InfoSec Week 22, 2018

Google Pixel 2 devices implement insider attack resistance in the tamper-resistant hardware security module that guards the encryption keys for user data.
It is not possible to upgrade the firmware that checks the user’s password unless you present the correct user password.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/05/insider-attack-resistance.html

Avast Threat Labs analyzed malware pre-installed on a thousands of Android devices. More than 18000 users of Avast already had this adware in a device. Cheap smartphones are primarily affected.
https://blog.avast.com/android-devices-ship-with-pre-installed-malware

Great blog post about the USB reverse engineering tools and practices by the Glenn ‘devalias’ Grant.
http://devalias.net/devalias/2018/05/13/usb-reverse-engineering-down-the-rabbit-hole/

FBI advice router users to reboot devices in order to remove VPNFilter malware infecting 500k devices.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/fbi-tells-router-users-to-reboot-now-to-kill-malware-infecting-500k-devices/

If you didn’t hear about the recent arbitrary code execution vulnerability in git software (CVE 2018-11234, CVE 2018-11235), there is a high level summary on the Microsoft DevOps blog.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/05/29/announcing-the-may-2018-git-security-vulnerability/

The white hat hacker received $25000 bug bounty for getting root access on all Shopify instances by leveraging Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attack.
https://hackerone.com/reports/341876

Attacking browsers by site-channel attacks using CSS3 features. The guys demonstrated how to deanonymize website visitors and more.
https://www.evonide.com/side-channel-attacking-browsers-through-css3-features/

The Underhanded Crypto Contest for 2018 started, the topic has two categories: Backdooring messaging systems & Deceptive APIs. If you want to write some backdoor to the cryptographic implementation bud you do not harm anybody, this is a good opportunity.
https://underhandedcrypto.com/2018/05/27/rules-for-the-2018-underhanded-crypto-contest/

Article about the new threat model and potential mitigations for the Chrome browser against the Spectre like vulnerabilities.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/security/side-channel-threat-model.md

New article by the Intercept about the Google military drone AI contract. They want to make fortune on an image recognition.
https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/google-leaked-emails-drone-ai-pentagon-lucrative/

Codechain - secure multiparty code reviews with signatures and hash chains.
According to the author, Codechain is not about making sure the code you execute is right, but making sure you execute the right code.
https://github.com/frankbraun/codechain