• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 4th, 2023
  • JATth@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•Arch with XZ
    51·
    3 months ago

    I just did: “rm -rf xz”

    pacman -Syu
find / -name "*xz*"  | sort | grep -e '\.xz$' | xargs -o -n1 rm -i 
pacman -Qqn | pacman -S -

    (and please, absolutely don’t run above as root. Just don’t.) I carefully answered to retain any root owned files and my backups, despite knowing the backdoor wasn’t included in the culprit package. This system has now “un-trusted” status, meaning I’ll clean re-install the OS, once the full analysis of the backdoor payload is available.

    Edit: I also booted the “untrusted” system without physical access to the web, no gui, and installed the fixed package transferred to it locally. (that system is also going to be dd if=/dev/zero'd)

  • JATth@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Kaspersky/Securelist researchers detail zero-click iPhone exploit involving four distinct zero-day vulnerabilities, including undocumented hardware features in iPhone chipsEnglish
    7·
    6 months ago

    The attack is spread via iMessage. A vulnerable device merely needs to receive a bad message with PDF attachment. --> A Remote code execution. No user interaction.

    Yikes. Indeed.

    The attack entry point is via bad TrueType font + PDF attachment that only needs to processed once. Once a process touches that, the attack vector begins and exploits are chained until they get kernel mode access. After getting kernel mode access all hope is lost, the attacker owns the device.

    Only sliver of hope is that fixing the attack entry point blocks the current attack. And that bug is:

    This attachment exploits the remote code execution vulnerability CVE-2023-41990 in the undocumented, Apple-only ADJUST TrueType font instruction. This instruction had existed since the early nineties before a patch removed it.

    But unless all the CVEs are patched, it is just matter of time a new attack entry point is found.

  • JATth@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Kaspersky/Securelist researchers detail zero-click iPhone exploit involving four distinct zero-day vulnerabilities, including undocumented hardware features in iPhone chipsEnglish
    20·
    6 months ago

    Shorter version: Operating systems set up hardware locks and protections to confine processes, and once set up, they cannot be undone. (the hardware + OS denies modifications to the security policy)

    • Attacker broke out from the app sandbox. (attacker can run code in the infected process)
    • Broke out of the process. (gained root access; attacker can run anything)
    • Broke into the kernel space (gained 100% control over the hardware)
    • Corrupted some kernel memory via a damm magic MMIO accesses nobody knows (hardware vulnerable)
    • Bypassed protections that kernel set up earlier such that it cannot accidentally modify itself.
    • Finally broke the kernel via hardware exploit thus the attacker got rootkit level access.

    Getting arbitrary code execution and root access is one thing, but breaking out from the damm kernel configured hardware protections is insane.

    They basically managed to flip a “read-only” switch to “modify-as-much-as-you-like”. The infected device at this point is broken beyond repair, as the firmware(s) may have been tampered with. End result is a terrestrial spy brick.

  • JATth@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•IBM demonstrates useful Quantum computing within 133-qubit Heron, announces entry into Quantum-centric supercomputing eraEnglish
    21·
    7 months ago

    Quantum computing is going to make it possible to solve problems that normal computers simply cannot do.

    Most of these are optimizing problems like “compute the best solution to traveling salesman” or “find a molecule that binds to this receptor”.

    On normal computers solving such problems “perfectly” takesexponential amount of computing time vs. the size of the problem.

    Quantum computers are going to chop down that exponential thing a little, so we can see the results before the sun burns out. The reason QCs are theoretically able to do this is that each added qubit improves the machines performance exponentially.

    However, the qubit state is so fragile that we need hundreds of them to make a single “stable” logical qubit that can do operations repeatedly. What the quantum computer uses as qubit (photons, super-conducting wire) is irrelevant as long as the system can do useful work.

    Because of the fragility, the results are gathered using thousands of runs on the quantum machine and measured statistically.

    We are not quite there yet to solve any useful sized problems.