Researchers Tobias Engel and Karsten Nohl demonstrated serious vulnerabilities in the SS7 protocol for cellular service, putting the privacy of phone calls and users’ location data at risk for intercept.
Karsten Nohl has updated his BadUSB research, looking at the top eight USB controller chips and determining that about half are susceptible to being maliciously reprogrammed.
Researchers who released attack code against vulnerabilities in USB devices followed that up with a patch, that they and researcher Karsten Nohl acknowledge isn’t enough to solve the problem.
Two researchers published attack code exploiting weaknesses in USB similar to the BadUSB research presented at this year’s Black Hat conference.
Embedded device security emerged as front page news during the recently wrapped up Black Hat and DEF CON events.
Scenes from this year’s hacking conference in Las Vegas, Nev. include a keynote by General Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency and talks by researchers Karsten Nohl and Ralf-Phillip Weinmann.
As many as 750 million mobile phones could be vulnerable to an encryption flaw on some types of SIM cards, a German cryptographer and researcher warned over the weekend.
