cryptonews

It’s an impressive feat, over a decade after the box was released:

Since reset glitching wasn’t possible, Gaasedelen thought some voltage glitching could do the trick. So, instead of tinkering with the system rest pin(s) the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail. This was quite a feat, as Gaasedelen couldn’t ‘see’ into the Xbox One, so had to develop new hardware introspection tools.

Eventually, the Bliss exploit was formulated, where two precise voltage glitches were made to land in succession. One skipped the loop where the ARM Cortex memory protection was setup. Then the Memcpy operation was targeted during the header read, allowing him to jump to the attacker-controlled data.

As a hardware attack against the boot ROM in silicon, Gaasedelen says the attack in unpatchable. Thus it is a complete compromise of the console allowing for loading unsigned code at every level, including the Hypervisor and OS. Moreover, Bliss allows access to the security processor so games, firmware, and so on can be decrypted.

The population needs better conservation.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

404 Media has a story about Proton Mail giving subscriber data to the Swiss government, who passed the information to the FBI.

It’s metadata—payment information related to a particular account—but still important knowledge. This sort of thing happens, even to privacy-centric companies like Proton Mail.

Someone tries to remote control his own DJI Romo vacuum, and ends up controlling 7,000 of them from all around the world.

The IoT is horribly insecure, but we already knew that.

Surprising no one, Meta’s new AI glasses are a privacy disaster.

I’m not sure what can be done here. This is a technology that will exist, whether we like it or not.

Meanwhile, there is a new Android app that detects when there are smart glasses nearby.

An expensive mistake:

Someone jumped at the opportunity to steal $4.4 million in crypto assets after South Korea’s National Tax Service exposed publicly the mnemonic recovery phrase of a seized cryptocurrency wallet.

The funds were stored in a Ledger cold wallet seized in law enforcement raids at 124 high-value tax evaders that resulted in confiscating digital assets worth 8.1 billion won (currently approximately $5.6 million).

When announcing the success of the operation, the agency released photos of a Ledger device, a popular hardware wallet for crypto storage and management.

However, the images also showed a handwritten note of the wallet recovery phrase, which serves as the master key that allows restoring the assets to another device.

The authorities failed to redact that info, allowing anyone to transfer into their account the assets in the cold wallet.

Reportedly, shortly after the press release was published, 4 million Pre-Retogeum (PRTG) tokens, worth approximately $4.8 million at the time, were transferred out of the confiscated wallet to a new address.

I’m skeptical about—and not qualified to review—this new result in factorization with a quantum computer, but if it’s true it’s a theoretical improvement in the speed of factoring large numbers with a quantum computer.