tedu

High pressure, high forces, long lever arms...all of that meant heavy and strong (read: expensive) parts which I was not looking forward to having to fabricate. Instead, I settled on the simpler idea of harnessing the power of compressed gas. Instead of using a high mechanical advantage lever to push a piston, compressed CO2 would be dispensed from a small and inexpensive 12g or 16g cartridge which would then generate the requisite pressure to properly extract espresso. This concept is not actually novel; both an unsuccessful kickstarter and a now-defunct handheld espresso maker (with a fanatical user base) employed this mechanism.

It was obvious already before that NVD really does not try very hard to actually understand or figure out the problem they grade. In this case it is quite impossible for me to understand how they could come up with this severity level. It’s like they saw “integer overflow” and figure that wow, yeah that is the most horrible flaw we can imagine, but clearly nobody at NVD engaged their brains nor looked at the “vulnerable” code or the patch that fixed the bug. Anyone that looks can see that this is not a security problem.

The vulnerability should be obvious: at some point in the boot process, the VMK transits unencrypted between the TPM and the CPU. This means that it can be captured and used to decrypt the disk.

The flaw is tracked as CVE-2023-40477 and could give remote attackers arbitrary code execution on the target system after a specially crafted RAR file is opened.

RARLAB released WinRAR version 6.23 on August 2nd, 2023, effectively addressing CVE-2023-40477.

https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-23-1152/

Espresso coffee is among the most consumed beverages in the world. Recent studies report a protective activity of the coffee beverage against neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer′s disease. Alzheimer′s disease belongs to a group of disorders, called tauopathies, which are characterized by the intraneuronal accumulation of the microtubule-associated protein tau in fibrillar aggregates. In this work, we characterized by NMR the molecular composition of the espresso coffee extract and identified its main components. We then demonstrated with in vitro and in cell experiments that the whole coffee extract, caffeine, and genistein have biological properties in preventing aggregation, condensation, and seeding activity of the repeat region of tau. We also identified a set of coffee compounds capable of binding to preformed tau fibrils. These results add insights into the neuroprotective potential of espresso coffee and suggest candidate molecular scaffolds for designing therapies targeting monomeric or fibrillized forms of tau.

In vitro results, take with a grain of salt or shot of espresso.

MTE = Memory Tagging Extension

In mid-2022, Project Zero was provided with access to pre-production hardware implementing the ARM MTE specification. This blog post series is based on that review, and includes general conclusions about the effectiveness of MTE as implemented, specifically in the context of preventing the exploitation of memory-safety vulnerabilities.

Despite its limitations, MTE is still by far the most promising path forward for improving C/C++ software security in 2023. The ability of MTE to detect memory corruption exploitation at the first dangerous access provides a significant improvement in diagnostic and potential security effectiveness. In comparison, most other proposed approaches rely on blocking later stages in the exploitation process, for example various hardware-assisted CFI approaches which aim to block invalid control-flow transfers.

Implementation Testing

Mitigation Case Studies

The Kernel

41 in-the-wild 0-days were detected and disclosed in 2022, the second-most ever recorded since we began tracking in mid-2014, but down from the 69 detected in 2021. Although a 40% drop might seem like a clear-cut win for improving security, the reality is more complicated.

Yael Tauman Kalai’s breakthroughs secure the digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.

My master’s thesis was titled “How to Leak a Secret.” Here’s the problem: We know how to digitally sign — to say, “This is me that wrote this message.” But say I want to sign something as an MIT professor, but I don’t want people to know it’s me? That way the secret does hold some water because you know an MIT professor signed it, but you don’t know who.

We solved this with something we called ring signatures, which were inspired by a notion in computer science called witness-indistinguishable proofs. Let’s say there’s a statement and two different ways to prove it. We say there’s two “witnesses” to the statement being correct — each of the proofs. A witness-indistinguishable proof looks the same no matter which you use: It hides which witness you started with.