Up: Logitech MX Master Gets USB-C and Big Battery
» Hack a DayWhen the internal rechargeable battery in his wireless mouse died, [cmot17] decided it was the perfect excuse for making a couple of modifications. The Logitech MX Master isn’t exactly a budget mouse to begin with, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement. With the addition of a larger battery and USB-C charging port, a very nice mouse just got even better.
As it turns out, there’s plenty of empty space inside the Logitech MX Master, which made it easy to add a larger battery. The original 500 mAh pack was replaced with a new 950 mAh one, which is often sold under the model number 603443. Realistically, if you wanted to go even bigger it looks like any three wire 3.7 V Li-Po pack would probably work in this application, but nearly doubling the capacity is already a pretty serious bump.
Adding the USB-C connector ended up being quite a bit trickier. [cmot17] ordered a breakout board from Adafruit that was just a little too large to fit inside the mouse. In the end, not only did some of the case need to get cut away internally, but the breakout PCB itself got a considerable trimming. Once it was shoehorned in there, a healthy dose of hot glue was used to make sure nothing shifts around.
Since [cmot17] didn’t change the mouse’s original electronics, the newly upgraded Logitech MX Master won’t actually benefit from the faster charging offered by USB-C. If anything, it’s actually going to charge slower thanks to the beefier battery. But considering how infrequently it will need to be charged with the upgraded capacity (Logitech advertised 40 days with the original 500 mAh battery), we don’t think it will be a problem.
Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of stuff crammed into the lowly mouse. Everything from a full computer, to malicious firmware code has been grafted onto that most ubiquitous of computer peripherals. So in the grand scheme of things, this is perhaps one of the most practical mouse modifications to ever grace these pages.
Tags: peripherals hacks
-
2:44
[SECURITY] [DSA 4464-1] thunderbird security update
» BugtraqPosted by Moritz Muehlenhoff on Jun 17
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Security Advisory DSA-4464-1 security () debian org
https://www.debian.org/security/ Moritz Muehlenhoff
June 15, 2019 https://www.debian.org/security/faq
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Package : thunderbird
CVE ID : CVE-2019-11703 CVE-2019-11704...
Tags:
-
2:44
Microsoft Word (2016) Deceptive File Reference ZDI-CAN-7949
» BugtraqPosted by apparitionsec on Jun 17
[+] Credits: John Page (aka hyp3rlinx)
[+] Website: hyp3rlinx.altervista.org
[+] Source: http://hyp3rlinx.altervista.org/advisories/MICROSOFT-WORD-DECEPTIVE-FILE-REFERENCE.txt
[+] ISR: ApparitionSec
[+] Zero Day Initiative Program
[Vendor]
www.microsoft.com
[Product]
Microsoft Word 2016
[Vulnerability Type]
Deceptive File Reference
[References]
ZDI-CAN-7949
[Security Issue]
When a MS Word ".docx" File contains a...
Tags:
-
2:39
[SECURITY] [DSA 4463-1] znc security update
» BugtraqPosted by Salvatore Bonaccorso on Jun 17
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Security Advisory DSA-4463-1 security () debian org
https://www.debian.org/security/ Salvatore Bonaccorso
June 14, 2019 https://www.debian.org/security/faq
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Package : znc
CVE ID : CVE-2019-9917 CVE-2019-12816
Debian...
Tags:
-
2:36
[SE-2019-01] Java Card vulnerabilities (post shutdown release)
» BugtraqPosted by Adam Gowdiak on Jun 17
Hello All,
Original reports that were submitted to Oracle and Gemalto have been
posted to Security Explorations website:
http://www.security-explorations.com/javacard_details.html
This should help all interested parties to proceed with an independent
evaluation of the issues, but also judge Oracle and Gemalto stance with
respect to them.
Thank you.
Best Regards,
adam gowdiak
Tags:
-
Add Scroll Wheels and Buttons to Smartphones with 3D-Printed Widgets Read by Accelerometer
» Hack a DayThe first LED digital wristwatches hit the market in the 1970s. They required a button push to turn the display on, prompting one comedian to quip that giving one to a one-armed man would be in poor taste. While the UIs of watches and other wearables have improved since then, smartphones still present some usability challenges. Some of the touch screen gestures needed to operate a phone, like pinching, are nigh impossible when one-handing the phone, and woe unto those with stubby thumbs when trying to take a selfie.
You’d think that the fleet of sensors and the raw computing power on board would afford better ways to control phones. And you’d be right, if the modular mechanical input widgets described in a paper from Columbia University catch on. Dubbed “Vidgets” by [Chang Xiao] et al, the haptic devices are designed to create characteristic acceleration profiles on a phone’s inertial measurement unit (IMU) when actuated. Vidgets take various forms, from push buttons to scroll wheels, each of a similar size and shape and designed to dock into one of eight positions on the back of a 3D-printed phone case. Once trained, the algorithm watches for the acceleration signature caused by actuating a Vidget, and sends commands to the phone to mimic the corresponding gestures. The video below demonstrates a couple of use cases, of which the virtual saxophone is our favorite.
This is really clever stuff, and ventures deep into “Why didn’t I think of that?” territory. Need to get ahead of the curve on IMUs to capitalize on what they can do? You could start with [Al Williams]’ primer on micro-electromechanical systems, or MEMS.
Thanks to [Itay Ramot] for the tip, [via Gizmodo]
Tags: cellphone hacks
-
Vuln: QEMU 'tcp_subr.c' Local Heap Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesQEMU 'tcp_subr.c' Local Heap Buffer Overflow VulnerabilityTags:
-
Vuln: Google Chrome CVE-2019-5842 Remote Security Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesGoogle Chrome CVE-2019-5842 Remote Security VulnerabilityTags:
-
Vuln: Cisco Identity Services Engine CVE-2018-0187 Information Disclosure Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesCisco Identity Services Engine CVE-2018-0187 Information Disclosure VulnerabilityTags:
-
Mac Plus Becomes A Vector Display
» Hack a DayThe vintage Macintosh all-in-one computers were a design icon, as well as being highly useful machines in the 80s and 90s. In the decades since, they’ve been used for everything from web servers to aquariums, but that’s not all. [Arcade Jason] decided to grab an old Macintosh Plus and turn it into a vector display.
The hack starts with the opening of a Macintosh, which naturally requires a long screwdriver with the right tip. Setting the stage for things to come, this is achieved by soldering together a couple of existing tools to get the reach he needs. [Jason] then proceeds to install a brightness control for the main electron gun, as well as deflection drivers and a spot killing circuit. Everything is done with the intention of the hack being reversible, as [Jason] didn’t wish to sacrifice a good Macintosh Plus just for the sake of having some fun.For those unfamiliar with vector cathode-ray displays and the manner in which they are driven, [Arcade Jason] does a great job explaining the basics. A set of magnetic coils is used to alter the trajectory of an electron fired at the screen. If you aim those electrons in ordered lines from left-to-right, top-to-bottom you’ve created a raster display. If you instead guide the electrons to follow the shapes you want to appear on the screen you’ve created a vector display.
We can’t help but feel this would be a hilarious way to troll at a demoscene meetup. We’ve seen [Jason]’s vector work before, too — like this impressive color Asteroids hack.
Tags: mac hacks
-
Play Dough Simplifies Interferometer Build
» Hack a DayAn interferometer sounds like something complicated, and in a way, it is. But it is also pretty easy to build one with some common materials. [Let’s Innovate] has instructions for how to make an interferometer using a green laser pointer, some mirrors, and a CD case. one of the most mundane parts, though, might be the most important: Play Dough.
The very sensitive device needs very precise alignment of the mirrors that reflect the beam. Using Play Dough it is easy to adjust the mirrors to the spot that is just right and then have it stay there.
For the best result, the mirrors really need to be first surface mirrors and not the more common kind with the reflective part on the back. Apparently, a green laser gives better results than a red one, too. If you don’t want to hack up a CD jewel case, a DVD player may give up a beam splitter.
So what do you use it for? Well, most of us use it to see the pretty patterns. But the instrument actually has wide-ranging applications to measure very small distances in fields as diverse as astronomy, optics, and photomicroscopy. To do anything really practical, you might need to add a detector of some sort.
If you want a more robust build, this one is similar. If you have a well-stocked test bench, you might be able to get by with even less.
Tags: laser hacks
-
Building a Mag Lev Optical Table
» Hack a DayWhen you’re talking about optics, things are often happening on a nanometer scale. This means that even the slightest amount of vibration can spoil delicate work. [The Thought Emporium] is working on a long-scale project to produce chocolate holograms, and needed a stable surface to set up some optical components. Thus, he decided to build a magnetically levitated laser table.
The build starts with a series of eight machined delrin bushings, each mounting a strong neodymium ring magnet. Four are placed on the base, with a thin steel rod protruding upwards. The other four bushings are then placed such that the poles of the magnets are opposite one another, causing them to levitate. An acrylic plate is then lowered on top, being supported by the levitating magnets.
It’s a very simple way to create a magnetically levitated table, and in a basic interferometry test, appears to do a decent job of isolating the table from vibrations. We also wonder if there’s scope for further improvement through the use of some kind of eddy current damper. It should make an excellent platform for further experiments, and we look forward to seeing some chocolate holograms in the near future.
It turns out that [The Thought Emporium] was inspired by an earlier chocolate optics project. Video after the break.
Tags: laser hacks
-
Simulating the Enigma’s Oddball Cousin
» Hack a DayEven if you wouldn’t describe yourself as a history buff, you’re likely familiar with the Enigma machine from World War II. This early electromechanical encryption device was used extensively by Nazi Germany to confound Allied attempts to eavesdrop on their communications, and the incredible effort put in by cryptologists such as Alan Turing to crack the coded messages it created before the end of the War has been the inspiration for several books and movies. But did you know that there were actually several offshoots of the “standard” Enigma?
For their entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Arduino Enigma] is looking to shine a little light on one of these unusual variants, the Enigma Z30. This “Baby Enigma” was intended for situations where only numerical data needed to be encoded. Looking a bit like a mechanical calculator, it dropped the German QWERTZ keyboard, and instead had ten buttons and ten lights numbered 0 through 9. If all you needed to do was send off numerical codes, the Z30 was a (relatively) small and lightweight alternative for the full Enigma machine.Creating an open source hardware simulator of the Z30 posses a rather unique challenge. While you can’t exactly order the standard Enigma from Digi-Key, there are at least enough surviving examples that they’ve been thoroughly documented. But nobody even knew the Z30 existed until 2004, and even then, it wasn’t until 2015 that a surviving unit was actually discovered in Stockholm.
Of course, [Arduino Enigma] does have some experience with such matters. By modifying the work that was already done for full-scale Enigma simulation on the Arduino, it only took a few hours to design a custom PCB to hold an Arduino Nano, ten buttons with matching LEDs, and of course the hardware necessary for the iconic rotors along the top.
The Z30 simulator looks like it will make a fantastic desk toy and a great way to help visualize how the full-scale Enigma machine worked. With parts for the first prototypes already on order, it shouldn’t be too long before we get our first good look at this very unique historical recreation.
The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:
Tags: arduino hacks
-
A Laser Cut Gingerbread Cathedral
» Hack a DayOne of the more disappointing news stories of 2019 was the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral. Widely considered a building of great historical importance and architectural merit, it was heavily damaged and will take significant time and resources to repair. Fundamentally though, if you’re reading this, that’s probably someone else’s job. Instead, why not just build your own Notre Dame out of gingerbread at home? [Scott Hasse] did just that.
The stained glass windows are the real party piece of the build.
The project began by using an existing papercraft model. This had to be heavily modified to account for the thickness of gingerbread and the fact that it can’t easily be folded around corners. The modified geometry was then lasercut at the Sector 67 hackerspace, as they’re experienced with the material.
With parts cut out, royal frosting was used as a mortar to help stick parts together during assembly. Significant development time was also spent in perfecting the stained glass windows, made from colored sugar. After much experimentation, a process involving melting the sugar on silicone sheets proved to be most successful. To complete the look, a series of RGB LEDs were also installed during the construction process.
The final results are nothing short of stunning. The build is instantly recognisable as the famous French cathedral, and the back-lit stained glass is absolutely breathtaking. We wouldn’t want to be going up against [Scott]’s family at the county fair baking contest, that’s for sure!
Tags: cooking hacks
-
Exquisite Craftsmanship Elevate Vic’s Creations Above The Rest
» Hack a DayThis booth was easy to miss at Maker Faire Bay Area 2019 amidst tall professional conference signage erected by adjacent exhibitors. It showcased the work of [Dr. Victor Chaney] who enjoys his day job as a dentist and thus feels no desire to commercialize his inventions — he’s building fun projects for the sake of personal enjoyment which he simply calls Vic’s Creations. Each project is built to his own standards, which are evidently quite high judging by the perfect glossy finish on every custom wood enclosure.
Some of these creations were aligned with his musical interests. The Backpacking Banjo was built around a (well cleaned) cat food can to satisfy the desire for a lightweight instrument he can take camping. His Musical Laser Rainbow Machine (fully documented in Nuts & Volts) was created so little bands formed by independent artists like himself can have a visual light show to go with their live performances. The Music Kaleidoscope is another execution along similar lines, with an LED array whose colors are dictated by music. Venturing outside the world of music, we see a magnetically levitated Castle In The Clouds which also receives power wirelessly to illuminate LEDs
The largest and most complex work on display is an epic electromechanical masterpiece. Par One is a rolling ball sculpture featuring the most convoluted golf course ever. Several more rolling ball sculptures (also called marble machines or marble runs) are on display at Dr. Chaney’s office which must make it the coolest dentist’s lobby ever. The lifelike motions he was able to get from the automatons he built into the sculpture are breathtaking, as you can see below.
If you’re inspired to make your own marble sculptures, keep in mind it won’t take much to get started. You can find space for one anywhere in your house, and there are plenty of creations to draw inspiration from.
Tags: laser hacks
-
Homemade Magic Makes the Metcal Go
» Hack a DayFirst soldering irons are often of the
Radioshack or Maplinfirestarter variety. They’re basically wall power shorted across a nichrome heater or similar with some inline resistance to make it harder to burn down the house. You plug them in, the current flows, and they get hot. Done.If you stick with the hobby for a while, these eventually get replaced with something like the venerable HAKKO FX-888D or that one Weller everyone likes with the analog knob. These are much improved; having temperature control leads to a more consistently heated tip and much improved soldering experience.
Entering the electronics workplace one comes across the next level of quality soldering iron: high end HAKKOs, Metcals, JBCs, and the like. Using one of these irons is practically a religious experience; they heat in a flash and solder melts while you blink. They even turn off when you put the handpiece down! But they’re expensive to buy (hint: think used). What’s a hobbyist to do?
[SergeyMax] seems to have had this problem. He bit the bullet, figured out how the Metcal works, and made his own base. This is no mean feat as a Metcal might look like a regular iron but it’s significantly more complex than ye olde firestarter. The Metcal magic is based on a oscillating magnetic fields (notice the handpiece is connected via BNC?) interacting with a tip bearing a special coating. In the presence of the changing field the tip heats up until it hits its Curie temperature, at which point it stops interacting with the magnetic field and thus stops heating.
When the user solders, the tip cools by sinking its heat into the part and drops below the Curie temperature again, which starts the heating again. It’s like temperature control with the sensor placed absolutely as close to the part as possible and a nearly instant response time, without even a control loop! [SergeyMax] has a much more thorough description of how these irons work, which we definitely recommend reading.
So what’s the hack? Based on old schematics and some clever reverse engineering from photos [SergeyMax] built a new base station! The published schematic is as rich with capacitors and inductors as one could hope. He didn’t post source or fab files but we suspect the schematic and photos of the bare board combined with some tinkering are enough for the enterprising hacker to replicate.
The post contains a very thorough description of the reverse engineering process and related concerns in designing a cost efficient version of the RF circuitry. Hopefully this isn’t the last Metcal replacement build we see! Video “walkthrough” after the break.
Thanks for the tip Freddie!
Tags: Hardware
-
Thrust Vectoring With Compliant Mechanisms Is Hard
» Hack a DayThrust vectoring is one way to control aerial vehicles. It’s become more popular as technology advances, finding applications on fifth-generation fighter aircraft, as well as long being used in space programmes the world over.[RCLifeOn] decided to try and bring the technology to a prop-powered RC aircraft, in an unconventional way.
After attending a lecture on compliant mechanisms and their potential use in space vehicles for thrust vectoring control, [RCLifeOn] decided to try applying the concept himself. His test mechanism is a fixed-wing with a single-piece motor mount that has enough flex in the right places to allow the motor (and propeller) to be moved in two axes, achieving thrust vectoring control.
After printing a compliant motor mount in a variety of materials, one was selected for having the right balance of strength and flexibility. The vectoring mechanism was fitted to a basic flying wing RC aircraft, and taken to the field for testing. Unfortunately, success was not the order of the day. While the mechanism was able to flex successfully and vector the motor in bench testing, it was unable to hold up to the stresses of powered flight. The compliant mechanism failed and the plane nosedived to the ground.
[RCLifeOn] suspects that the basic concept is a difficult proposition to engineer properly, as adding strength would tend to add weight which would make flight more difficult. Regardless, we’d love to see further development of the idea. It’s not the first time we’ve seen his 3D-printed flight experiments, either. Video after the break.
Tags: classic hacks
-
Cycloid Drawing Machine Uses Sneaky Stepper Hack
» Hack a DayStepper motors are great for projects that require accurate control of motion. 3D printers, CNC machines and plotters are often built using these useful devices. [InventorArtist] built a stepper-based cycloid drawing machine, and made use of a nifty little hack along the way.
The machine uses a rotating turntable to spin a piece of drawing paper. A pen is then placed in a pantograph mechanism, controlled by another two stepper motors. The build uses the common 28BYJ-48 motor, which are a unipolar, 5-wire design. A common hack is to open these motors up and cut a trace in order to convert them to bipolar operation, netting more torque at the expense of being more complex to drive. [InventorArtist] worked in collaboration with [Doug Commons], who had the idea of instead simply drilling a hole through the case of the motor to cut the trace. This saves opening the motor, and makes the conversion a snap.[InventorArtist] was able to create a machine capable of beautiful spirograph drawings, and develop a useful hack along the way. Reports are that a jig is in development to make the process foolproof for those keen to mod their own motors. We expect to see parts up on Thingiverse any day now. We’ve also covered the basic version of this hack before.
[Thanks to Darcy Whyte for the tip!]
Tags: classic hacks
-
The Smallest Hacker Camps Are The Most Satisfying, And You Can Do One Too
» Hack a DayTwo of my friends and I crammed into a small and aged European hatchback, drove all day along hundreds of miles of motorway, and finally through a succession of ever smaller roads. We were heading for a set of GPS co-ordinates in the north of Scotland, along with all of our camping gear.
There’s nothing like the hacker camp we’re looking for. After heading down a lane barely wider than the car, we drove through a farmyard with a sheepdog lying in the middle of the road (the reclining mutt seemed unconcerned as we edge the car around). We had arrived at GampGND, one of Europe’s smallest hacker camps.
A Village Becomes A Camp For A WeekendIf you’ve ever been to one of the larger camps, you may have encountered the Scottish Consulate village. The Scottish hackerspaces come together with a characteristic irreverent humour, and from where I’m sitting they really get that hacker camps are about having fun. CampGND is their start-of-season shakedown, at which they assemble what is in effect the Scottish Consulate village on a farm in the depths of rural Aberdeenshire for a weekend of fun and hacks. We were lucky enough to be able to make it to the camp, and we are much indebted to them for the experience.
So how does a hacker camp of about twenty people work, in contrast to one of several thousand? There are no villages, no talks, and no attractions, for a start. Instead it’s a much more intimate and social affair, of communal sitting around the table working on projects — or catching up on a bit of Hackaday editing, in my case. It was fun watching the work of the GB1GND special event amateur radio station (I corrupted the youth with a deplorable piece of radio culture from the long-ago CB days, by reminding them that a DTMF keypad can be used to play “Yankee Doodle” — 4426462, if you are curious). And of course we spent much time sitting around the fire in the evening drinking Scottish beer, toasting marshmallows, and talking the usual tall tales and interesting stuff of a hackerspace conversation.
Coming from Oxford Hackspace and MK Makerspace in central southern England it was particularly interesting to share experiences with the folks from 57 North in Aberdeen and Edinburgh HackLab. The mechanics of running a space are universal wherever in the world you may be, and it is both refreshing to find the support of those with the same experiences, and interesting to hear their fresh perspectives. The catering was communal, for which we are again indebted, as we’d done the usual hacker camp thing of bringing along a few less palatable essentials.
Small Hacker Camps Are Not Just For The FewWe had an excellent time over the weekend, and though our drive required an unexpected Travelodge due to traffic congestion in the English Midlands it was very much a journey worth making. The point of this article though is not to urge you all to head for CampGND next year, while our hosts were very hospitable this is by its nature a small camp whose logistics would be taxed by a huge influx of Hackaday readers. Instead, it should be seen as a blueprint, a demonstration that you don’t need several thousand people and a huge venue to mount a successful hacker camp. If you can put on a hacker camp village for your hackerspace you can put together an event like CampGND, all you need is to find a field with the appropriate permission, bring in a few facilities, and assemble twenty of your friends. Every hackerspace should ask themselves whether they can do the same as the Scottish Consulate and prepare for their summer with a mini hacker camp, because it’s an experience worth having.
Tags: cons
-
Enforce Speed Limits with a Rusty Bike
» Hack a DayThey say you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and that certainly held true in the case of this bicycle that was used to measure the speed of cars in one Belgian neighborhood. If we understand the translation from Dutch correctly, the police were not enforcing the speed limit despite complaints. As a solution, the local citizenry built a bicycle with a radar gun that collected data which was then used to convince the police to enforce the speed limit on this road.
The bike isn’t the functional part of this build, as it doesn’t seem to have been intended to move. Rather, it was chosen because it is inconspicuous (read: rusty and not valuable) and simply housed the radar unit and electronics in a rear luggage case. The radar was specially calibrated to have less than 1% error, and ran on a deep cycle lead acid battery for around eight days. Fitting it with an Arduino-compatible shield and running some software (provided on the github page) is enough to get it up and running.
This is an impressive feat of citizen activism to provide the local police with accurate data to change a problem in a neighborhood. Not only was the technology put to good use, but the social engineering involved with hiding expensive electronics in plain sight with a rusty bicycle is a step beyond what we might have thought of as well.
Thanks to [Jo_elektro] for the tip!
Tags: transportation hacks
-
Open Source Headset With Inside-Out Tracking, Video Passthrough
» Hack a DayThe folks behind the Atmos Extended Reality (XR) headset want to provide improved accessibility with an open ecosystem, and they aim to do it with a WebVR-capable headset design that is self-contained, 3D-printable, and open-sourced. Their immediate goal is to release a development kit, then refine the design for a wider release.
An early prototype of the open source Atmos Extended Reality headset.
The front of the headset has a camera-based tracking board to provide all the modern goodies like inside-out head and hand tracking as well as the ability to pass through video. The design also provides for a variety of interface methods such as eye tracking and 6 DoF controllers.
With all that, the headset gives users maximum flexibility to experiment with and create different applications while working to keep development simple. A short video showing off the modular design of the HMD and optical assembly is embedded below.
Extended Reality (XR) has emerged as a catch-all term to cover broad combinations of real and virtual elements. On one end of the spectrum are completely virtual elements such as in virtual reality (VR), and towards the other end of the spectrum are things like augmented reality (AR) in which virtual elements are integrated with real ones in varying ratios. With the ability to sense the real world and pass through video from the cameras, developers can choose to integrate as much or as little as they wish.
Terms like XR are a sign that the whole scene is still rapidly changing and it’s fascinating to see how development in this area is still within reach of small developers and individual hackers. The Atmos DK 1 developer kit aims to be released sometime in July, so anyone interested in getting in on the ground floor should read up on how to get involved with the project, which currently points people to their Twitter account (@atmosxr) and invites developers to their Discord server. You can also follow along on their newly published Hackaday.io page.
A modular VR headset?!?!Our first developer kit will have modular internals allowing for you to mix and match components. Now you can upgrade components without having to buy a new headset.
Join the discussion in our discord: https://t.co/EVpxe0PuDd pic.twitter.com/iXnSRaowyx
— Atmos (@AtmosXR) May 1, 2019
Tags: computer hacks
-
Try NopSCADlib for your Next OpenSCAD Project
» Hack a DayMost readers of this site are familiar by now with the OpenSCAD 3D modeling software, where you can write code to create 3D models. You may have even used OpenSCAD to output some STL files for your 3D printer. But for years now, [nophead] has been pushing OpenSCAD further than most, creating some complex utility and parts libraries to help with modeling, and a suite of Python scripts that generate printable STLs, laser-ready DXFs, bills of material, and human-readable assembly instructions complete with PNG imagery of exploded-view sub-assemblies.
Recently [nophead] tidied all of this OpenSCAD infrastructure up and released it on GitHub as NopSCADlib. You can find out more by browsing through the example projects and README file in the repository, and by reading the announcement blog post on the HydraRaptor blog. Some functionality highlights include:
- a large parts library full of motors, buttons, smooth rod, et cetera
- many utility functions to help with chamfers, fillets, precision holes, sub-assemblies, and BOM generation
- Python scripts to automate the output of STLs, DXFs, and BOMs
- automatic creation of documentation from Markdown embedded in your OpenSCAD files
- automatic rendering of exploded subassemblies
All that’s missing is a nice Makefile to tie it all together! Try it out for your next project if you – like us – get giddy at the thought of putting your 3D projects into version control before “compiling” them into the real world.
We’ve discussed some complex OpenSCAD before: Mastering OpenSCAD Workflow, and An OpenSCAD Mini-ITX Computer Case.
Tags: printer hacks
-
Back To Where (For Most Of Us) It Started, The Intel 8080
» Hack a DayThe early history of microprocessors is a surprisingly complex one, with more than one claimant for the prize of being the first, and multiple competing families. That the first commercially available part was the Intel 4004 is a matter of record, but it’s fair to say that few of us will have ever encountered one. Even its 8-bit sibling the 8008 would not have featured heavily in a 1974 version of Hackaday, such was its exotic nature. If there’s a microprocessor that can be claimed to have started it all for us then, it’s the Intel 8080. It established the 8-bit microporcessor with an 8-bit bus and a 16-bit address space, it had an order of maginitude more performance than its predecessors, and crucially it would become affordable enough for experimenters. It provided the guts of the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer, and thus kickstarted the progression of home computers which led to the devices you use every day.
The 8080 is in our sights today, thanks to [DeviceGuru], who was sent down memory lane by thoughts of the 6502-based KIM-1 from his master’s thesis project. This led to memories of the 8080 Abie computer that he built for himself in 1979, for which he provides us some details and hand-drawn schematics. By then the 8080’s need for several support chips made it somewhat outdated, but from his perspective the chip could be had from Radio Shack without too much outlay. His tale of hand-assembling 8080 code and sending it to a friend for blowing onto a PROM might be familiar to some readers of a certain age.
Though the 8080 ceased volume production a quarter century ago (surprisingly there are still places you can get a new one though) it hasn’t entirely disappeared from our community’s consciousness. [DeviceGuru] tells us about the 8080 Microprocessor kit from [Wichit Sirichote] in Thailand which is a single board computer in the 1970s vein, hex keypad and all.
As you might expect, the 8080 hasn’t appeared in many projects here due to its rarity. Those that have seem more likely to feature its Eastern Bloc clones, such as this Polish model or this Russian one. It’s worth the reminder that if you fancy exploring some 8080 code of your own that you don’t even need an 8080 to run it on some silicon. The hugely popular Zilog Z80 as found in retrocomputers such as the RC2014 is fully mostly 8080 code compatible, indeed some of us learned about microprocessors that way because 8080 books were discounted in 1983 and Z80 ones weren’t.
Header image: Konstantin Lanzet [CC BY-SA 3.0].
Tags: Retrocomputing
-
Surfing Diorama Makes For A Neat Desk Toy
» Hack a DayIn 1994, Weezer famously said that “you take your car to work, I’ll take my board”. Obviously, for the office-bound, surfing is simply out of the question during the working day. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun with a desk toy inspired by the waves.
The crux of the build is a watery diorama, which interacts with a faux-surfboard. The diorama consists of a tank constructed out of plexiglas, sealed together to be watertight. It’s then filled with blue-dyed water, and topped off with baby oil. The tank is then mounted on a cam controlled by a servo, which rocks the tank back and forth to create waves. This is controlled by the motion of the rider on the plywood surfboard, which can be rocked to and fro on the floor thanks to its curved bottom. An Arduino built into the board monitors a three-axis accelerometer, and sends this information to the Arduino controlling the tank.
By riding the board, the user can shake the tank. Get the motion just right, and smooth rolling waves are your reward. Jerk around with no real rhythm, and you’ll just get messy surf. We reckon it would be even better with a little surfer floating in the tank, too. It’s a fun build, and one that might help stave off the negative health effects of sitting at a desk all day. You might prefer a more shocking desk toy, however. Video after the break.
Tags: misc hacks
-
A Robotic Whiteboard Cleaner Keeps The Board Ready To Go
» Hack a DayWiping a whiteboard can be a tedious chore. Nobody wants to stick around after a long meeting to clean up, and sensitive information is often left broadcast out in the open. Never fear, though – this robot is here to help.
Wipy, as the little device is known, is a robotic cleaner that scoots around to keep whiteboards clear and ready for work. With brains courtesy of an Arduino Uno, it uses an IR line-following sensor to target areas to wipe, rather then wasting time wiping areas that are already clean. It’s also fitted with a time-of-flight sensor for ranging, allowing it to avoid obstacles, or busy humans that are writing on the board.
If Wipy lacks anything, it’s probably discretion. Despite its cute emoji-like face, it’s not really capable of tact, or knowing when it’s not needed. It’s recommended to keep Wipy powered down until you’re completely finished, lest it barge in and start wiping off important calculations before you’re done.
Fundamentally, it’s a fun build, and a great way to learn how to use a variety of sensors. If you’ve done something similar, be sure to let us know on the tips line. Else, consider automating the writing side of things, too. Tongue-in-cheek infomercial after the break.
Tags: robots hacks
-
Tearing Down A $25K 8K Video Camera
» Hack a DayMost people buy expensive cameras and use them rather than taking them apart, but Linus Tech Tips has a different approach. They decided that they would rather take the camera apart, with a view to converting it to water cooling. Why? Well, that’s perhaps like asking why climb Mount Everest: because it is there. The practicality (or desirability) of water-cooling an 8K camera aside, the teardown is rather interesting from an an engineering point of view. The RED HELIUM 8K costs about $25K, and most of us don’t often get a look inside equipment like this.
The video that we’ve placed below is, as you might expect, more about the horror of tearing the thing apart than the real details, but you do get some insight. There seem to be at least five different PCBS and a while mess of ribbon cables between them. A lot of the camera brains seems to be in the form of Kintex FPGA chips, some of the more powerful ones in the Xilinx lineup. At $1600 each, that’s probably a big chunk of the cost of the camera right there.
The current cooling system of the camera is also somewhat crazy looking, with multiple heat pipes pulling heat from the multiple PCBS, each holding large FPGA chips to a ducted radiator at the back. There’s a huge amount of thermal grease in there.
Perhaps this huge heat sink makes more sense than you might think at first, though: the RED camera turns off the fans while shooting to avoid noise, so the system has to absorb a lot of heat while shooting, then dissipate it afterwards quickly before it has to switch to silent running again.
There is also a rather odd-looking arrangement for cooling the sensor chip. It looks as though the heat sync works through a hole in the PCB, possibly with a Peltier or similar pulling heat from the back of the chip. Any more insight from this? Would any of those who are experts with this kind of system want to let us know what they see?
Tags: teardown
-
Gigapixel Microscope Reveals Tiny Parts Of The Big Picture
» Hack a Day[JBumstead] didn’t want an ordinary microscope. He wanted one that would show the big picture, and not just in a euphemistic sense, either. The problem though is one of resolution. The higher the resolution in an image — typically — the narrower the field of view given the same optics, which makes sense, right? The more you zoom in, the less area you can see. His solution was to create a microscope using a conventional camera and building a motion stage that would capture multiple high-resolution photographs. Then the multiple photos are stitched together into a single image. This allows his microscope to take a picture of a 90x60mm area with a resolution of about 15 μm. In theory, the resolution might be as good as 2 μm, but it is hard to measure the resolution accurately at that scale.
As an Arduino project, this isn’t that difficult. It’s akin to a plotter or an XY table for a 3D printer — just some stepper motors and linear motion hardware. However, the base needs to be very stable. We learned a lot about the optics side, though.
Two Nikon lenses and an aperture stop made from black posterboard formed a credible 3X magnification element. We also learned about numerical aperture and its relationship to depth of field.
One place the project could improve is in the software department. Once you’ve taken a slew of images, they need to blend together. It can be done manually, of course, but that’s no fun. There’s also a MATLAB script that attempts to automatically stitch the images together, blending the edges together. According to the author, the code needs some work to be totally reliable. There are also off-the-shelf stitching solutions, which might work better.
We’ve seen similar setups for imaging different things. We’ve even seen it applied to a vintage microscope.
Tags: arduino hacks
-
Bringing Pneumatics To The Masses With Open Source Soft Robotics
» Hack a DaySoft robotics is an exciting field. Mastering the pneumatic control of pliable materials has enormous potential, from the handling of delicate objects to creating movement with no moving parts. However, pneumatics has long been overlooked by the hacker community as a mode of actuation. There are thousands of tutorials, tools and products that help us work with motor control and gears, but precious few for those of us who want to experiment with movement using air pressure, valves and pistons.
Physicist and engineer [tinkrmind] wants to change that. He has been developing an open source soft robotics tool called Programmable Air for the past year with the aim of creating an accessible way for the hacker community to work with pneumatic robotics. We first came across [tinkrmind]’s soft robotics modules at World Maker Faire in New York City in 2018 but fifty beta testers and a wide range of interesting projects later — from a beating silicone heart to an inflatable bra — they are now being made available on Crowd Supply.
We had the chance to play with some of the Programmable Air modules after this year’s Makerfaire Bay Area at Bring A Hack. We can’t wait to see what squishy, organic creations they will be used for now that they’re out in the wild.
If you need more soft robotics inspiration, take a look at this robotic skin that turns teddy bears into robots from Yale or these soft rotating actuators from Harvard.
See a video of the Programmable Air modules in action below the cut.
Tags: news
-
OpenSCAP Libraries 1.3.1
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesThe openscap project is a set of open source libraries that support the SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) set of standards from NIST. It supports CPE, CCE, CVE, CVSS, OVAL, and XCCDF.Tags:
-
OpenSCAP Libraries 1.3.1
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesThe openscap project is a set of open source libraries that support the SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) set of standards from NIST. It supports CPE, CCE, CVE, CVSS, OVAL, and XCCDF.Tags:
-
Stylish Alarm Clock Rocks a VFD
» Hack a DayThere are a great many display technologies available if you wish to make a digital clock. Many hackers seem to have a penchant for the glowier fare from the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall. [ChristineNZ] is one such hacker, and managed to secure some proper Soviet kit for an alarm clock build.
The clock employs an IV-27M vacuum fluorescent display, manufactured in the now-defunct USSR. Featuring 13 seven-segment digits, it’s got that charming blue glow that you just don’t get with other technologies. A MAX6921AWI chip is used to drive the VFD, and an Arduino Mega is the brains of the operation. There’s also an HD44780-compliant LCD that can display further alphanumeric information, and a 4×4 keypad for controlling the device.
The best part of the build though is the enclosure. The VFD is encased in a glass tube, and supported at either end by 90-degree copper pipe couplers. These hold the VFD aloft, and also act as a conduit for the wires coming off each end of the tube. It’s all built on top of a wooden base that holds the rest of the electronics.
It’s an attractive build, and we love the floating look created by the glass tube construction. It’s not the first time we’ve seen old Russian VFDs, and we doubt it will be the last. Video after the break.
Th
Tags: clock hacks
-
Dell EMC Avamar ADMe Web UI 1.0.50 / 1.0.51 Local File Inclusion
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesDell EMC Avamar ADMe Web Interface is affected by a local file inclusion vulnerability which may allow a malicious user to download arbitrary files from the affected system by sending a specially crafted request to the Web Interface application. Versions 1.0.50 and 1.0.51 are affected.Tags:
-
Dell EMC Avamar ADMe Web UI 1.0.50 / 1.0.51 Local File Inclusion
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesDell EMC Avamar ADMe Web Interface is affected by a local file inclusion vulnerability which may allow a malicious user to download arbitrary files from the affected system by sending a specially crafted request to the Web Interface application. Versions 1.0.50 and 1.0.51 are affected.Tags:
-
Dell EMC Avamar ADMe Web UI 1.0.50 / 1.0.51 Local File Inclusion
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesDell EMC Avamar ADMe Web Interface is affected by a local file inclusion vulnerability which may allow a malicious user to download arbitrary files from the affected system by sending a specially crafted request to the Web Interface application. Versions 1.0.50 and 1.0.51 are affected.Tags:
-
Java Card Proof Of Concepts
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsSecurity Explorations has discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in the reference implementation of Java Card technology from Oracle used in financial, government, transportation and telecommunication sectors among others. As for the impact, the vulnerabilities found make it possible to break memory safety of the underlying Java Card VM. As a result, full access to smartcard memory could be achieved, applet firewall could be broken or native code execution could be gained. This archive contains the proof of concept code that demonstrates these vulnerabilities which were originally made public in March of 2019.Tags:
-
Java Card Proof Of Concepts
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesSecurity Explorations has discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in the reference implementation of Java Card technology from Oracle used in financial, government, transportation and telecommunication sectors among others. As for the impact, the vulnerabilities found make it possible to break memory safety of the underlying Java Card VM. As a result, full access to smartcard memory could be achieved, applet firewall could be broken or native code execution could be gained. This archive contains the proof of concept code that demonstrates these vulnerabilities which were originally made public in March of 2019.Tags:
-
Java Card Proof Of Concepts
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesSecurity Explorations has discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in the reference implementation of Java Card technology from Oracle used in financial, government, transportation and telecommunication sectors among others. As for the impact, the vulnerabilities found make it possible to break memory safety of the underlying Java Card VM. As a result, full access to smartcard memory could be achieved, applet firewall could be broken or native code execution could be gained. This archive contains the proof of concept code that demonstrates these vulnerabilities which were originally made public in March of 2019.Tags:
-
Gemalto Java Card SE-2019-01 Issue 34
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesThis is the second of two extensive reports sent to Gemalto by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issue 34 is documented in this report.Tags:
-
Gemalto Java Card SE-2019-01 Issue 34
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesThis is the second of two extensive reports sent to Gemalto by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issue 34 is documented in this report.Tags:
-
Gemalto Java Card SE-2019-01 Issue 34
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesThis is the second of two extensive reports sent to Gemalto by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issue 34 is documented in this report.Tags:
-
Gemalto Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 19 And 33
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesThis is the first of two extensive reports sent to Gemalto by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 19 and 33 are in this report.Tags:
-
Gemalto Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 19 And 33
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesThis is the first of two extensive reports sent to Gemalto by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 19 and 33 are in this report.Tags:
-
Gemalto Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 19 And 33
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesThis is the first of two extensive reports sent to Gemalto by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 19 and 33 are in this report.Tags:
-
Oracle Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 26-32
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesThis is the third of three extensive reports sent to Oracle by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 26 through 32 are in this report.Tags:
-
Oracle Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 26-32
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesThis is the third of three extensive reports sent to Oracle by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 26 through 32 are in this report.Tags:
-
Oracle Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 26-32
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesThis is the third of three extensive reports sent to Oracle by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 26 through 32 are in this report.Tags:
-
Oracle Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 20-25
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesThis is the second of three extensive reports sent to Oracle by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 20 through 25 are in this report.Tags:
-
Oracle Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 20-25
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesThis is the second of three extensive reports sent to Oracle by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 20 through 25 are in this report.Tags:
-
Oracle Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 20-25
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesThis is the second of three extensive reports sent to Oracle by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 20 through 25 are in this report.Tags:
-
Oracle Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 1-18
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesThis is the first of three extensive reports sent to Oracle by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 1 through 18 are in this report.Tags:
-
Oracle Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 1-18
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesThis is the first of three extensive reports sent to Oracle by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 1 through 18 are in this report.Tags:
-
Oracle Java Card SE-2019-01 Issues 1-18
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesThis is the first of three extensive reports sent to Oracle by Security Explorations to document vulnerabilities found in Java Card. Issues 1 through 18 are in this report.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical Type Confusion
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsA type confusion has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash the process or leak information from the client system via calendar replies. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical Type Confusion
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesA type confusion has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash the process or leak information from the client system via calendar replies. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical Type Confusion
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesA type confusion has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash the process or leak information from the client system via calendar replies. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical Stack Buffer Overflow
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsA stack-based buffer overflow has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash or gain remote code execution in the client system. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical Stack Buffer Overflow
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesA stack-based buffer overflow has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash or gain remote code execution in the client system. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical Stack Buffer Overflow
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesA stack-based buffer overflow has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash or gain remote code execution in the client system. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical icalparser.c Heap Overflow
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsA heap-based buffer overflow has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash or gain remote code execution in the client system. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical icalparser.c Heap Overflow
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesA heap-based buffer overflow has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash or gain remote code execution in the client system. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical icalparser.c Heap Overflow
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesA heap-based buffer overflow has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash or gain remote code execution in the client system. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical Heap Overflow
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsA heap-based buffer overflow has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash or gain remote code execution in the client system. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical Heap Overflow
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesA heap-based buffer overflow has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash or gain remote code execution in the client system. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
Thunderbird libical Heap Overflow
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesA heap-based buffer overflow has been identified in the Thunderbird email client. The issue is present in the libical implementation, which was forked from upstream libical version 0.47. The issue can be triggered remotely, when an attacker sends an specially crafted calendar attachment and does not require user interaction. It might be used by a remote attacker to crash or gain remote code execution in the client system. Proof of concept included.Tags:
-
12:27
DSA-2019-092: Dell EMC Avamar Security Update for ADMe Web UI Vulnerability
» Full DisclosurePosted by secure on Jun 14
DSA-2019-092: Dell EMC Avamar Security Update for ADMe Web UI Vulnerability
Dell EMC Identifier: DSA-2019-092
CVE Identifier: CVE-2019-3737
Severity: High
Severity Rating: CVSS v3 Base Score: 8.6 (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N)
Affected products:
DELL EMC Avamar(r) ADMe Web UI (c) 1.0.50, 1.0.51
Summary:
DELL EMC Avamar(r) Data Migration Enabler (ADMe) Web UI requires security updates to address a local file include(LFI)...
Tags:
-
12:26
[Project] Open frame to the main.
» Full DisclosurePosted by hacksomeheavymetal via Fulldisclosure on Jun 14
Despite of anakata's motives one thing is certain, thanks to him some
people got hooked and started to talk about the security of mainframes.
Since then, few individuals, and before that even fewer, did their best
sharing their knowledge in the field and contributing to the infosec and
mainframe communities. This however was still not enough to close the gap
between mainframes and the rest of the world.
I'm sharing the bits and pieces...
Tags:
-
12:25
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory X41-2019-004: Type confusion in Thunderbird
» Full DisclosurePosted by X41 D-Sec GmbH Advisories on Jun 14
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory: X41-2019-004
Type confusion in Thunderbird
=============================
Severity Rating: Medium
Confirmed Affected Versions: All versions affected
Confirmed Patched Versions: Thunderbird ESR 60.7.XXX
Vendor: Thunderbird
Vendor URL: https://www.thunderbird.net/
Vendor Reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1555646
Vector: Incoming mail with calendar attachment
Credit: X41 D-SEC GmbH, Luis Merino...
Tags:
-
12:25
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory X41-2019-003: Stack-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
» Full DisclosurePosted by X41 D-Sec GmbH Advisories on Jun 14
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory: X41-2019-003
Stack-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
==========================================
Severity Rating: High
Confirmed Affected Versions: All versions affected
Confirmed Patched Versions: Thunderbird ESR 60.7.XXX
Vendor: Thunderbird
Vendor URL: https://www.thunderbird.net/
Vendor Reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553808
Vector: Incoming mail with calendar attachment
Credit: X41...
Tags:
-
12:25
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory X41-2019-002: Heap-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
» Full DisclosurePosted by X41 D-Sec GmbH Advisories on Jun 14
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory: X41-2019-002
Heap-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
=========================================
Severity Rating: High
Confirmed Affected Versions: All versions affected
Confirmed Patched Versions: Thunderbird ESR 60.7.XXX
Vendor: Thunderbird
Vendor URL: https://www.thunderbird.net/
Vendor Reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553820
Vector: Incoming mail with calendar attachment
Credit: X41...
Tags:
-
12:25
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory X41-2019-001: Heap-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
» Full DisclosurePosted by X41 D-Sec GmbH Advisories on Jun 14
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory: X41-2019-001
Heap-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
=========================================
Severity Rating: High
Confirmed Affected Versions: All versions affected
Confirmed Patched Versions: Thunderbird ESR 60.7.XXX
Vendor: Thunderbird
Vendor URL: https://www.thunderbird.net/
Vendor Reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553814
Vector: Incoming mail with calendar attachment
Credit: X41...
Tags:
-
CentOS 7.6 ptrace_scope Privlege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsCentOS version 7.6 ptrace_scope misconfiguration local privilege escalation exploit.Tags:
-
CentOS 7.6 ptrace_scope Privlege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesCentOS version 7.6 ptrace_scope misconfiguration local privilege escalation exploit.Tags:
-
CentOS 7.6 ptrace_scope Privlege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesCentOS version 7.6 ptrace_scope misconfiguration local privilege escalation exploit.Tags:
-
Meet the Bootstrap Winners of the 2019 Hackaday Prize
» Hack a DayThe twenty projects that won this year’s Hackaday Prize bootstrap competition have just been certified. The purpose of this is to help great examples of early entries offset the cost that goes into prototyping as they work on their projects throughout the summer.
We know this has had a big impact on entries in the past. When working on hard projects it’s easy to doubt yourself, but you can usually get over that with just a bit of outside validation. Alex Williams encountered this when he first entered his Open Source Under Water Glider into the 2017 Hackaday Prize. He wanted to show off his work but didn’t think there’d be much interest and wasn’t sure if he’d continue development. He was shocked by the number of people who were excited about it, continued working feverishly on it, and went on to win the grand prize.
You’ll find all 20 bootstrap winners listed below, but we wanted to feature a couple of examples to show the kind of work that is happening during the Hackady Prize. The results of the bootstrap competition have no bearing on the top prizes: they are all still up for grabs, so enter your project today!
The SierrOS team is hard at work building an automatic CPR machine. The four students from Lyon France are working on an all-in-one device that can provide both chest compressions and ventilation. Just two weeks ago they were at the Olympics of Engineering in Paris and placed 20th out of 1,500 teams. It’s exciting to see a sneak peek at the newest revision of the machine, and they promise to share more details soon. SierrOS secured $500 in the bootstrap round.
Pilates feels like a new development in personal fitness, but the practice harkens back to its founder who was born in 1883. Joseph Pilates invented a piece of equipment called the Pilates Reformer which is still in use today. But another Joseph, the hacker from Connecticut who submitted this project, seeks to design a more affordable version of the Pilates Reformer. We especially enjoyed seeing the video of him testing the shipping and assembly plan for this equipment. He had the idea to ship all the parts in a concrete forming tube is a clever one, and testing the assembly process is a big part of proving that your product fits your market. The Pilates Reformer project secured $408 in the bootstrap round.
Certified Bootstrap Competition Winners:The Bootstrap Competition was determined by the number of “likes” on each Hackaday Prize entry prior to June 1st. The top twenty finishers received $5 per like with a cap of $500. Congratulations to each of these projects:
- Axiom: 100+kW Motor Controller
- ULX3S powerful ECP5 board for open source FPGA
- eAgrar – digital agriculture
- SmallKat: An adorable dynamics oriented robot cat
- BikeOn
- SierrOS – Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Device
- Leavening Cell
- The DIYson, an open source Cyclone vacuum cleaner
- Odinub
- null modular F(n)
- pcbtc (GaN edition)
- Park Asset and Condition Monitor
- BikePin
- Persistence of Vision Fidget Spinner
- Portable Retro Game Console with 7.9-inch display
- Lightning detector
- PiSugar Battery for Raspberry Pi zero
- Pilates Reformer
- DLT one – A Damn Linux Tablet!
- LedCade – µ arcade game cabinet – 8×8 LED matrix
Tags: the hackaday prize
-
Aida64 6.00.5100 SEH Buffer Overflow
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsAida64 version 6.00.5100 Log to CSV File local SEH buffer overflow exploit.Tags:
-
Aida64 6.00.5100 SEH Buffer Overflow
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesAida64 version 6.00.5100 Log to CSV File local SEH buffer overflow exploit.Tags:
-
Aida64 6.00.5100 SEH Buffer Overflow
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesAida64 version 6.00.5100 Log to CSV File local SEH buffer overflow exploit.Tags:
-
Active Directory Enumeration With PowerShell
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesWhitepaper called Active Directory Enumeration with PowerShell.Tags:
-
Active Directory Enumeration With PowerShell
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesWhitepaper called Active Directory Enumeration with PowerShell.Tags:
-
This British 3D Printing Meetup is On the Rise
» Hack a DayMost people who are serious about designing, building, or improving 3D printers see the Midwest Reprap Festival as the place where the latest and greatest is on show for all to see. But if you live on the other side of the world as I do, chances are slim that you’ll be able to attend.
I live in the UK, and there haven’t traditionally been any events quite like MRRF, but that may be changing. The 3D Meetup UK in Birmingham is a community-organised event bringing together the 3D printing maker and hacker community for a couple of days of talks, demonstrations, and tours. I went along this year to see what was going on, and to take the temperature of the British side of this community.
R2-D2 And Damn’ Good Cake
An R2-D2 walking the halls
The event was held over a weekend in Birmingham Open Media, an art and technology space placed right in the centre of the city and very conveniently for transport links. It attracted a healthy crowd, and there was plenty going on with talks, commercial exhibitors, and community exhitibs spread across three levels of the venue.
A stand-out was Mike Baddeley’s talk and demonstration of his lifesized working remote controlled R2D2 ‘droid. This had been prowling the exhibition space downstairs, so was an anticipated talk. The other Saturday talk that one that caught my attention was Nigel Tolley from Make Bromyard talking about 3D printing keys. Nigel is a professional master locksmith, and the keys in question were huge items for vintage locks rather than modern ones with higher security.
A Solid Line-Up of Demos from Commercial Exhibitors
e3D are sadly not branching out into giant-sized extruders.
The exhibitors were a mix of general 3D print suppliers, component suppliers, and companies doing exciting things with 3D printers. The hotend company E3D were there, as were Duet3D, the controller electronics company.
Script3D’s gummy candy printer, with its syringe-based extruder.
Of particular interest were a couple of local companies in the 3D printing business, Backface Studios with their eerily lifelike 3D printed figures shown here that were modelled from photogrametric 3D scans. I also enjoyed seeing Script3D with their edible-print 3D printer. At the show they had it in one of its “fun” uses, printing gummy sweets, but the other side of their business lies in a technically more exciting direction in creating custom nutritional supplements and medicines. Their printer was a relatively conventional mechanism in a food-safe enclosure, but with an interchangeable syringe in an actuator replacing the familiar filament extruder and hotend.
Meanwhile the community area had a selection of hackerspaces with some of their work. The local FizzPOP hackerspace was on hand, and the standout project for us was an eye-catching diffused-LED lightbox display. Meanwhile opposite them Leicester Hackspace had a 3D printed balloon payload, and some fascinating exhibits from a member with nearly three decades of experience in the world of professional 3D printing. These formed part of his 3D Printing Museum collection, and would have been an eye opener to anyone for whom 3D printing began with the RepRap.
This Is A Community Event, Now Into The Community It Sprang FromPart of the day involved outside tours, and I saw both FizzPOP and Backface Studios. FizzPOP is a well-equipped space in the top floor of one of Birmingham’s many older industrial buildings, and is typical of a vibrant British hackerspace. I could have spent far too much time in their junk room, and cast envious eyes over their SMT assembly line.
Backface’s scanner, and the resulting render of a Hackaday scribe.
Backface occupy an upstairs office suite close to FizzPOP, in which they have both their photogrametry suite and their ProJet 660 Pro full-colour 3D printer. The former is a full-room-sized structure on whose interior is mounted hundreds of SLR cameras. Bringing together all their data to servers via a bundle of USB hubs is a task in itself. Standing in their scanner was a quick and painless process, and having done so it’s undecided whether a 3D printed mini Hackaday scribe would look good or a bit creepy on the mantelpiece.
As we wrapped up the day in a gloriously intact and as yet un-hipsterised Victorian pub it was time to reflect on the event. My conclusion is that it’s very much worth returning to. It’s not MRRF yet as it’s only been going for a couple of years, but I think it has potential. There were no pushing-the-boundary community builds such as the infinite-bed machines I’d hoped might be there, but building an event that has MRRF’s reach takes time. The 3D Meetup folks have certainly cracked the community aspect of it in another sense. The attendees were all there to swap ideas and experiences with others as much as to see the exhibitors, and that is the special sauce that can’t be replicated at will by any shiny corporate event. I wish it well in future years.
Put It In Your Diary For Next Year, And See The City While You’re ThereBefore ending this piece it’s worth talking about its surroundings as another reason to make it to 3D Meetup.
Birmingham is the UK’s second city and has at times had a sad reputation as a run-down former industrial powerhouse whose best days are behind it. But in recent years Birmingham has successfully re-invented itself and is a vibrant European city. Most readers will be familiar with Shenzhen in China as one of the 21st century world’s major tech manufacturing cities where anything seems possible, perhaps it’s best to describe Birmingham by comparison as the 19th century’s equivalent. The thousands of metalworking and other trades that were once plied here may largely have been supplanted, but with their legacy round every corner it remains a fascinating city for anyone with an interest in these things to visit.
I’d suggest a trip to Thinktank, Birmingham’s science and technology museum, as well as the Pen Museum, and the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter. And though it’s a few stops on an urban railway, I’d be letting you down if I didn’t remind you about the Cadbury World chocolate factory attraction.
Tags: printer hacks
-
Evernote Critical Flaw Opened Personal Data Of Millions To Attack
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesEvernote Critical Flaw Opened Personal Data Of Millions To AttackTags: headlineprivacyflawchrome
-
Spirit Confirms ASCO Industries Cyberattack
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesSpirit Confirms ASCO Industries CyberattackTags: headlinemalwarefraud
-
Symantec Plays Down Unreported Breach Of Test Data
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesSymantec Plays Down Unreported Breach Of Test DataTags: headlinehackerdata losspasswordsymantec
-
Julian Assange's Extradition Hearing Set For 2020
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesJulian Assange's Extradition Hearing Set For 2020Tags: headlinegovernmentprivacyusabritaindata losscyberwarspyware
-
4 US Agencies Don't Properly Verify Your Data Due To The Equifax Breach
» Packet Storm Security Headlines4 US Agencies Don't Properly Verify Your Data Due To The Equifax BreachTags: headlinegovernmentprivacyusadata lossfraudidentity theft
-
JavaScript Template Attacks Expose New Browser Fingerprinting Vectors
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesJavaScript Template Attacks Expose New Browser Fingerprinting VectorsTags: headlineflawspyware
-
Hackaday Podcast Ep23: Everything Breaks… Raspberry Pi, ADS-B, Hackaday Website, and Automotive Airbags
» Hack a DayMike Szczys and Elliot Williams talk news and great hacks from the past seven days. Sad word this week as Maker Media, the company behind Make Magazine and Maker Faire, have closed their doors. There seems to be a lot of news about broken hardware and software to discuss, with ADS-B problems grounding hundreds of flights in the US, Hackaday itself having a site outage, the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ can be bricked with a really easy mistake, and Lewin wrote a great overview of the Takata airbag debacle. Don’t worry there are still plenty of hacks as we look at old computers that sing, microcontrollers that chiptune, beat boxes that are actually boxes, and some very neat cartridge hacks for NES and Arduboy.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download (60 MB)
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts: Episode 023 Show Notes: New This Week:- Maker Media Ceases Operations
- GPS And ADS-B Problems Cause Cancelled Flights
- The Day Hackaday’s Theme Was Broken
- Vintage Speech Synthesizer Croons The Oldies
- SOICbite: A Program/Debug Connector For An SOIC Test Clip
- Play To The Beat Of This Robotic Drummer In A Box
- Doom On The NES
- The ArduBoy Community Rolled Their Own Cartridge
- Unconventional Drone Uses Gas Thrusters For Control
- Mike’s Picks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Takata’s Deadly Airbags: An Engineering Omnishambles
- Shorting Pins On A Raspberry Pi Is A Bad Idea; PMIC Failures Under Investigation
Tags: hackaday Columns
-
Knitting Software Automatically Converts 3D Models into Machine-knit Stuffies
» Hack a DayWe’ve seen our fair share of interesting knitting hacks here at Hackaday. There has been a lot of creative space explored while mashing computers into knitting machines and vice versa, but for the most part the resulting knit goods all tend to be a bit… two-dimensional. The mechanical reality of knitting and hobbyist-level knitting machines just tends to lend itself to working with a simple grid of pixels in a flat plane.
However, a team at the [Carnegie Mellon Textiles Lab] have been taking the world of computer-controlled knitting from two dimensions to three, with software that can create knitting patterns for most any 3D model you feed it. Think of it like your standard 3D printing slicer software, except instead of simple layers of thermoplastics it generates complex multi-dimensional chains of knits and purls with yarn and 100% stuffing infill.
The details are discussed and very well illustrated in their paper entitled Automatic Machine Knitting of 3D Meshes and a video (unfortunately not embeddable) shows the software interface in action, along with some of the stuffing process and the final adorable (ok they’re a little creepy too) stuffed shapes.
Since the publication of their paper, [the Textiles Lab] has also released an open-source version of their autoknit software on GitHub. Although the compilation and installation steps look non-trivial, the actual interface seems approachable by a dedicated hobbyist. Anyone comfortable with 3D slicer software should be able to load a model, define the two seams necessary to close the shape, which will need to be manually sewn after stuffing, and output the knitting machine code.
Previous knits: the Knit Universe, Bike-driven Scarf Knitter, Knitted Circuit Board.
Tags: printer hacks
-
This Week in Security: Use Emacs, Crash a Windows Server, and a Cryptocurrency Heist
» Hack a DayIt looks like Al was right, we should all be using Emacs. On the 4th of June, [Armin Razmjou] announced a flaw in Vim that allowed a malicious text file to trigger arbitrary code execution. It’s not every day we come across a malicious text file, and the proof of concept makes use of a clever technique — escape sequences hide the actual payload. Printing the file with cat returns “Nothing here.” Cat has a “-v” flag, and that flag spills the secrets of our malicious text file. For simplicity, we’ll look at the PoC that doesn’t include the control characters. The vulnerability is Vim’s modeline function. This is the ability to include editor options in a text file. If a text file only works with 80 character columns, a modeline might set “textwidth=80”. Modeline already makes use of a sandbox to prevent the most obvious exploits, but [Armin] realized that the “:source!” command could run the contents of a file outside that sandbox. “:source! %” runs the contents of the current file — the malicious text file.
:!uname -a||" vi:fen:fdm=expr:fde=assert_fails("source\!\ \%"):fdl=0:fdt="Taking this apart one element at a time, the “:!” is the normal mode command to run something in the shell, so the rest of the line is what gets run. “uname -a” is the arbitrary command, benign in this case. Up next is the OR operator, “||” which fully evaluates the first term first, and only evaluates what comes after the operator if the first term returns false. In this case, it’s a simple way to get the payload to run even though the rest of the line is garbage, as far as bash is concerned. “vi:” informs Vim that we have a modeline string. “:fen” enables folding, and “:fdm=expr” sets the folding method to use an expression. This feature is usually used to automatically hide lines matching a regular expression. “:fde=” is the command to set the folding expression. Here’s the exploit, the folding expression can be a function like “execute()” or “assert_fails()”, which allows calling the :source! command. This pops execution out of the sandbox, and begins executing the text file inside vim, just as if a user were typing it in from the keyboard.
[Armin] suggests disabling modelines altogether, and mentions that Debian does this by default. I’ve checked my Fedora desktop, and while I had already updated Vim to the patched version, I was surprised to see modelines still enabled. I quickly opened “/etc/virc” and added “set nomodeline” to the end of that file, and I suggest you do the same.
An Email Bug From Ages PastThe Exim email server has a remote command execution vulnerability, and it takes a week of real time to exploit. The code to be run is embedded in the send-to email address: “run{kcalc}@localhost”, and a certain code path processes that address using “expand_string()”, which helpfully includes a function to run commands. The researchers from Qualys ran into a problem trying to exploit this problem remotely: by default, Exim checks incoming email for valid destination addresses. “run{}” is pretty obviously not a valid username, so the message never interacts with the vulnerable code. The solution to this is clever, to say the least.
By default, when an email server receives a message it can’t successfully deliver, a bounce email is generated, informing the sender that the message failed. This bounce message uses the sender’s reported email address, allowing an attacker to inject commands as a part of that address. This solves one problem, but creates another. Not all messages trigger execution of the vulnerable code, and since the attacker is relying on the bounce message to trigger the exploit, he can no longer manipulate the message’s failure mode. The full exploit is to send an email from “run{…}@attackerdomain.com” to a vulnerable Exim server. When that server attempts to connect to the attacker’s MX server to deliver the bounceback message, the attacker forces the connection open for 7 days, by only sending a new byte every four minutes. Once 7 days have passed, the connection is terminated with a permanent delivery failure. This particular failure state triggers the vulnerable code, running the specified command. There is at least one report that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild, so if you’re running Exim, go install the patch!
The disclosure thread includes two very old Sendmail stories, the WIZ and DEBUG vulnerability. Both are fun reads, and a reminder of the simpler days of computer security.
Your 90 Days are Up!Google’s Project Zero is no stranger to controversy, and this week is no exception. On Tuesday, [Tavis Ormandy] announced a new Denial of Service vulnerability in a Windows Cryptography routine. You may recognize [Tavis] from last week. At this rate, we’ll need to rename the column in a few more weeks.
This particular bug results in a deadlock when processing a specific X.509 certificate. So far, there is no path to command execution for this bug, but it’s not hard to imagine an attacker taking a Windows server offline by sending this particular certificate in an email or other channel.
When Microsoft was informed of the issue, they requested an extra day, in order to release the patch on Patch Tuesday, the 11th. Even though that was technically the 91st day, the Project Zero team agreed. On the 11th, Microsoft opted not to release the patch, and the vulnerability was announced as scheduled. While some have already condemned the release of the bug, I can only observe that Microsoft was given more than enough time to roll out a fix, and Project Zero has done exactly what they agreed to do.
Hacking Cryptocurrency Wallets to Save ThemAnother day, another supply chain attack. A Javascript library,
electron-native-notify, was updated to include malicious code. This particular library was used in the Agama cryptocurrency wallet, developed by Komodo. The npm security team gave their perspective on the official npm blog. They discovered the malicious code, and notified projects using that library, including Komodo. This code was uploading wallet information and secrets to the attacker’s server, who were then using that information to drain money from the vulnerable wallets.In an unexpected plot twist, the server used to store the stolen information was publicly accessible, and the Komodo security team was aware of it. Here is quite the ethical dilemma. They were watching an active attack on their users, but the only immediate solution was legally and ethically questionable. Komodo decided to bite the bullet and jump into action. Yes, they hacked their own customers, using the stolen information to move cryptocurrency out of the now vulnerable digital wallets. Komodo is still working to restore the missing funds to their users. The decision they had to make in such a short amount of time must have been very difficult, and serves as a reminder of the occasional gray area of security work.
It appears that the developer who pushed the malicious code into the library in question had been targeting the Agama wallet for some time, making genuinely useful code contributions to the Agama project. We’ve seen this style of attack in the past — event-stream is the example that first comes to mind. In both cases, a developer appeared to be a helpful contributor and was quickly given too much access to a project, only to push malicious code into the project before disappearing. I’m confident this won’t be the last time this approach is attempted — and when it happens we’ll be sure to tell you about it. Stay Tuned!
Tags: computer hacks
-
Augmented Arthropod Gets A Self-Balancing Ride
» Hack a DayThere are many people who find being around insects uncomfortable. This is understandable, and only likely to get worse as technology gives these multi-legged critters augmented bodies to roam around with. [tech_support], for one, welcomes our new arthropod overlords, and has even built them a sweet new ride to get around in.
The build follows the usual hallmarks of a self-balancing bot, with a couple of interesting twists. There’s twin brushed motors for drive, an an Arduino Uno running the show. Instead of the more usual pedestrian IMUs however, this rig employs the Bosch BNO055 Absolute Orientation Sensor. This combines a magnetometer, gyroscope, and accelerometer all on a single die, and handles all the complicated sensor fusion maths onboard. This allows it to output simpler and more readily usable orientation data.
The real party piece is even more interesting, however. Rather than radio control or a line following algorithm, this self-balancer instead gets its very own insect pilot. The insect is placed in a small chamber with ultrasonic sensors used to determine its position. The insect may then control the movement of the bot by moving around this chamber itself. The team have even developed a variety of codes to dial in the sensor system for different types of insect.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen insects augmented with robotic hardware, and we doubt it will be the last. If you’re working on a mad science project of your own, drop us a line. Video after the break.
Tags: misc hacks
-
2:59
[SE-2019-01] Java Card vulnerabilities (post shutdown release)
» Full DisclosurePosted by Adam Gowdiak on Jun 14
Hello All,
Original reports that were submitted to Oracle and Gemalto have been
posted to Security Explorations website:
http://www.security-explorations.com/javacard_details.html
This should help all interested parties to proceed with an independent
evaluation of the issues, but also judge Oracle and Gemalto stance with
respect to them.
Thank you.
Best Regards,
adam gowdiak
Tags:
-
Hyperlinking Comes to GitHub via Extension
» Hack a DayIf you are browsing GitHub it is very tempting to open up the source code to some project and peek at how it works. The code view is easy to read, but the viewer lacks one important feature: the ability to click on an included file and find it. The Octolinker extension fixes that oversight.
If you want to try it without installing the extension, there is a mock-up demo available. Even though the demo wants you to click on specific things, if you don’t play by the rules it will still do the right thing and take you to either the code on GitHub or an appropriate page. You can even substitute the demo URL for github.com and try it out on any GitHub page without the extension.
The tool supports at least 20 languages although we were bemused to see that C and C++ were not among them. The developer claims that none of your source code is ever sent out of your browser by the extension. If you use Octolinker on a private repository, you also have to supply a GitHub API token and that’s never sent out of your browser, either, according to the web site.
The code (on GitHub, of course) has a plug in architecture, so it ought to be easy to add the language of your choice. If you crave pop up tool tips for source code in GitHub, check out OctoHint.
GitHub seems to have survived being bought by Microsoft without becoming tarnished. If you want to keep an eye on your GitHub properties, there’s always this project.
Tags: Software development
-
23:13
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory X41-2019-004: Type confusion in Thunderbird
» BugtraqPosted by X41 D-Sec GmbH Advisories on Jun 13
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory: X41-2019-004
Type confusion in Thunderbird
=============================
Severity Rating: Medium
Confirmed Affected Versions: All versions affected
Confirmed Patched Versions: Thunderbird ESR 60.7.XXX
Vendor: Thunderbird
Vendor URL: https://www.thunderbird.net/
Vendor Reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1555646
Vector: Incoming mail with calendar attachment
Credit: X41 D-SEC GmbH, Luis Merino...
Tags:
-
23:13
[slackware-security] mozilla-thunderbird (SSA:2019-164-01)
» BugtraqPosted by Slackware Security Team on Jun 13
[slackware-security] mozilla-thunderbird (SSA:2019-164-01)
New mozilla-thunderbird packages are available for Slackware 14.2 and -current
to fix security issues.
Here are the details from the Slackware 14.2 ChangeLog:
+--------------------------+
patches/packages/mozilla-thunderbird-60.7.1-i686-1_slack14.2.txz: Upgraded.
This release contains security fixes and improvements.
For more information, see:...
Tags:
-
23:12
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory X41-2019-003: Stack-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
» BugtraqPosted by X41 D-Sec GmbH Advisories on Jun 13
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory: X41-2019-003
Stack-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
==========================================
Severity Rating: High
Confirmed Affected Versions: All versions affected
Confirmed Patched Versions: Thunderbird ESR 60.7.XXX
Vendor: Thunderbird
Vendor URL: https://www.thunderbird.net/
Vendor Reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553808
Vector: Incoming mail with calendar attachment
Credit: X41...
Tags:
-
23:09
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory X41-2019-002: Heap-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
» BugtraqPosted by X41 D-Sec GmbH Advisories on Jun 13
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory: X41-2019-002
Heap-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
=========================================
Severity Rating: High
Confirmed Affected Versions: All versions affected
Confirmed Patched Versions: Thunderbird ESR 60.7.XXX
Vendor: Thunderbird
Vendor URL: https://www.thunderbird.net/
Vendor Reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553820
Vector: Incoming mail with calendar attachment
Credit: X41...
Tags:
-
23:00
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory X41-2019-001: Heap-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
» BugtraqPosted by X41 D-Sec GmbH Advisories on Jun 13
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory: X41-2019-001
Heap-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
=========================================
Severity Rating: High
Confirmed Affected Versions: All versions affected
Confirmed Patched Versions: Thunderbird ESR 60.7.XXX
Vendor: Thunderbird
Vendor URL: https://www.thunderbird.net/
Vendor Reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553814
Vector: Incoming mail with calendar attachment
Credit: X41...
Tags:
-
22:56
[SECURITY] [DSA 4462-1] dbus security update
» BugtraqPosted by Salvatore Bonaccorso on Jun 13
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Security Advisory DSA-4462-1 security () debian org
https://www.debian.org/security/ Salvatore Bonaccorso
June 13, 2019 https://www.debian.org/security/faq
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Package : dbus
CVE ID : CVE-2019-12749
Debian Bug :...
Tags:
-
22:53
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory X41-2019-001: Heap-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
» BugtraqPosted by X41 D-Sec GmbH Advisories on Jun 13
X41 D-Sec GmbH Security Advisory: X41-2019-001
Heap-based buffer overflow in Thunderbird
=========================================
Severity Rating: High
Confirmed Affected Versions: All versions affected
Confirmed Patched Versions: Thunderbird ESR 60.7.XXX
Vendor: Thunderbird
Vendor URL: https://www.thunderbird.net/
Vendor Reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553814
Vector: Incoming mail with calendar attachment
Credit: X41...
Tags:
-
Divide To Conquer Capacitive Touch Problems
» Hack a DayBack in the day, all of your music was on a shelf (or in milk crates) and the act of choosing what to listen to was a tangible one. [Michael Teeuw] appreciates the power of having music on demand, but misses that physical aspect when it comes time to “put something on”. His solution is a hardware controller that he calls MusicCubes.
Music cube makes selection using RFID, and touching to the right raises the volume level
This is a multi-part project, but the most recent rework is what catches our eye. The system uses cubes with RFID tags in them for each album. This part of the controller works like a charm, just set the cube in a recessed part of the controller — like Superman’s crystals in his fortress of solitude — and the system knows you’ve made your decision. But the touch controls for volume didn’t work as well. Occasionally they would read a false touch, which ends up muting the system after an hour or so. His investigations led to the discovery that the capacitive touch plates themselves needed to be smaller.
Before resorting to a hardware fix, [Michael] tried to filter out the false positives in software. This was only somewhat successful so his next attempt was to cut the large touch pads into four plates, and only react when two plates register a press at one time.
He’s using an MPR121 capacitive touch sensor which has inputs for up to 12-keys so it was no problem to make this change work with the existing hardware. Surprisingly, once he had four pads for each sensor the false-positives completely stopped. The system is now rock-solid without the need to filter for two of this sub-pads being activated at once. Has anyone else experienced problems with large plates as the touch sensors? Can this be filtered easily or is [Michael’s] solution the common way to proceed? Share your own capacitive touch sensor tips in the comments below!
Want to get a look at the entire project? Start with step one, which includes a table of contents for the other build logs.
Tags: classic hacks
-
Tzumi Electronics Klic Lock Authentication Bypass
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsTzumi Electronics Klic Lock version 1.0.9 allows for attackers to access resources via capture-replay.Tags:
-
Tzumi Electronics Klic Lock Authentication Bypass
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesTzumi Electronics Klic Lock version 1.0.9 allows for attackers to access resources via capture-replay.Tags:
-
Tzumi Electronics Klic Lock Authentication Bypass
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesTzumi Electronics Klic Lock version 1.0.9 allows for attackers to access resources via capture-replay.Tags:
-
A Tetris Clock
» Hack a DayWe have had no shortage of clock projects over the years, and this one is entertaining because it spells the time out using Tetris-style blocks. The project looks good and is adaptable to different displays. The code is on GitHub and it relies on a Tetris library that has been updated to handle different displays and even ASCII text.
[Brian] wanted to use an ESP8266 development board for the clock, but the library has a bug that prevents it from working, so he used an ESP32 board instead. The board, a TinyPICO, has a breakout board that works well with the display.
There are also some 3D printed widgets for legs. If we’re honest, we’d say the project looks cool but the technology isn’t revolutionary. What we did find interesting though is that this is a good example of how open source builds on itself.
Of course, the library does a lot of the work, but according to [Brian] the it has several authors. [Tobias Bloom] started the code, and others have changed the library to draw ASCII characters and to support any display that uses the AdaFruit GFX-style library.
So while the code is simple, the result is impressive and is a result of [Brian] leveraging a lot of code from others — a great example of Open Source in action.
We looked at Brian’s use of this library for a YouTube subscription counter, but a clock has more universal appeal, we think — not everyone has a lot of YouTube subscribers. If you don’t have a life, you might try to recreate Tetris using the game of life.
Tags: arduino hacks
-
Let The Cards Fall Where They May, With A Robotic Rain Main
» Hack a DayFinally, a useful application for machine vision! Forget all that self-driving nonsense and facial recognition stuff – we’ve finally got an AI that can count cards at the blackjack table.
The system that [Edje Electronics] has built, dubbed “Rain Man 2.0” in homage to the classic title character created by [Dustin Hoffman] for the 1988 film, aims to tilt the odds at the blackjack table away from the house by counting cards. He explains one such strategy, a hi-low count, in the video below, which Rain Man 2.0 implements with the help of a webcam and YOLO for real-time object detection. Cards are detected in any orientation based on their suit and rank thanks to an extensive training set of card images, which [Edje] generated synthetically via some trickery with OpenCV. A script automated the process and yielded a rich training set of 50,000 images for YOLO. A Python program implements the trained model into a real-time card counting application.
Rain Man 2.0 is an improvement over [Edje]’s earlier Tensor Flow card counter, but it still has limitations. It can’t count into a six-deck shoe as the fictional [Rain Man] could, at least not yet. And even though cheater’s justice probably isn’t all cattle prods and hammers these days, the hardware needed for this hack is not likely to slip past casino security. So [Edje] has wisely limited its use to practicing his card counting skills. Eventually, he wants to turn Rain Man into a complete AI blackjack player, and explore its potential for other games and to help the visually impaired.
Tags: games
-
Debian Security Advisory 4462-1
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4462-1 - Joe Vennix discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability in dbus, an asynchronous inter-process communication system. The implementation of the DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 authentication mechanism was susceptible to a symbolic link attack. A local attacker could take advantage of this flaw to bypass authentication and connect to a DBusServer with elevated privileges.Tags:
-
Slackware Security Advisory - mozilla-thunderbird Updates
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesSlackware Security Advisory - New mozilla-thunderbird packages are available for Slackware 14.2 and -current to fix security issues.Tags:
-
Slackware Security Advisory - mozilla-thunderbird Updates
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesSlackware Security Advisory - New mozilla-thunderbird packages are available for Slackware 14.2 and -current to fix security issues.Tags:
-
Debian Security Advisory 4462-1
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4462-1 - Joe Vennix discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability in dbus, an asynchronous inter-process communication system. The implementation of the DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 authentication mechanism was susceptible to a symbolic link attack. A local attacker could take advantage of this flaw to bypass authentication and connect to a DBusServer with elevated privileges.Tags:
-
Slackware Security Advisory - mozilla-thunderbird Updates
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesSlackware Security Advisory - New mozilla-thunderbird packages are available for Slackware 14.2 and -current to fix security issues.Tags:
-
Debian Security Advisory 4462-1
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4462-1 - Joe Vennix discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability in dbus, an asynchronous inter-process communication system. The implementation of the DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 authentication mechanism was susceptible to a symbolic link attack. A local attacker could take advantage of this flaw to bypass authentication and connect to a DBusServer with elevated privileges.Tags:
-
LEDSpicer Is An Open Source Light Controller For Your Arcade Machine
» Hack a DayIn this day and age of cheap and easy emulation, it’s more tempting than ever to undertake a home arcade cabinet build. If you want to show off, it’s got to have a light show to really pull the crowds in. To make that easier, [Guillermo] put together a software package by the name of LEDSpicer.
The project came about when [Guillermo] was working on his Linux-based MAME cabinet, and realised there were limited software options to control his Ultimarc LED board. As the existing solutions lacked features, it was time to get coding.
LEDSpicer runs on Linux only, and requires compilation, but that’s not a huge hurdle for the average MAME fanatic. It comes with a wide variety of animations, as well as tools for creating attract modes and managing LEDs during gameplay. There are even audio-reactive modes available for your gaming pleasure. It’s open source too, so it’s easy to tinker with if there’s something you’d like to add yourself.
It’s a great package that should help many arcade builders out there. LEDs can be used to great effect on a cabinet build; this marquee is a particularly good example. Video after the break.
Tags: classic hacks
-
WAGO 852 Industrial Managed Switch Series Code Execution / Hardcoded Credentials
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsThe industrial managed switch series 852 from WAGO is affected by multiple vulnerabilities such as old software components embedded in the firmware. Furthermore, hardcoded password hashes and credentials were also found by doing an automated scan with IoT Inspector.Tags:
-
WAGO 852 Industrial Managed Switch Series Code Execution / Hardcoded Credentials
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesThe industrial managed switch series 852 from WAGO is affected by multiple vulnerabilities such as old software components embedded in the firmware. Furthermore, hardcoded password hashes and credentials were also found by doing an automated scan with IoT Inspector.Tags:
-
WAGO 852 Industrial Managed Switch Series Code Execution / Hardcoded Credentials
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesThe industrial managed switch series 852 from WAGO is affected by multiple vulnerabilities such as old software components embedded in the firmware. Furthermore, hardcoded password hashes and credentials were also found by doing an automated scan with IoT Inspector.Tags:
-
APCUPSD Information Leak
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsThis script abuses an unauthenticated information leak in the apcupsd daemon.Tags:
-
APCUPSD Information Leak
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesThis script abuses an unauthenticated information leak in the apcupsd daemon.Tags:
-
APCUPSD Information Leak
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesThis script abuses an unauthenticated information leak in the apcupsd daemon.Tags:
-
Red Hat Security Advisory 2019-1467-01
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesRed Hat Security Advisory 2019-1467-01 - Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language, which includes modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types and dynamic typing. Python supports interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as to various windowing systems. Issues addressed include an information leakage vulnerability.Tags:
-
Red Hat Security Advisory 2019-1467-01
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesRed Hat Security Advisory 2019-1467-01 - Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language, which includes modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types and dynamic typing. Python supports interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as to various windowing systems. Issues addressed include an information leakage vulnerability.Tags:
-
Red Hat Security Advisory 2019-1467-01
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesRed Hat Security Advisory 2019-1467-01 - Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language, which includes modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types and dynamic typing. Python supports interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as to various windowing systems. Issues addressed include an information leakage vulnerability.Tags:
-
Pronestor Health Monitoring Privilege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsPronestor Health Monitoring versions prior to 8.1.12.0 suffer from a local privilege escalation vulnerability due to weak file permissions.Tags:
-
Pronestor Health Monitoring Privilege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesPronestor Health Monitoring versions prior to 8.1.12.0 suffer from a local privilege escalation vulnerability due to weak file permissions.Tags:
-
Pronestor Health Monitoring Privilege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesPronestor Health Monitoring versions prior to 8.1.12.0 suffer from a local privilege escalation vulnerability due to weak file permissions.Tags:
-
Sitecore 8.x Deserialization Remote Code Execution
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsSitecore versions 8.x suffer from a deserialization vulnerability that allows for remote code execution.Tags:
-
Sitecore 8.x Deserialization Remote Code Execution
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesSitecore versions 8.x suffer from a deserialization vulnerability that allows for remote code execution.Tags:
-
Sitecore 8.x Deserialization Remote Code Execution
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesSitecore versions 8.x suffer from a deserialization vulnerability that allows for remote code execution.Tags:
-
WebLord WL-Nuke Coppermine For PHP-Nuke 1.3.1c SQL Injection
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsWebLord WL-Nuke Coppermine for PHP-Nuke version 1.3.1c suffers from a remote SQL injection vulnerability.Tags:
-
WebLord WL-Nuke Coppermine For PHP-Nuke 1.3.1c SQL Injection
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesWebLord WL-Nuke Coppermine for PHP-Nuke version 1.3.1c suffers from a remote SQL injection vulnerability.Tags:
-
WebLord WL-Nuke Coppermine For PHP-Nuke 1.3.1c SQL Injection
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesWebLord WL-Nuke Coppermine for PHP-Nuke version 1.3.1c suffers from a remote SQL injection vulnerability.Tags:
-
Well-Built Sentry Gun Addresses the Menace of Indoor Micro-UAVs
» Hack a DayWhat is this world coming to when you can’t even enjoy sitting in your living room without some jamoke flying a drone in through the window? Is nothing sacred? Won’t someone think of the children?
Apparently [Drew Pilcher] did, and the result is this anti-drone sentry gun. It’s a sturdily built machine – one might even say it’s overbuilt. The gimbal is made from machined steel pieces, and the swivels are a pair of Sherline stepper-controlled rotary tables with 1/40 of a degree accuracy selling for $400 each. Riding atop that is a Nerf rifle, which is cocked by a stepper-actuated linear slide, as well as a Kinect for object tracking. The tracking app is a little rough – just OpenCV hacked onto the Kinect SDK – but good enough for testing. The gun tracks as smoothly as one would expect given the expensive hardware, and the auto-cocking feature works well if a bit slowly. Based as it is on Nerf technology, this sentry is only indicated for the control of the micro-drones seen in the snuff video below, but really, anyone afflicted by indoor infestations of Phantoms or Mavics has bigger problems to worry about.
Over-engineered? Perhaps, but it’s better than letting the menace of indoor drones go unanswered. And it’s far from the first sentry gun we’ve seen, targeting everything from cats to squirrels using lasers, paintballs, and even plain water.
The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:
Tags: misc hacks
-
Hackaday Superconference: Rob Ryan Silva On Designing For Developing Environments
» Hack a DayThroughout the six years of the Hackaday Prize we have seen a stream of projects tackling all manner of applications and challenges. Many of them have a goal of addressing issues faced by people in developing countries, and this was the topic upon which Rob Ryan Silva spoke at the Hackaday Superconference.
Rob’s perspective is an interesting one: he runs the maker lab at Development Alternatives Incorporated, or DAI, who are best described as a specialist contractor in the international development sector. Thus while many of the Prize entrants are hardware hackers who have become involved in development related projects, he is a development specialist who has made the opposite journey to becoming a hardware hacker.
Join me below for the video of Rob’s talk and a deep dive into it. Also of note, tickets for the 2019 Hackaday Superconference are now available, the Call for Proposals is now open, and of course, the 2019 Hackaday Prize is ready for your entry! Okay, now onto Rob’s talk.
Always Know Your ContextKnowing your context is key. We all design our work using our built-in knowledge of the world, which though we are well-meaning might not always be in sync with the environments in which it will eventually be placed. A device might fail and have no spare parts, or simply be ill-adapted to the needs and abilities of its intended users. The point Rob Ryan Silva drives home as a frequent gotcha is that the solution is not ready for the environment, rather than the environment not being ready for the solution.
The water level detector deployed to Cambodia.
Knowing the technology available to the target user is an important consideration. Rob used a sonar water level detector in Cambodia as an example. When it detects a high river level it triggers a recorded voice call rather than the SMS text message you might expect, because few phones in the hands of users support the Khmer character set.
Another example is the choice to use open source tools rather than proprietary ones. This allows other people to refine and adapt your work, which can be vital to keeping it relevant. A point that should be important in any situation is that the problem should drive the solution rather than the other way around.
Stakeholders Make All The DifferenceThroughout his talk, Rob stresses the importance of understanding the stakeholders involved with the project. You can’t build a solution to a problem unless it is embraced and valued by people who are using it. This could mean working with government agencies or NGOs. But for the best chance of success, the people in the community need to buy into the project’s continued viability, and must have an incentive to keep it running. He suggests designing with rather than for the users. One of his examples was recruiting a local cafe owner next to the bridge holding the level monitor to keep kids from breaking the device’s solar panel with their slingshots.
Many of us have thought about projects which might answer a problem faced by people in developing countries. This talk provides a well placed insight into this kind of work from the rare standpoint of someone with a foot in both communities. If you follow that course it might help you avoid becoming an engineer saviour.
Tags: cons
-
High Severity Cisco Flaw In IOS XE Enables Device Takeover
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesHigh Severity Cisco Flaw In IOS XE Enables Device TakeoverTags: headlineflawcisco
-
Facebook Emails Seem To Show Zuck Knew Of Privacy Issues
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesFacebook Emails Seem To Show Zuck Knew Of Privacy IssuesTags: headlineprivacyemaildata lossfacebook
-
Exim Email Servers Are Now Under Attack
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesExim Email Servers Are Now Under AttackTags: headlinehackerprivacyemailflaw
-
EFF Asks For DOJ Efforts To Break Facebook Encryption To Be Made Public
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesEFF Asks For DOJ Efforts To Break Facebook Encryption To Be Made PublicTags: headlinegovernmentprivacyusaspywarefacebooksocialcryptography
-
Up Your Game With a Battle Tested Input Device
» Hack a DayIf you’re looking to add some realism to your flight setup without converting the guest bedroom into a full-scale cockpit simulator, you might be interested in the compromise [MelkorsGreatestHits] came up with. He bolted a genuine military keypad to his PC joystick and instantly added 100% more Top Gun to his desktop.
The Rockwell Collins manufactured keypad came from eBay, and appears to have been used in aircraft such as the EA-6B Prowler and Lockheed C-130 Hercules for data input. Each key on the pad is wired to the 37 pin connector on the rear, which [MelkorsGreatestHits] eventually mapped out after some painstaking work with a breakout board.Once the matrix was figured out, he made up a cable that would go from the connector to a Teensy 2.0 microcontroller. The Teensy reads the keypad status and converts button presses over to standard USB HID that can be picked up in any game.
The joystick side of the build is a VKB Gunfighter, which is already a pretty nice piece of kit on its own. No modifications were necessary to the joystick itself, other than the fact that it’s now mounted to the top of a black project enclosure. It still connects directly to the computer via its original USB cable, as the keypad has its own separate connection. As luck would have it, the joystick is almost a perfect fit in the opening on the keypad, which presumably would have been for a small screen when installed in the aircraft.
Finding cockpit components from military aircraft on eBay is not as hard as you may think; something to keep in mind if you ever decide to tackle that custom flight simulator build.
Tags: microcontrollers
-
Perovskites: Not Just for Solar Cells Anymore
» Hack a DayIf you’ve been around long enough, you’ll know there’s a long history of advances in materials science that get blown far out of proportion by both the technical and the popular media. Most of the recent ones seem to center on the chemistry of carbon, particularly graphene and nanotubes. Head back a little in time and superconductors were all the rage, and before that it was advanced ceramics, semiconductors, and synthetic diamonds. There’s always some new miracle material to be breathlessly and endlessly reported on by the media, with hopeful tales of how one or the other will be our salvation from <insert catastrophe du jour here>.
While there’s no denying that each of these materials has led to huge advancements in science, industry, and the quality of life for billions, the development cycle from lab to commercialization is generally a tad slower than the press would have one believe. And so when a new material starts to gain traction in the headlines, as perovskites have recently, we feel like it’s a good opportunity to take a close look, to try to smooth out the ups and downs of the hype curve and manage expectations.
Mind the Band GapTo the extent that you’ve heard about perovskites – and you probably have, with coverage right here on these pages and a full Amp Hour podcast devoted to them – you’ve probably got the impression that they’re some newly discovered material that can be used to build solar cells that are better than the current crop of silicon photovoltaics. There’s a lot more to perovskites than PV, though, and the chemistry behind them is pretty interesting too.
Perovskite, the mineral. By Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com – CC-BY-SA-3.0
To start with, perovskite – note the singular – is a mineral, calcium titanate (CaTiO₃), first discovered in the Ural mountains in the late 19th-century and named after famed Russian mineralogist Lev Perovski. Naturally occurring perovskite deposits are found all over the world, and the mineral is mined commercially.
Perovskites, on the other hand, are natural and synthetic compounds that match the crystal structure of natural perovskite. The general form of perovskites is ABC₃, where C is usually oxygen and A and B are positively charged ions, or cations. A is generally an alkaline or rare-earth metal, while B is usually one of the metals from the transition series on the periodic table. Some synthetic perovskites even substitute organic cations for the inorganic metal, resulting in hybrid perovskites with interesting and useful properties ranging from superconductivity to optoelectronics.
The reason that perovskites have so much promise as photovoltaics is that they are much better at absorbing light than silicon, thanks to the fact that perovskites have a direct band gap, rather than silicon’s indirect band gap. The band gap of a material refers to the energy needed to move electrons around in it, and indirect band gap materials have to shuttle electrons around in a two-step process. The practical effect of this means that indirect band gap materials need to be thicker to absorb enough light to work. A silicon layer 200 microns thick is needed to absorb the same amount of energy as a half-micron layer of a hybrid perovskite such as a methylammonium lead trihalide (CH₃NH₃PbX₃, where X is usually iodine or bromine). What’s more, the band gap of hybrid perovskites can be tweaked to cover more of the spectrum by fiddling with the ratio of halides, as shown in the featured image above.
Schematic for a perovskite-fullerene PV cell. The methylammonium lead iodide acts as an electron donor, while the C60 fullerene layer acts as the acceptor. Source: Jeng et al, Methylammonium lead iodide perovskite/
fullerene-based hybrid solar cellsAnother selling point of hybrid perovskites is that can be made into aqueous solutions, which can then be applied to a substrate such as glass using very simple techniques like vapor deposition or spin-coating. There’s even work going on with printing perovskites using modified ink-jet printers. Contrast these processes with the laborious methods of silicon solar cell production, which basically require most of the trappings of a semiconductor fab, and you can see that the excitement about perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is justified.
Perovskites are not the be-all and end-all of solar cell technology, of course. There are significant problems, including lower efficiency than silicon cells. That’s likely a temporary problem, though; whereas silicon PVs have taken almost 70 years to get from 6% efficiency to the current 27% efficiency of commercial cells, PSCs are already at 23%, and they’ve only been in development since 2009. With more work, perovskite efficiency could eclipse silicon PVs and approach the theoretical maximum of 31%.
The real drawback for PSCs is engineering them to stand up to weathering; the water-solubility that makes hybrid perovskites so easy to work with also makes it tough to moisture-proof PSCs. UV degradation of the dyes is a problem, too – organic compounds are famously labile under UV radiation, and layers that can filter out the UV reliably without blocking other wavelengths need to be applied over the perovskite layer.
Sensors for X-RayThe potential boost in efficiency and decrease in costs make it a good bet that the engineering problems surrounding PSCs will be addressed and full commercialization will begin. But turning sunlight into energy is far from the only trick that perovskites can perform, and might not even be their most lucrative application. Medical imaging, particularly with X-rays, is poised to benefit greatly from perovskite-based sensors.
Being just another wavelength of light, X-rays interact with perovskites similarly, converting them to electric charges that can be sensed directly. This differs from the majority of current X-ray sensors used for digital radiography, which are indirect sensors – a plate covered with a compound that emits light when struck by X-rays, known as a scintillator, is sandwiched to a standard charge-coupled device (CCD), which picks up the light and creates a digital representation of the differential penetration of tissues by the X-rays. This has the benefit of being very sensitive and reducing the dose of X-ray necessary to produce an image, but at the cost of reduced resolution since light from the scintillator grains spreads out before striking the CCD detector.
A direct sensor, on the other hand, converts the incident X-rays directly to electric charges, greatly increasing the resolution that can be achieved. But conventional semiconductor direct X-ray sensors, which typically use selenium, suffer from the same problem that silicon does when used as a solar cell – it doesn’t absorb electromagnetic radiation very well. That makes selenium detectors slow to acquire an image, requiring a higher X-ray dose. Perovskite direct sensors, though, absorb much better and result in far better resolution sensors that require much lower doses.
Schematic of perovskite x-ray sensor (a) and the actual panel (b). The x-ray image (e) of the PCB was made with the sensor. Source: Chen et al, All-inorganic perovskite nanocrystal scintillators.
Many of the same hurdles facing the commercialization of perovskite in solar cells remain for X-ray sensors. But the multi-billion dollar medical imaging industry may well have the upper hand in getting perovskites to market first. It’s far easier to protect a perovskite X-ray sensor from the moisture and rough handling associated with patient care than it is to engineer PSCs to withstand the years of sleeting ultraviolet rays and wind-driven rain that any practical solar array has to deal with.
That said, what’s learned by the medical imaging applications for perovskites will no doubt drive the development of PSCs, and our guess is that perovskites will be a household word within the next five years or so.
[Featured image source: National University of Singapore]
Tags: chemistry hacks
-
4:30
SEC Consult SA-20190612-0 :: Multiple vulnerabilities in WAGO 852 Industrial Managed Switch Series
» BugtraqPosted by SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab on Jun 13
SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab Security Advisory < 20190612-0 >
=======================================================================
title: Multiple vulnerabilities
product: WAGO 852 Industrial Managed Switch Series
vulnerable version: 852-303: <v1.2.2.S0
852-1305: <v1.1.6.S0
852-1505: <v1.1.5.S0
fixed version: 852-303: v1.2.2.S0...
Tags:
-
Self-Cleaning Camera Lens Makes for Speckle-Free Video
» Hack a DayPeople making videos about machining have a problem: the coolant gets everywhere. When you take a video to show the process of creating a device, the milky gunk that keeps everything cool gets all over your camera lens. AvE is experimenting with an interesting fix for this problem, with a self-cleaning camera lens. (Video embedded below, some salty language.) His prototype uses a spinning piece of clear PVC mounted on BB gun pellets, driven by compressed air. The camera can see through this spinning piece, but when the coolant hits the spinning piece, it is thrown off.
That’s not a new idea: most ships use a thing called a clear view screen or clearsight to help the crew see out of the window in bad weather. These are usually driven by an electric motor at the center, though, and AvE’s version is instead driven by the compressed air. That means that the camera can see right through the rotating part without obstruction. The next step, AvE says, is to make it thinner and mount it on a filter mount so it can be attached to a GoPro or other small camera.
This is definitely a project to watch. Anyone who has used a GoPro in the rain faces similar problems, so this might find a use outside of the machine shop as well.
Tags: cnc hacks
-
SOICbite: A Program/Debug Connector for an SOIC Test Clip
» Hack a DayThe problem is well-known: programming and debug headers consume valuable board space and the connectors cost money. Especially troublesome are the ubiquitous 100-mil pin headers, not because they’re expensive, but because they’re huge, especially along the z-axis. If you’re building miniature devices, these things can take up a ridiculous amount of space. With some clever thinking, [Simon Merrett] has found a way to re-use something many of us already have — an SOIC-8 test clip — to connect to a special footprint on the PCB without requiring another connector. He calls the system SOICbite.
The SOIC clip attaches to a footprint consisting of eight pads, four on each side of the PCB, plus five non-plated-through holes, which serve to anchor the clip in place. The idea of mating a PCB footprint directly with a removable connector isn’t entirely new — Tag Connect has been doing this for a while, but the connectors are expensive and single-sourced. On the other hand, SOIC test clips of varying quality are available from a number of vendors, including dirt-cheap deals on your favorite websites. The one disadvantage we can see is that the SOICbite footprint must be at the edge of the PCB to properly mate with the clip. The savings in space and cost may well make up for this, however.
[Simon] has made his KiCAD footprint available in a GitHub repo, and has offered to host footprints for any other CAD package there as well. So, fire up your preferred tool and draw one up for him to get these things widely adopted, because we think this is a great idea.
For the commercial alternative, check out our coverage of Tag Connect back in 2014.
Tags: Hardware
-
Vuln: Microsoft Windows 'SetJobFileSecurityByName()' Function Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesMicrosoft Windows 'SetJobFileSecurityByName()' Function Local Privilege Escalation VulnerabilityTags:
-
Vuln: Microsoft Windows CVE-2019-1064 Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesMicrosoft Windows CVE-2019-1064 Local Privilege Escalation VulnerabilityTags:
-
Vuln: Microsoft Windows Shell CVE-2019-1053 Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesMicrosoft Windows Shell CVE-2019-1053 Local Privilege Escalation VulnerabilityTags:
-
Vuln: Microsoft Windows Installer CVE-2019-0973 DLL Loading Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesMicrosoft Windows Installer CVE-2019-0973 DLL Loading Local Privilege Escalation VulnerabilityTags:
-
Vuln: Apache httpd CVE-2019-0196 Security Bypass Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesApache httpd CVE-2019-0196 Security Bypass VulnerabilityTags:
-
Vuln: RETIRED: Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler CVE-2019-1069 Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesRETIRED: Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler CVE-2019-1069 Local Privilege Escalation VulnerabilityTags:
-
Vuln: Apache HTTP Server CVE-2019-0197 Denial of Service Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesApache HTTP Server CVE-2019-0197 Denial of Service VulnerabilityTags:
-
Vuln: Apache HTTP Server CVE-2019-0220 Remote Security Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesApache HTTP Server CVE-2019-0220 Remote Security VulnerabilityTags:
-
23:01
SEC Consult SA-20190612-0 :: Multiple vulnerabilities in WAGO 852 Industrial Managed Switch Series
» Full DisclosurePosted by SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab on Jun 12
SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab Security Advisory < 20190612-0 >
=======================================================================
title: Multiple vulnerabilities
product: WAGO 852 Industrial Managed Switch Series
vulnerable version: 852-303: <v1.2.2.S0
852-1305: <v1.1.6.S0
852-1505: <v1.1.5.S0
fixed version: 852-303: v1.2.2.S0...
Tags:
-
Magic Record Stand Can Play Your Records For You
» Hack a DayVinyl remains a popular format, despite taking a huge hit in popularity for a couple decades while CDs ruled the roost. It has a charm that keeps it relevant, and likely will continue to do so until everyone who grew up with a record player dies out. In the meantime, [sp_cecamp] has come up with a great way to experience your collection, with the magic of modern technology. It goes by the name of Plynth.
Fundamentally, it’s a small record stand with an excellent party trick. The prototype consists of a 3D-printed body, which holds a record sleeve at an attractive angle for display. A camera built into the base then images the artwork. The first image taken is run through the Google Vision API, and further images are then run through OpenCV to identify the record. This data is then passed to the Spotify API to play the track. The whole process takes a couple of seconds, and the music is then pumped out of whatever streaming device is connected to the rig.
It’s a fun way to play your old records, and would be a welcome change to those tired of screaming at Siri to play Weezer (Blue Album), not Weezer (Green Album). For those interested, [sp_cecamp] has thrown up a site to gauge interest in the project, and may make a limited production run in future.
Of course, you could instead just go about building your own turntable. To each their own!
Tags: musical hacks
-
He Comes To Bury Sensors, Not To Praise Them
» Hack a Day[Adosia] has some interesting videos about their IoT platform controlling self-watering plant pots. However, the video that really caught our eye was the experience in sealing up sensors that are going to be out in the field. Even if you aren’t using the exact sensors, the techniques are useful.
We would have expected to see potting compound, but that’s messy and hard to use so their process is simpler. First, a few coats of clear urethane sealant goes over the electronics. Next, heat shrink goes over the assembly. It isn’t ordinary heat shrink though, instead it’s the kind that has heat-activated adhesive inside.
If you haven’t seen adhesive-lined heat shrink, it is often sold as marine heat shrink — you can even find it under that name at Harbor Freight. You also see this sometimes in tape form as heat shrinkable electrical tape.
Heat shrink seems ubiquitous and commonplace, but it is actually a fairly recent and sophisticated creation. Creating it usually requires radiation and sophisticated polymer chemistry, and it has only been available since 1962. If you do try potting instead of this technique, our advice is to avoid the silicone and stick with a proper two-part epoxy.
Tags: how-to
-
Falco 0.15.3
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesSysdig falco is a behavioral activity monitoring agent that is open source and comes with native support for containers. Falco lets you define highly granular rules to check for activities involving file and network activity, process execution, IPC, and much more, using a flexible syntax. Falco will notify you when these rules are violated. You can think about falco as a mix between snort, ossec and strace.Tags:
-
Falco 0.15.3
» Packet Storm Security ToolsSysdig falco is a behavioral activity monitoring agent that is open source and comes with native support for containers. Falco lets you define highly granular rules to check for activities involving file and network activity, process execution, IPC, and much more, using a flexible syntax. Falco will notify you when these rules are violated. You can think about falco as a mix between snort, ossec and strace.Tags:
-
Falco 0.15.3
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesSysdig falco is a behavioral activity monitoring agent that is open source and comes with native support for containers. Falco lets you define highly granular rules to check for activities involving file and network activity, process execution, IPC, and much more, using a flexible syntax. Falco will notify you when these rules are violated. You can think about falco as a mix between snort, ossec and strace.Tags:
-
Mechanical Tremolo Does Things The Old-School Way
» Hack a DayThe word “tremolo” has a wide variety of meanings in the musical lexicon. A tremolo effect, in the guitar community at least, refers to a periodic variation in amplitude. This is often achieved with solid state electronics, but also recalls the sounds created by Hammond organs of years past with their rotating Leslie speakers. [HackaweekTV] decided to do things the old fashioned way, building a mechanical tremolo effect of his own (Youtube link, embedded below).
Electronically, the signal is simply passed through a linear audio potentiometer. The effect is generated by rapidly cycling this potentiometer up and down. The motion is achieved through a geared motor salvaged from a Roomba, which turns a cam. A sprung follower sits on top of the cam, and is attached to the potentiometer.
There were some challenges in development. Rigidity of the frame was an issue, and the follower had issues with snagging on the cam. However, with some careful iteration they were able to get everything up and running. The final project sounds great, and with the amplifier turned up, there’s no need to worry about the sound of the moving parts.
Naturally, you can always build a tremolo with a 555 instead. Video after the break.
Tags: musical hacks
-
IKEA Cloud Lamp Displays The Weather With An ESP8266
» Hack a DayThe IKEA DRÖMSYN is a wall mounted cloud night light that’s perfect for a kid’s room. For $10 USD, it’s just begging for somebody to cram some electronics in there and make it do something cool. Luckily for us, [Jodgson] decided to take on the challenge and turned this once simple lamp into a clever weather display. It even still works as an LED lamp, if you’re into that sort of thing.
After stripping out the original hardware, [Jodgson] installed a Wemos D1 Mini and a string of fourteen SK6812 RGB LEDs that run down the length of the cloud’s internal structure. Weather data is pulled down with the OpenWeatherMap API, and conditions are displayed through various lighting colors and effects.Sunny days are represented with a nice yellow glow, and a cloudy forecast looks like…well it’s already a white cloud so that one’s pretty easy. If rain is expected the cloud turns blue and the bottom LEDs flicker a bit to represent raindrops. When there’s a thunderstorm, the cloud will intermittently flash random LEDs on the strip a bit brighter than their peers; a really slick effect that gets the point across immediately.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody take a cheap light from IKEA and turn it into something much more impressive with the ESP8266. Just like with that previous project, we wouldn’t be surprised to see this particular modification popping up more in the future.
Tags: led hacks
-
Falco 0.15.2
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesSysdig falco is a behavioral activity monitoring agent that is open source and comes with native support for containers. Falco lets you define highly granular rules to check for activities involving file and network activity, process execution, IPC, and much more, using a flexible syntax. Falco will notify you when these rules are violated. You can think about falco as a mix between snort, ossec and strace.Tags:
-
Falco 0.15.2
» Packet Storm Security ToolsSysdig falco is a behavioral activity monitoring agent that is open source and comes with native support for containers. Falco lets you define highly granular rules to check for activities involving file and network activity, process execution, IPC, and much more, using a flexible syntax. Falco will notify you when these rules are violated. You can think about falco as a mix between snort, ossec and strace.Tags:
-
Falco 0.15.2
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesSysdig falco is a behavioral activity monitoring agent that is open source and comes with native support for containers. Falco lets you define highly granular rules to check for activities involving file and network activity, process execution, IPC, and much more, using a flexible syntax. Falco will notify you when these rules are violated. You can think about falco as a mix between snort, ossec and strace.Tags:
-
Debian Security Advisory 4461-1
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4461-1 - Harrison Neil discovered that the getACL() command in Zookeeper, a service for maintaining configuration information, did not validate permissions, which could result in information disclosure.Tags:
-
Debian Security Advisory 4461-1
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4461-1 - Harrison Neil discovered that the getACL() command in Zookeeper, a service for maintaining configuration information, did not validate permissions, which could result in information disclosure.Tags:
-
Debian Security Advisory 4461-1
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4461-1 - Harrison Neil discovered that the getACL() command in Zookeeper, a service for maintaining configuration information, did not validate permissions, which could result in information disclosure.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec T2200H Local Privilege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsTelus Actiontec T2200H with firmware T2200H-31.128L.08 suffers from a local privilege escalation vulnerability.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec T2200H Local Privilege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesTelus Actiontec T2200H with firmware T2200H-31.128L.08 suffers from a local privilege escalation vulnerability.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec T2200H Local Privilege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesTelus Actiontec T2200H with firmware T2200H-31.128L.08 suffers from a local privilege escalation vulnerability.Tags:
-
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-4015-2
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesUbuntu Security Notice 4015-2 - USN-4015-1 fixed a vulnerability in DBus. This update provides the corresponding update for Ubuntu 12.04 ESM and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM. Joe Vennix discovered that DBus incorrectly handled DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 authentication. A local attacker could possibly use this issue to bypass authentication and connect to DBus servers with elevated privileges. Various other issues were also addressed.Tags:
-
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-4015-2
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesUbuntu Security Notice 4015-2 - USN-4015-1 fixed a vulnerability in DBus. This update provides the corresponding update for Ubuntu 12.04 ESM and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM. Joe Vennix discovered that DBus incorrectly handled DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 authentication. A local attacker could possibly use this issue to bypass authentication and connect to DBus servers with elevated privileges. Various other issues were also addressed.Tags:
-
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-4015-2
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesUbuntu Security Notice 4015-2 - USN-4015-1 fixed a vulnerability in DBus. This update provides the corresponding update for Ubuntu 12.04 ESM and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM. Joe Vennix discovered that DBus incorrectly handled DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 authentication. A local attacker could possibly use this issue to bypass authentication and connect to DBus servers with elevated privileges. Various other issues were also addressed.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Serial Number Information Disclosure
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsTelus Actiontec WEB6000Q with firmware 1.1.02.22 suffers from a serial number information disclosure vulnerability. The wireless extenders use DHCP Option 125 to include device details such as model number, manufacturer, and serial number. The WCB6000Q DHCP DISCOVER and REQUEST broadcasts include the device serial number in the DHCP option 125 (subopt 2) field. An attacker on the same Layer 2 network segment as the device, can see all these DHCP requests with a packet capture. Once he or she has this, the device's admin web UI password can be reset using the web UI "forgot password" page to reset to a known value.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Serial Number Information Disclosure
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesTelus Actiontec WEB6000Q with firmware 1.1.02.22 suffers from a serial number information disclosure vulnerability. The wireless extenders use DHCP Option 125 to include device details such as model number, manufacturer, and serial number. The WCB6000Q DHCP DISCOVER and REQUEST broadcasts include the device serial number in the DHCP option 125 (subopt 2) field. An attacker on the same Layer 2 network segment as the device, can see all these DHCP requests with a packet capture. Once he or she has this, the device's admin web UI password can be reset using the web UI "forgot password" page to reset to a known value.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Serial Number Information Disclosure
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesTelus Actiontec WEB6000Q with firmware 1.1.02.22 suffers from a serial number information disclosure vulnerability. The wireless extenders use DHCP Option 125 to include device details such as model number, manufacturer, and serial number. The WCB6000Q DHCP DISCOVER and REQUEST broadcasts include the device serial number in the DHCP option 125 (subopt 2) field. An attacker on the same Layer 2 network segment as the device, can see all these DHCP requests with a packet capture. Once he or she has this, the device's admin web UI password can be reset using the web UI "forgot password" page to reset to a known value.Tags:
-
SymCrypt Infinite Loop
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsThere's a bug in the SymCrypt multi-precision arithmetic routines that can cause an infinite loop when calculating the modular inverse on specific bit patterns with bcryptprimitives!SymCryptFdefModInvGeneric.Tags:
-
SymCrypt Infinite Loop
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesThere's a bug in the SymCrypt multi-precision arithmetic routines that can cause an infinite loop when calculating the modular inverse on specific bit patterns with bcryptprimitives!SymCryptFdefModInvGeneric.Tags:
-
SymCrypt Infinite Loop
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesThere's a bug in the SymCrypt multi-precision arithmetic routines that can cause an infinite loop when calculating the modular inverse on specific bit patterns with bcryptprimitives!SymCryptFdefModInvGeneric.Tags:
-
Debian Security Advisory 4460-1
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4460-1 - Multiple security vulnerabilities have been discovered in MediaWiki, a website engine for collaborative work, which may result in authentication bypass, denial of service, cross-site scripting, information disclosure and bypass of anti-spam measures.Tags:
-
Debian Security Advisory 4460-1
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4460-1 - Multiple security vulnerabilities have been discovered in MediaWiki, a website engine for collaborative work, which may result in authentication bypass, denial of service, cross-site scripting, information disclosure and bypass of anti-spam measures.Tags:
-
Debian Security Advisory 4460-1
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4460-1 - Multiple security vulnerabilities have been discovered in MediaWiki, a website engine for collaborative work, which may result in authentication bypass, denial of service, cross-site scripting, information disclosure and bypass of anti-spam measures.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec T2200H Serial Number Information Disclosure
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsTelus Actiontec T2200H with firmware T2200H-31.128L.08 suffers from a serial number information disclosure vulnerability. The wireless extenders use DHCP Option 125 to include device details such as model number, manufacturer, and serial number. By forging a special DHCP packet using Option 125, an attacker can obtain the device serial number. Once he or she has this, the device's admin web UI password can be reset using the web UI "forgot password" page to reset to a known value.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec T2200H Serial Number Information Disclosure
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesTelus Actiontec T2200H with firmware T2200H-31.128L.08 suffers from a serial number information disclosure vulnerability. The wireless extenders use DHCP Option 125 to include device details such as model number, manufacturer, and serial number. By forging a special DHCP packet using Option 125, an attacker can obtain the device serial number. Once he or she has this, the device's admin web UI password can be reset using the web UI "forgot password" page to reset to a known value.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec T2200H Serial Number Information Disclosure
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesTelus Actiontec T2200H with firmware T2200H-31.128L.08 suffers from a serial number information disclosure vulnerability. The wireless extenders use DHCP Option 125 to include device details such as model number, manufacturer, and serial number. By forging a special DHCP packet using Option 125, an attacker can obtain the device serial number. Once he or she has this, the device's admin web UI password can be reset using the web UI "forgot password" page to reset to a known value.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Denial Of Service
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsTelus Actiontec WEB6000Q with firmware 1.1.02.22 suffers from a denial of service vulnerability. By querying CGI endpoints with empty (GET/POST/HEAD) requests causes a Segmentation Fault of the uhttpd webserver. Since there is no watchdog on this daemon, a device reboot is needed to restart the webserver to make any modification to the device.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Denial Of Service
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesTelus Actiontec WEB6000Q with firmware 1.1.02.22 suffers from a denial of service vulnerability. By querying CGI endpoints with empty (GET/POST/HEAD) requests causes a Segmentation Fault of the uhttpd webserver. Since there is no watchdog on this daemon, a device reboot is needed to restart the webserver to make any modification to the device.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Denial Of Service
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesTelus Actiontec WEB6000Q with firmware 1.1.02.22 suffers from a denial of service vulnerability. By querying CGI endpoints with empty (GET/POST/HEAD) requests causes a Segmentation Fault of the uhttpd webserver. Since there is no watchdog on this daemon, a device reboot is needed to restart the webserver to make any modification to the device.Tags:
-
Hyperion Runtime Encrypter 2.0
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesHyperion is a runtime encrypter for 32-bit and 64-bit portable executables. It is a reference implementation and bases on the paper "Hyperion: Implementation of a PE-Crypter".Tags:
-
Hyperion Runtime Encrypter 2.0
» Packet Storm Security ToolsHyperion is a runtime encrypter for 32-bit and 64-bit portable executables. It is a reference implementation and bases on the paper "Hyperion: Implementation of a PE-Crypter".Tags:
-
Hyperion Runtime Encrypter 2.0
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesHyperion is a runtime encrypter for 32-bit and 64-bit portable executables. It is a reference implementation and bases on the paper "Hyperion: Implementation of a PE-Crypter".Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Privilege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsTelus Actiontec WEB6000Q with firmware 1.1.02.22 suffers from both local and remote privilege escalation vulnerabilities.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Privilege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesTelus Actiontec WEB6000Q with firmware 1.1.02.22 suffers from both local and remote privilege escalation vulnerabilities.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Privilege Escalation
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesTelus Actiontec WEB6000Q with firmware 1.1.02.22 suffers from both local and remote privilege escalation vulnerabilities.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec T2200H WiFi Credential Disclosure
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsTelus Actiontec T2200H with firmware T2200H-31.128L.08 suffers from a credential disclosure vulnerability. An HTTP interface used by wireless extenders to pull the modem's wifi settings uses DHCP client-provided option values to restrict access to this API. By forging DHCP packets, one can access this interface without any authentication and obtain details such as SSID name, encryption type, and WPA/WEP keys. This can be leveraged if an attacker is on the same Layer 2 network as the modem.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec T2200H WiFi Credential Disclosure
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesTelus Actiontec T2200H with firmware T2200H-31.128L.08 suffers from a credential disclosure vulnerability. An HTTP interface used by wireless extenders to pull the modem's wifi settings uses DHCP client-provided option values to restrict access to this API. By forging DHCP packets, one can access this interface without any authentication and obtain details such as SSID name, encryption type, and WPA/WEP keys. This can be leveraged if an attacker is on the same Layer 2 network as the modem.Tags:
-
Telus Actiontec T2200H WiFi Credential Disclosure
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesTelus Actiontec T2200H with firmware T2200H-31.128L.08 suffers from a credential disclosure vulnerability. An HTTP interface used by wireless extenders to pull the modem's wifi settings uses DHCP client-provided option values to restrict access to this API. By forging DHCP packets, one can access this interface without any authentication and obtain details such as SSID name, encryption type, and WPA/WEP keys. This can be leveraged if an attacker is on the same Layer 2 network as the modem.Tags:
-
The Pianist Octopus
» Hack a DayMIDI has been around for nearly forty years, but what do you do if you have an old ‘toy’ keyboard without MIDI? Or really any way to make it sound good? You could turn it into a player piano, and that’s exactly what [Alessandro] did with an old toy keyboard. It’s The Pianist Octopus, and it is perhaps the coolest, neatest pianist you’ve ever seen.
This build uses 24 individual 9 gram hobby servos, which of course means you need to drive those servos somehow. There are plenty of ways to attach a few servos to an Arduino board, but when you need to drive 24 servos, your options become somewhat limited. The electronics consist mostly of a Fishino Octopus, an Arduino shield that can drive sixteen individual servos. Slap two of these shields on an Arduino and you have something that will drive twenty four servos.
The mechanical part of the build consists of a 3D printed frame that allows the servos to be mounted across an arc, something like a harp. Metal rods connect the servos to tentacle-shaped actuators. These were designed in Google SketchUp and printed in PLA.
Attached to these servos and Arduino is a character LCD and a few buttons that allow the user to cycle through a few functions. The play button plays the current melody (based on old Nokia ringtones, by the way), a few more buttons adjust the position of the individual servos, and there’s another button to stop playing. Since this is a complete electronic-to-mechanical interface for a toy piano, a MIDI-in port isn’t out of the question; all a MIDI implementation would need to do is move a servo down on a note on event and move it back up on the note off event.
The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:
Tags: musical hacks
-
FusionPBX 4.4.3 Remote Command Execution
» Packet Storm Security ExploitsFusionPBX versions 4.4.3 and below suffer from a remote code execution vulnerability via cross site scripting.Tags:
-
FusionPBX 4.4.3 Remote Command Execution
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesFusionPBX versions 4.4.3 and below suffer from a remote code execution vulnerability via cross site scripting.Tags:
-
FusionPBX 4.4.3 Remote Command Execution
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesFusionPBX versions 4.4.3 and below suffer from a remote code execution vulnerability via cross site scripting.Tags:
-
LDAP Swiss Army Knife
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesThis paper presents the "LDAP Swiss Army Knife", an easy to use LDAP server implementation built for penetration oder software testing. Apart from general usage as a server or proxy it also shows some specific attacks against Java/JNDI based LDAP clients.Tags:
-
LDAP Swiss Army Knife
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesThis paper presents the "LDAP Swiss Army Knife", an easy to use LDAP server implementation built for penetration oder software testing. Apart from general usage as a server or proxy it also shows some specific attacks against Java/JNDI based LDAP clients.Tags:
-
Blacksmithing For The Uninitiated: Your First Time At The Anvil
» Hack a DayFor the past few months we’ve been running this series of Blacksmithing For The Uninitiated posts, exploring the art of forge work for a novice. It’s based upon my experience growing up around a working blacksmith’s business and becoming an enthusiastic if somewhat inexpert smith, and so far we’ve spent our time looking at the equipment you might expect to need were you embarking on your own blacksmith work. Having assembled by now a basic forge of our own it’s now time to fire it up and take to the anvil for our first bit of smithing.
Lighting a forge is easy enough. Some people do it with a gas torch, but I break a piece of firewood into sticks using a hammer with the fuller set in the hardy hole on the anvil as an impromptu splitter. Making a small fire by lighting some paper under my pile of sticks placed on the hearth next to the tuyere I start the blower and then pile coke on top of the resulting conflagration. After about ten minutes I will have a satisfying roar and a heap of glowing coals, and as they burn there will be some slag collecting in the bottom of the fire that I will eventually need to rake out.
Think About The Steel You Use
This piece of steel has been left in the fire too long, and is burning like a sparkler.
For your first experiment, select a piece of steel stock about 10 mm (3/8″) in diameter, either square or round, it doesn’t matter. I suggest one 300 mm (1′) or more long, such that you can handle the cold end without needing tongs. You will no doubt try a variety of materials depending upon what comes your way and you will discover what works best for you. Harder steels are correspondingly more difficult to work, so sometimes lower quality stock may be better for experimentation.
If you place the end of it, about 25 mm (1″) or so, into the hottest part of the fire where it is bright yellow, you can watch as it comes up to temperature. Ideally you want it to reach the point of being nearly but not quite as yellow as the coals around it at which point you can withdraw it and start work. If you leave it in too long it will first start to burn such that it will be sparking like a firework sparkler when you withdraw it, and if you leave it in longer still it will start to melt.
Your First Stroke Of The Hammer
Hammering a flat on the end of a piece of bar stock. Mine has by good fortune remained consistent, but don’t worry if yours has a slightly oval shape.
Given a piece of 10 mm steel with its end 25 mm yellow-hot, holding it by the cold end you can place it on the face of the anvil. Hammer the hot end repeatedly in the same place, and it will start to spread out. You’re not making anything here, instead it’s a simple exercise in getting used to both the metal and the hammering motion. Instead of lifting the hammer high for each stroke in the stereotypical image of a blacksmith, you are aiming to create a rhythm with it in your lower arm and wrist, taking full advantage of the rebound we mentioned when we looked at what makes a good anvil. As you hammer, you will see the work lose temperature, it will change from yellow through orange and red to a dull red with grey seeping in. At this point you will need to put it back in the coals as described above to bring it back up to temperature, and repeat the process.
As you continue hammering, if you are consistent you will see the end of the stock flatten out until eventually it will be a flat piece of steel on the end of your stock. It probably won’t be a consistent shape and you haven’t yet made anything useful, but you’ve started to gain a feel for both the metal itself and the hammering motion required. Quench it in a vat of water so it is cool enough that you can handle it and you will see that some grey oxides have flaked off its surface, this is normal.
From Round To Square, Or Vice Versa
I’ve squared off the end of my piece of round stock. The bright sunlight makes it difficult to see, but the metal is now a dull red and needs to go back in the fire.
Now you have a bit of a feel for the metal, it’s time to learn something a little more useful. Take the other end of your piece of stock whose end you’ve just flattened, and heat it up in the coals as before for about 50 mm (2″). If it’s a square piece of stock you’re going to make it round, and conversely if it’s round you’ll hammer it square. Lay it down on the face of the anvil, and give it a set of blows with the hammer evenly spread across its length. If you continued you would end up with a longer flattened piece of metal as before, but in this case you are going to turn the stock as you hammer.
If it is a round piece you’ll hammer one face until it starts to flatten slightly before rotating it through 90 degrees and hammering the other, while if it’s a square one you’ll first hammer it on its corners to round them off, and then consistently rotate it as you hammer to ensure that the blows are distributed evenly across its surface. You may find that it starts to bend as you do this, in that case simply lay it on the face of the anvil in the axis you want to straighten, and hammer it flat. Throughout this process you’ll need to continue to return it to the fire to heat it up again, and you may surprise yourself by discovering that a lighter touch is needed with the hammer than you expect.
Eventually you will find yourself with either a newly squared piece on the end of a round piece of stock, or conversely a rounded piece on some square stock. There’s no shame in getting it wrong and trying again multiple times, but you will get the hang of it before too long. You will have learned more about the feel of the metal and the hammer, and what kind of effort is required in the process.
Giving It All A Point
Forging a point, the piece of stock is held at an angle to the face of the anvil and rotated, while it is hammered to the desired angle.
Finally for today, you’ll put a point on your newly squared-or-rounded piece of stock. Heat up the end 25 mm, and place its tip on the face of the anvil at an angle of about 20 degrees. Hammer at right angles onto its very end as you slowly rotate it, and you will see a point beginning to form. As you work the hammering back from the point it will become more pronounced. You’ll never get it to a pencil-like sharpness, but with a bit of practice you can produce a consistent result. Quench it, and all being well you should have a piece of stock with a leaf-like flat piece on one end, and a point on the other. You haven’t really made anything useful, but you have already learned quite a bit of basic blacksmithing.
This series will continue with more basic blacksmithing techniques, in the next installment we’ll have a go at bending steel, making curves, loops, and scrolls. You won’t be an expert blacksmith just yet, indeed though having grown up around expert blacksmiths I am not one of them either, however as you proceed you should amass a set of basic skills upon which you can build the ability to make more complex pieces of work.
My finished piece of work. It doesn’t have a use, but it shows all three techniques from the session.
My thanks to Henry List for taking the pictures used in this piece.
Tags: hackaday Columns
-
Hack My Wired Heart
» Hack a DayLiner notes? Passé. In Berlin, the release of a special edition synth-wave record came with an accompanying experimental synthesizer called Wired Heart.
At the core of this adorable heart-shaped synth, designed by music technology enthusiast [tobi tubbutec], is the classic 74HCT14 chip with six Schmitt trigger oscillators. The bright red PCB has eight gold touch and humidity sensing pads that activate and modulate these oscillators. As well as changing the sounds by playing with pressure and conductive liquids you can use the six sets of header pins on board to plug in your own components for noisy experimentation. Wired Heart ships with LEDs, photoresistors and a potentiometer, but we’ve also plugged our own DIY fabric pressure sensors into this synth to make some excellent electronic sounds.
In the Hackaday.io post linked above, [tobi tubbutec] walks us through a number of the circuit design decisions he made while prototyping his “cardiotronic human-touch hexoscillatric stereo esoteric snythespacer”. We enjoyed his creative and sometimes unconventional designs, from his inclusion of non-functioning traces for aesthetic reasons to his chosen method of hard syncing — injecting a small pulse of one oscillator into the other. If you want to examine his layout in more detail, [tobi tubbutec] has helpfully included the KiCad schematic file in his write up.
This adorable, hackable synth caught our eye at this year’s SuperBooth — an annual indie electronic music conference in Berlin that’s well worth checking out if odd noises and handmade electronics are your thing — but it’s recently been listed on Tindie too. To listen to the upbeat synth-wave record Wired Heart originally shipped with, visit the artist Hyboid’s bandcamp.
If you’re interested in experimental musical instruments and synthy chip tune you’ll also love [jarek319]’s Sega Genesis synthesiser.
Check out a demo of the Wired Heart synth in the video after the break.
Tags: musical hacks
-
Radiohead Sells Recordings To Public After Hacker Attempts Extortion
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesRadiohead Sells Recordings To Public After Hacker Attempts ExtortionTags: headlinehackercybercrimedata lossfraud
-
Intel Fixes Severe NUC Firmware, Web Console Vulnerabilities
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesIntel Fixes Severe NUC Firmware, Web Console VulnerabilitiesTags: headlineflawpatchintel
-
Adobe Fixes Critical Security Flaws In Flash, ColdFusion, Campaign
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesAdobe Fixes Critical Security Flaws In Flash, ColdFusion, CampaignTags: headlineadobepatch
-
Linux Command-Line Editors Vulnerable To High Severity Bug
» Packet Storm Security HeadlinesLinux Command-Line Editors Vulnerable To High Severity BugTags: headlinelinuxflaw
-
7:40
[SECURITY] [DSA 4461-1] zookeeper security update
» BugtraqPosted by Moritz Muehlenhoff on Jun 12
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Security Advisory DSA-4461-1 security () debian org
https://www.debian.org/security/ Moritz Muehlenhoff
June 12, 2019 https://www.debian.org/security/faq
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Package : zookeeper
CVE ID : CVE-2019-0201
Harrison Neil...
Tags:
-
7:38
[SECURITY] [DSA 4460-1] mediawiki security update
» BugtraqPosted by Moritz Muehlenhoff on Jun 12
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Security Advisory DSA-4460-1 security () debian org
https://www.debian.org/security/ Moritz Muehlenhoff
June 12, 2019 https://www.debian.org/security/faq
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Package : mediawiki
CVE ID : CVE-2019-11358 CVE-2019-12466...
Tags:
-
7:34
[SECURITY] [DSA 4459-1] vlc security update
» BugtraqPosted by Moritz Muehlenhoff on Jun 12
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Security Advisory DSA-4459-1 security () debian org
https://www.debian.org/security/ Moritz Muehlenhoff
June 12, 2019 https://www.debian.org/security/faq
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Package : vlc
CVE ID : not yet available
Multiple security...
Tags:
-
Shorting Pins on a Raspberry Pi is a Bad Idea; PMIC Failures Under Investigation
» Hack a DayYou may have noticed, we’re fans of the Raspberry Pi here at Hackaday. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t feature a hack that uses a Pi somewhere in the build. As useful as the Pis are, they aren’t entirely without fault. We’ve talked about the problems with the PoE hat, and multiple articles about keeping SD cards alive. But a new failure mode has popped that is sometimes, but not always, caused by shorting the two power rails on the board.
The Pi 3 B+ has a new PMIC (Power Management Integrated Circuit) made by MaxLinear. This chip, the MxL7704, is a big part of how the Raspberry Pi foundation managed to make the upgrades to the Pi 3 without raising the price over $35.
A quick look at the Raspberry Pi forum shows that some users have been experiencing a specific problem with their new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ units, where the power LED will illuminate but the unit will not boot. The giveaway is zero voltage on the 3v3 pin. It’s a common enough problem that it’s even mentioned in the official boot problems thread.
Word From the Top: We’re Working On ItMake sure the probe you are measuring with does not slip, and simultaneously touches any of the other GPIO pins, as that might instantly destroy your PI, especially shorting the 3V3 pin to the 5V pin will prove to be fatal.
After experiencing this failure mode first-hand I decided to investigate. I reached out to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and got a response directly from Eben Upton about the issue. He confirmed that there is a known issue: Shorting the 5V and 3V3 pins of the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ will permanently damage the PMIC. Of course shorting out power rails is a user error, but since it’s a mistake encountered by quite a few of us, they’re working on a way to fix the issue.
The interesting thing is that Eben acknowledged that a few people have experienced this failure without shorting the power pins, but it’s proven extremely difficult to troubleshoot. They are in search of someone who can reliably replicate the 3V3 failure without simply shorting the power pins. Eben even said “I would fly an engineer anywhere in the world to meet someone who can do this.” It’s not hard to see why this failure mode is so hard to track down — you can only perform it once and then the damage is done. Here’s their contact form if you happen to have info that can help.
This PMIC Fault is Not User Serviceable
The official solution to a 3V3 line failure is to contact the distributor and request a replacement Pi. The MxL7704 is officially considered not a user serviceable part. That’s obviously not enough to stop us, so I thought I’d try swapping out the bad chip for a replacement.
The MxL7704 is available through Mouser, so I ordered a couple and tried my hand at replacing the chip. Even with a hot air rework station, soldering the .5mm pitched chip was too fine for me to master for this project. I discussed this with Eben and he mentioned that the chip from Mouser isn’t actually a drop-in replacement for the one on the Raspberry Pi, and suggested replacing the chip with one from a working Pi 3a+. It’s not clear to me if there are actual silicon changes, or if the differences are all in the i2c programming of the PMIC.
For all you Pi 3+ owners out there, be careful you don’t accidentally short pins on the new Raspberry Pis, as it will almost certainly brick the device. If you manage to recover your Pi by swapping out the PMIC, be sure to let us know!
Tags: featured
-
Prusa Printer Gets an LCD-ectomy, Gains a VFD
» Hack a DayWhat’s wrong with the OEM display on a Prusa I3 Mk3? Nothing at all. Then why replace the stock LCD with a vacuum fluorescent display? Because VFDs are much, much cooler than LCDs.
(Pedantic Editor’s Note: VFDs actually run a little warm.)
At least that’s the reasoning [Scott M. Baker] applied to his Prusa upgrade. We have to admit to a certain affection for all retro displays relying on the excitation of gasses. Nixies, Numitrons, and even the lowly neon pilot light all have a certain charm of their own, but by our reckoning the VFD leads the pack. [Scott] chose a high-quality Noritake 4×20 alphanumeric display module for his upgrade, thriftily watching eBay for bargains rather than buying from the big distributors. The module has a pinout that’s compatible with the OEM LCD, so replacing it is a snap. [Scott] simplified that further by buying a replacement Prusa control board with no display, to which he soldered the Noritake module. Back inside the bezel, the VFD is bright and crisp. We like the blue-green digits against the Prusa red-orange, but [Scott] has an orange filter on order for the VFD to make everything monochromatic. That’ll be a nice look too.
A completely none functional hack, to be sure, but sometimes aesthetics need attention too. And it’s possible that a display switch would help the colorblind use the UI better, like this oscilloscope mod aims to do.
Tags: printer hacks
-
An Exhaustive Guide To Building 18650 Packs
» Hack a DayMost of us know the basics of building packs of lithium-ion batteries. We’re familiar with cell balancing and the need for protection circuitry, and we understand the intricacies of the various serial and parallel configurations. It’s still a process that can be daunting for the first-time pack-builder though, because the other thing that most of us know about lithium ion batteries is that getting things wrong can cause fires. Rule zero of hackerspaces is “Don’t be on fire”, so what’s to be done? Fortunately [Adam Bender] is on hand with an extremely comprehensive two-part guide to designing and building lithium-ion battery packs from cylindrical 18650 cells.
In one sense we think the two-parter is in the wrong order. Part two takes us through all the technical details and theory, from lithium-ion chemistry to battery management systems and spot-welding nickel busbars, while part one shows us the construction of his battery pack. There are also a couple of videos, which we’ve placed below the break. It’s still not a job for the faint-hearted, but we’d say he’s produced about as professional and safe a pack as possible.
If spot welding worries you then it might be possible to build a pack without it. But it’s always worth considering: would you be better served buying one?
Tags: misc hacks
-
Vuln: Cisco IOS XE Software CVE-2019-1904 Cross Site Request Forgery Vulnerability
» SecurityFocus VulnerabilitiesCisco IOS XE Software CVE-2019-1904 Cross Site Request Forgery VulnerabilityTags:
-
Reverse Engineering WyzeSense Hardware
» Hack a DayWyze are a company that produces a variety of home automation products. Their Wyze Sense package is a system of contact and PIR home security sensors, that piggy backs off their Wyze Cam product. In the interests of being able to use this hardware outside the prescribed corporate ecosystem, [Xuan Xing] got down to hacking.
The project starts by tearing down the Wyze Cam, and getting serial console access. This was made easier by an existing Github project, which develops custom firmwares for smart cameras. With that in place he was able to see what was going on under the hood, and read the camera’s system logs.
By poring over these logs, and examining the disassembled Wyze Sense dongle, he’s well on the way to discovering how the sensors communicate with the Wyze Cam. The end goal is to enable the Wyze security sensors to be used with the Raspberry Pi platform, and to share the code on Github for other makers to experiment with.
Home automation platforms come and go quicker than the seasons change. This makes the hardware a popular target for hackers trying to get things running independently of any one company’s servers.
Tags: classic hacks
-
Art Project Analyzes Every Public Recording Of Facebook’s CEO Since 2004
» Hack a Day[Benjamin Grosser] had a simple question: “What does Mark Zuckerberg think about?” The resulting art project is named ORDER OF MAGNITUDE and to create it he researched archives of every public utterance the founder and CEO of the world’s largest social media network has made, going as far back as 2004.
The end product is a nearly fifty-minute film consisting entirely of cuts centered around what [Benjamin] says are three of the Facebook CEO’s most favored and often-used terms:
- The word “more”
- The word “grow”
- Metrics such as “ninety-nine percent”, “two million”, and terms of that nature.
The idea is that the resulting video provides insight into what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about, has focused on, and how that has (or has not) changed between 2004 and now. How well does ORDER OF MAGNITUDE do that? Watch the video below, and judge for yourself.
“More” does seem to sum it up. More users, more data, and more of your personal info whether Facebook discloses it or not.
Tags: art
-
New PCB Revives Ancient Bubble LED Displays
» Hack a DayFor those of us who remember LED calculators, the HP 5082-7400 series red “bubble” displays hold a special charm. Available in 3, 4, or 5-digit varieties, these multiplexed 7-segment displays provided countless hours of entertainment to those who would spell upside-down words on their pocket calculators. In case you happen to be lucky enough to have access to a few of these beautiful vintage display sticks, [Gigawipf] has designed a small driver PCB that lets you easily interface them to a modern microcontroller.
At the heart of the board, aimed at either the 5082-7405 or 5082-7415 5-digit modules, are a pair of 74HC595 shift registers in tiny QFN packages. Five lines from one register drive one of the common cathodes for the selected digit, while the other register drives the eight anode lines through 330-Ohm resistors. The boards are slightly smaller than the width of the displays allowing you to stack them seamlessly for more digits, and eight header pins on each allow you to plug them into solderless breadboards for prototyping. The result is easy to drive with some simple code, and [Gigawipf] provides an example for Arduino as part of the project. The Eagle design files are supplied, as well as Gerbers for those who just want to have some boards made. This sounds like a great way to get some of these vintage displays going again.
If you can’t find any of these displays to play, with, you can try making some larger digits from individual surface-mount LEDs.
Tags: led hacks
-
The Day Hackaday’s Theme Was Broken
» Hack a DayToday at about 10:00 AM Pacific time, Hackaday’s site host had an outage. All websites on the WordPress VIP Go platform were down, and that includes Hackaday. For about 45 minutes you couldn’t load any content, and for a bit more than two hours after that all we could display was a default WordPress theme with an alarmingly bright background.
At first, we were looking at a broken home page with nothing on it. We changed some things around on the back end and we had a black text on white background displaying our latest articles. Not ideal, but at least you could catch up on your reading if you happened to check in right at that time.
But wait! Unintended consequences are a real drag. Our theme doesn’t have comments built into the front page and blog page views, but the WordPress stock themes do. So comments left on those pages were being blasted out to your RSS feeds. I’d like to apologize for that. Once it was reported, we turned off comments on those pages and deleted what was there. But if you have a caching RSS reader you’ll still see those, sorry about that.
As I type this, all should be back to normal. The front end was restored around 1:00 PM Pacific time. We’ve continued our normal publishing schedule throughout, and we hope you have had a good laugh at this debacle. It might be a few days before I’m able to laugh about it though.
Tags: news
-
Injection Molding With A Hot Glue Gun
» Hack a DayInjection molding is an industrial process used the world over for the quick and economical production of plastic parts. [Nikodem Bartnik] wanted to experiment with this at home, so whipped up some molds and got to work (Youtube link, embedded below).
[Nikodem] produced aluminium molds, using a Dremel-based CNC platform. This allowed for the design to be created in CAD software, and helps with the production of the geometry for both the part, as well as the gates and vents. Having learned about thermal issues with an early attempt, the mold was then clamped in a vice. Wood was used as an insulator to minimise heat lost to the vice.
With this setup, it was possible to mold M5 washers using hot glue, with good surface finish. Later attempts with a larger mold were unsuccessful, due to the glue cooling off before making it through the entire mold. [Nikodem] has resolved to improve his setup, and we look forward to seeing what happens next. We’ve seen others experiment in this area before, too. Video after the break.
Tags: classic hacks
-
HestiaPi: a Stylish Open Hardware Thermostat
» Hack a DayA common complaint about open hardware and software is that the aesthetic aspects of the projects often leave something to be desired. This isn’t wholly surprising, as the type of hackers who are building these things tend to be more concerned with how well they work than what they look like. But there’s certainly nothing wrong with putting a little polish on a well designed system, especially if you want “normal” people to get excited about it.
For a perfect example, look no further than the HestiaPi Touch. This entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize promises to deliver all the home automation advantages of something like Google’s Nest “smart” thermostat without running the risk of your data being sold to the highest bidder. But even if we take our tinfoil hat out of the equation, it’s a very slick piece of hardware from a functional and visual standpoint.As you probably guessed from the name, the thermostat is powered by the Raspberry Pi Zero, which is connected to a custom PCB that includes a couple of relays and a connector for a BME280 environmental sensor. The clever design of the 3D printed case means that the 3.5 inch touch screen LCD on the front can connect directly to the Pi’s GPIO header when everything is buttoned up.
Of course, the hardware is only half the equation. To get the HestiaPi Touch talking to all the other smart gadgets in your life, it leverages the wildly popular OpenHAB platform. As demonstrated in the video after the break, this allows you to use the HestiaPi and its mobile companion application to not only control your home’s heating and air conditioning systems, but pretty much anything else you can think of.
The HestiaPi Touch has already blown past its funding goal on Crowd Supply, and the team is hard at work refining the hardware and software elements of the product; including looking at ways to utilize the unique honeycomb shape of the 3D printed enclosure to link it to other add-on modules.
The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:
Tags: home hacks
-
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-4016-2
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesUbuntu Security Notice 4016-2 - It was discovered that Neovim incorrectly handled certain files. An attacker could possibly use this issue to execute arbitrary code.Tags:
-
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-4016-2
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesUbuntu Security Notice 4016-2 - It was discovered that Neovim incorrectly handled certain files. An attacker could possibly use this issue to execute arbitrary code.Tags:
-
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-4016-2
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesUbuntu Security Notice 4016-2 - It was discovered that Neovim incorrectly handled certain files. An attacker could possibly use this issue to execute arbitrary code.Tags:
-
10:14
Disclosing a security vulnerability
» Full DisclosurePosted by raki ben hamouda on Jun 11
Document Title:
===============
D-Link DWL-2600AP - (Authenticated) OS Command Injection (Restore Configuration)
Product & Service Introduction:
===============================
The D-Link DWL-2600AP has a web interface for configuration. You can use any web browser you like to login to the
D-Link DWL-2600AP.
Affected Product(s):
====================
Product: D-Link DWL-2600AP (Web Interface)
Exploitation Technique:
=======================...
Tags:
-
10:13
The Return of the WIZard: RCE in Exim (CVE-2019-10149)
» Full DisclosurePosted by Qualys Security Advisory on Jun 11
Qualys Security Advisory
The Return of the WIZard: RCE in Exim (CVE-2019-10149)
========================================================================
Contents
========================================================================
Summary
Local exploitation
Remote exploitation
- Non-default configurations
- Default configuration
Acknowledgments
Timeline
Boromir: "What is this new devilry?"
Gandalf: "A Balrog. A...
Tags:
-
10:13
APPLE-SA-2019-5-30-1 AirPort Base Station Firmware Update 7.9.1
» Full DisclosurePosted by Apple Product Security via Fulldisclosure on Jun 11
APPLE-SA-2019-5-30-1 AirPort Base Station Firmware Update 7.9.1
AirPort Base Station Firmware Update 7.9.1 is now available and
addresses the following:
AirPort Base Station Firmware
Available for: AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule base stations
with 802.11ac
Impact: A remote attacker may be able to leak memory
Description: An out-of-bounds read was addressed with improved input
validation.
CVE-2019-8581: Lucio Albornoz
AirPort Base...
Tags:
-
10:13
New Version of Hyperion (PE runtime encrypter) released.
» Full DisclosurePosted by Levon Kayan on Jun 11
Hi,
We've just released version 2.0 of our PE crypter, hyperion.
[ CHANGELOG ]
- Support for 64bit was added
- C++ has been replaced by a more clean C implementation
- More modular concept allows extensions with custom payloads
[ DESCR ]
Hyperion is a runtime encrypter for 32- and 64-bit portable executables. It is
a reference implementation and bases on the paper "Hyperion:
Implementation of a PE-Crypter"
[ LINKS ]...
Tags:
-
10:07
[SYSS-2019-015]: Logitech R700 Laser Presentation Remote - Keystroke Injection Vulnerability
» Full DisclosurePosted by Matthias Deeg on Jun 11
Advisory ID: SYSS-2019-015
Product: R700 Laser Presentation Remote
Manufacturer: Logitech
Affected Version(s): Model R-R0010 (PID WD904XM and PID WD802XM)
Tested Version(s): Model R-R0010 (PID WD904XM and PID WD802XM)
Vulnerability Type: Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity (CWE-345)
Keystroke Injection Vulnerability
Risk Level: High
Solution Status: Open
Manufacturer Notification: 2019-04-12
Solution Date: -
Public...
Tags:
-
10:07
[SYSS-2019-008]: Inateck 2.4 GHz Wearable Wireless Presenter WP2002 - Keystroke Injection Vulnerability
» Full DisclosurePosted by Matthias Deeg on Jun 11
Advisory ID: SYSS-2019-008
Product: 2.4 GHz Wearable Wireless Presenter WP2002
Manufacturer: Inateck
Affected Version(s): n/a
Tested Version(s): n/a
Vulnerability Type: Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity (CWE-345)
Keystroke Injection Vulnerability
Risk Level: High
Solution Status: Open
Manufacturer Notification: 2019-03-22
Solution Date: -
Public Disclosure: 2019-06-04
CVE Reference: CVE-2019-12504
Author of...
Tags:
-
10:07
[SYSS-2019-007]: Inateck 2.4 GHz Wireless Presenter WP1001 - Keystroke Injection Vulnerability
» Full DisclosurePosted by Matthias Deeg on Jun 11
Advisory ID: SYSS-2019-007
Product: 2.4 GHz Wireless Presenter WP1001
Manufacturer: Inateck
Affected Version(s): Rev. v1.3C
Tested Version(s): Rev. v1.3C
Vulnerability Type: Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity (CWE-345)
Keystroke Injection Vulnerability
Risk Level: High
Solution Status: Open
Manufacturer Notification: 2019-03-22
Solution Date: -
Public Disclosure: 2019-06-04
CVE Reference: CVE-2019-12505
Author of...
Tags:
-
10:06
Goby 1.0 Released!
» Full DisclosurePosted by goby goby on Jun 11
The Goby is a new network security tool for cybersecurity asset management.
After nearly six months of development, version 1.0 is being released to
the public.
Goby's main objective is to scan cybersecurity assets and vulnerabilities
with shortest time and minimum packets, which is first analyzing the target
network IT assets to build the assets knowledge database.
Some highlights in this release:
- More than 3000+ assets rules (IoT...
Tags:
-
10:06
Rapid7’s Windows InsightIDR Agent: Local Privilege Escalation
» Full DisclosurePosted by Florian Bogner on Jun 11
Local Privilege Escalation in Rapid7’s Windows Insight IDR Agent
Metadata
===================================================
Release Date: 03-Jun-2019
Author: Florian Bogner @ https://bee-itsecurity.at
Affected product: Rapid7’s Insight Agent v2.6.3.14 and earlier for Windows
Fixed in: version 2.6.5
Tested on: Windows 10 x64 fully patched
CVE: CVE-2019-5629
URL:...
Tags:
-
10:05
Multiple Cross-site Scripting Vulnerabilities in Shopware 5.5.6
» Full DisclosurePosted by Daniel Bishtawi on Jun 11
Hello,
We are informing you about the vulnerabilities we reported in Shopware
5.5.6.
*Information: *
Advisory by Netsparker
Name: Multiple Cross-site Scripting Vulnerabilities in Shopware
Affected Software: Shopware
Affected Versions: 5.5.6
Homepage: https://en.shopware.com/
Vulnerability: Cross-site Scripting
Severity: High
Status: Fixed
CVSS Score (3.0): AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N
Netsparker Advisory Reference: NS-19-004...
Tags:
-
10:05
[ Tool ] Linux kernel module generator for custom rules with Netfilter hooking.
» Full DisclosurePosted by Antonio Costa on Jun 11
HiddenWall is a Linux kernel module generator for custom rules with
netfilter. (block ports, Hidden mode, rootkit functions etc). The
motivation: on bad situation, attacker can put your iptables/ufw to fall...
but if you have HiddenWall, the attacker will not find the hidden kernel
module that block external access, because have a hook to netfilter on
kernel land(think like a second layer for firewall).
https://github.com/CoolerVoid/HiddenWall
Tags:
-
10:05
[CVE-2019-12789] Telus Actiontec T2200H Local Privilege Escalation
» Full DisclosurePosted by Andrew Klaus on Jun 11
### Device Details
Discovered By: Andrew Klaus (andrew () aklaus ca)
Vendor: Actiontec (Telus Branded)
Model: T2200H
Affected Firmware: T2200H-31.128L.08
Device Manual:
http://static.telus.com/common/cms/files/internet/telus_t2200h_user_manu
al.pdf
Reported: Sept 2018
CVE: CVE-2019-12789
The Telus Actiontec T2200H is bonded VDSL2 modem. It
incorporates 2 VDSL2 bonded links with a built-in firewall, bridge mode,
802.11bgn wireless, etc.
###...
Tags:
-
10:05
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Serial Number Information Disclosure
» Full DisclosurePosted by Andrew Klaus on Jun 11
### Device Details
Discovered By: Andrew Klaus (andrew () aklaus ca)
Vendor: Actiontec (Telus Branded, but may work on others)
Model: WEB6000Q
Affected Firmware: 1.1.02.22
Reported: Sept 2018
CVE: Not needed since update is pushed by the provider.
### Summary of Findings
The wireless extenders use DHCP Option 125 to include device details
such as model number, manufacturer, and serial number.
The WCB6000Q DHCP DISCOVER and REQUEST...
Tags:
-
10:05
Telus Actiontec T2200H Serial Number Information Disclosure
» Full DisclosurePosted by Andrew Klaus on Jun 11
### Device Details
Vendor: Actiontec (Telus Branded, but may work on others)
Model: T2200H
Affected Firmware: T2200H-31.128L.08
Device Manual:
http://static.telus.com/common/cms/files/internet/telus_t2200h_user_manu
al.pdf
Reported: Sept 2018
CVE: Not needed since update is pushed by the provider.
The Telus Actiontec T2200H is bonded VDSL2 modem. It
incorporates 2 VDSL2 bonded links with a built-in firewall, bridge mode,
802.11agn wireless,...
Tags:
-
10:05
Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Denial of Service of Management Interface
» Full DisclosurePosted by Andrew Klaus on Jun 11
### Device Details
Discovered By: Andrew Klaus (andrew () aklaus ca)
Vendor: Actiontec (Telus Branded)
Model: WEB6000Q
Affected Firmware: 1.1.02.22
Reported: July 2018
CVE: Not needed since update is pushed by the provider.
### Summary of Findings
By querying CGI endpoints with empty (GET/POST/HEAD) requests causes a
Segmentation Fault of the uhttpd webserver. Since there is no watchdog
on this daemon, a device reboot is needed to restart the...
Tags:
-
10:05
[CVE-2018-15557] Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Remote Privilege Escalation
» Full DisclosurePosted by Andrew Klaus on Jun 11
### Device Details
Discovered By: Andrew Klaus (andrew () aklaus ca)
Vendor: Actiontec (Telus Branded)
Model: WEB6000Q
Affected Firmware: 1.1.02.22
Reported: July 2018
CVE: CVE-2018-15557
### Summary of Findings
Two instances of Linux run on the WEB6000Q. One is the “main” instance
that runs the web management server, TR-069 daemon, etc., while the
other is the "quantenna" management OS used to manage the wireless.
By...
Tags:
-
10:05
[CVE-2018-15555 / 15556] Telus Actiontec WEB6000Q Local Privilege Escalation
» Full DisclosurePosted by Andrew Klaus on Jun 11
### Device Details
Discovered By: Andrew Klaus (andrew () aklaus ca)
Vendor: Actiontec (Telus Branded)
Model: WEB6000Q
Affected Firmware: 1.1.02.22
Reported: July 2018
CVE: CVE-2018-15555 (Main OS)
CVE: CVE-2018-15556 (Quantenna OS)
### Summary of Findings
Both “main” and “quantenna” have a UART header on the motherboard and
each of them provide full shell + bootloader access.
While the main OS has the credentials user: root pass:...
Tags:
-
10:05
Telus Actiontec T2200H WiFi Credential Disclosure
» Full DisclosurePosted by Andrew Klaus on Jun 11
### Device Details
Discovered By: Andrew Klaus (andrew () aklaus ca)
Vendor: Actiontec (Telus Branded, but may work on others)
Model: T2200H (but very likely affecting other models of theirs)
Affected Firmware: T2200H-31.128L.08
Device Manual:
http://static.telus.com/common/cms/files/internet/telus_t2200h_user_manu
al.pdf
Reported: July 2018
CVE: Not needed since update is pushed by the vendor.
The Telus Actiontec T2200H is bonded VDSL2...
Tags:
-
BioSentinel Mission Aims to Put Yeast into Deep Space
» Hack a DayIt’s a truly exciting time for space enthusiasts. Humanity is finally shaking itself out of the half-century-long doldrums of deep space exploration and planning a return to the Moon and a push to Mars. Yes, exciting things have happened since the glory days of Apollo. We’ve reached out into the outer planets, drilled holes in asteroids, and made tracks across the face of Mars in an improbably durable rover. We’ve built magnificent space telescopes, created a permanent space station to replace a couple of temporary ones, and put an intricate constellation of satellites into service.
Those are all laudable achievements, but not a single living creature has intentionally
achievedapproached Earth escape velocity since three astronauts and five mice did it aboard Apollo 17 at 3:46 AM on December 7, 1972. Since then, we’ve all been stuck down here at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well, with only a lucky few of us getting a tease of what space travel is really like with low Earth orbit (LEO) missions.But if NASA has its way, and certain difficulties with launch vehicles can be ironed out, in 2020 Earthlings will once again slip the surly bonds and make a trip to deep space. Of course those Earthlings will just be cultures of yeast carried into orbit around the Sun on a cubesat, but it’s a start, and it’s a good bet that more complex organisms won’t be far behind.
You Go First…
Artist’s impression of BioSentinel on station. Source: the indispensible Gunter’s Space Page
The baby step of returning to deep space by sending microorganisms as our proxy is probably wise. After all, we’ve had fifty years to lose our edge, and getting something expendable to go first makes sense. We’ve also lost the urgency that sent the Apollo astronauts lunging into the unknown in upgraded ICBMs, driven by an intense Cold War competition where success at the cost of human life was acceptable and even expected.
We won’t be so cavalier after fifty years, and making sure we get things right will be critical before humans get launched on deep-space missions. To that end, NASA proposes the BioSentinel mission. BioSentinel seeks to develop biosensors to measure radiation effects on living creatures in the space beyond LEO, a hostile environment that is difficult to simulate on Earth and in which no human has spent more than a week.
BioSentinel will use one of Earth’s oldest and tastiest model organisms, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewer’s yeast, to see just how much DNA damage deep-space radiation will cause during extended manned missions. The BioSentinel cubesat, a briefcase-sized solar-powered package, will head to the Moon for a lunar flyby, and from there it will enter into a heliocentric orbit for a mission duration of six to twelve months.
Artist’s rendition of cosmic ray vs DNA. NASA
The heart of BioSentinel is a deck of microfluidics cards – small plastic plates similar to microtiter plates. Each plate has 16 wells etched into it to hold genetically engineered yeast cells in a dried state. Half of the wells have a yeast strain where the RAD51 gene, which codes for enzymes important to repairing DNA from radiation-induced damage, has been deleted. The other eight wells have yeast with the wild type gene, which has a normal ability to repair radiation damage.
Once the cubesat has transitioned out of the protective environment of Earth’s magnetosphere, individual cards will be rehydrated. The yeast cells will remain largely dormant until radiation causes a double-strand break (DSB) in the DNA. If the break is successfully repaired, the yeast in that well will grow exponentially and become metabolically active, which can be detected by alamarBlue, an organic dye that turns from blue to fluorescent pink by reduction reactions within living cells. The viability of the cells is measured by pumping the media into a chamber with an RGB LED and a detector chip; the pinker the well, the more metabolically active the cells are.
Playing The Hole Card
BioSentinel detector schematic. Yeast growth is assessed colorimetrically using RGB LEDs shining through a flow cell onto a detector. Source: NASA
The BioSentinel mission profile calls for periodically rehydrating cards, each of which lasts for about a week. Identical experiments aboard the ISS as well as two on Earth, one under typical Earth conditions and one in a space-radiation simulation chamber, will undergo identical experiments at the same time. This will provide controls as well as data to correlate LEO and deep-space exposure, and allow us to assess our ability to simulate deep-space radiation on Earth.
BioSentinel also contains electronic radiation sensors that can detect a powerful radiation storm known as a Solar Particle Event (SPE). If the satellite should wander into one of those storms, a card kept in reserve for just such an occasion will be rehydrated and measured, to assess the potential effects of a severe radiation storm, something that deep-space travelers will no doubt have to deal with.
The original plan was for BioSentinel to fly as a secondary payload on EM-1, the first Exploratory Mission for Space Launch Systems. But as we recently learned, funding for SLS was cut from NASA’s 2020 budget. EM-1 has been rebranded as Artemis 1, and BioSentinel is one of thirteen secondary payload cubesats slated for deployment aboard it. If all goes well, the SLS Block 1 rocket will take off from the historic Launch Complex 39B at Cape Kennedy in June 2020, and begin sprinkling its payloads into their orbits.
As uninspiring as it may be to follow a satellite stuffed with fungus into space, BioSentinel is poised to answer critical questions about long-duration manned missions in deep space. The DNA repair mechanisms in yeast are extremely well conserved genetically, and the genes they carry are almost the same as the genes human cells carry for DNA repair. What happens to them will likely happen to us, and sending them first makes sense. We need to characterize the radiation regime out there before we can effectively protect ourselves from it, and if it means a few million yeast cells make it back to deep space before we do, then so be it.
Tags: hackaday Columns
-
Debian Security Advisory 4459-1
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4459-1 - Multiple security issues were discovered in the VLC media player, which could result in the execution of arbitrary code or denial of service if a malformed file/stream is processed.Tags:
-
Debian Security Advisory 4459-1
» Packet Storm Security Recent FilesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4459-1 - Multiple security issues were discovered in the VLC media player, which could result in the execution of arbitrary code or denial of service if a malformed file/stream is processed.Tags:
-
Debian Security Advisory 4459-1
» Packet Storm Security Misc. FilesDebian Linux Security Advisory 4459-1 - Multiple security issues were discovered in the VLC media player, which could result in the execution of arbitrary code or denial of service if a malformed file/stream is processed.Tags:
-
Google Home Mini Gets A Headphone Jack
» Hack a DayThe Google Home Mini can be a useful home assistant device. It can set reminders, tell you the weather, and even play you music. [Brian] had a few lying around, and decided he wanted to hook one up to a beefier set of speakers. Thus, he installed a headphone jack into the Google Home Mini.
The quick and dirty approach to such a task is to solder a jack to the speaker connections. However, this is an amplified signal, rather than a line level signal suitable for feeding to an amplifier. It’s also mono only. The Google Home Mini uses the TAS5720L mono digital amplifier chip, and some investigation with a logic analyzer and a datasheet allowed [Brian] to figure out the format of the I2C digital audio signal.
With this knowledge in hand, [Brian] hacked in a PCM5102A digital amplifier chip to the Google Home Mini. It can accept audio data in the same format as the TAS5720L, and is readily available on eBay for use with the Raspberry Pi and other maker platforms. With a 3D printed baseplate and some careful soldering, [Brian] was able to integrate the stereo amplifier and a headphone jack neatly into the Google Home.
Unfortunately, the audio output is only two mono channels rather than true stereo, as the device outputs the same data on both left and right channels in the I2C data. Regardless, the hack works, and [Brian] now has a high-quality voice assistant that he can hook up to a decent pair of speakers.
Tags: classic hacks
-
Red Hat Security Advisory 2019-1455-01
» Packet Storm Security AdvisoriesRed Hat Security Advisory 2019-1455-01 - The Advanced Virtualization module provides the user-space component for running virtual machines that use KVM in environments managed by Red Hat products. Issues addressed include a CPU related vulnerability.Tags: