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Blogs | EDITORIAL | August 3, 2021

Counterproliferation: Doing Our Part

IOActive’s mission is to make the world a safer and more secure place. In the past, we’ve worked to innovate in the responsible disclosure process.

John Sheehy
Research | INSIGHTS, RESEARCH | July 30, 2021

Breaking Protocol (Buffers): Reverse Engineering gRPC Binaries

The Basics gRPC is an open-source RPC framework from Google which leverages automatic code generation to allow easy integration to a number of languages. Architecturally, it follows the standard seen in many other RPC frameworks: services are defined which determine the available RPCs. It uses HTTP version 2 as its transport, and supports plain HTTP as well as HTTPS for secure communication. Services and messages, which act as the structures passed to and returned by defined RPCs, are defined as protocol buffers. Protocol buffers are a common serialization solution, also…

Ethan Shackelford
Library | WHITEPAPER | May 17, 2021

Cross-Platform Feature Comparison

For an Intel-commissioned study, IOActive compared security-related technologies from both the 11th Gen Intel Core vPro mobile processors and the AMD Ryzen PRO 4000 series mobile processors, as well as highlights from current academic research where applicable. Our comparison was based on a set of objectives bundled into five categories: Below the OS, Platform Update, Trusted Execution, Advanced Threat Protection, and Crypto Extension. Based on IOActive research, we conclude that AMD offers no corresponding technologies those categories while Intel offers features; Intel and AMD have equivalent capabilities in the Trusted…

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IOActive Research
Blogs | EDITORIAL | April 8, 2021

Trivial Vulnerabilities, Serious Risks

Introduction The digital transformation brought about by the social distancing and isolation caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic was both extremely rapid and unexpected. From shortening the distance to our loved ones to reengineering entire business models, we’re adopting and scaling new solutions that are as fast-evolving as they are complex. The full impact of the decisions and technological shifts we’ve made in such short a time will take us years to fully comprehend. Unfortunately, there’s a darker side to this rapid innovation and growth which is often performed to…

Tiago Assumpcao & Robert Connolly
Library | COLLATERAL | April 7, 2021

Trivial Vulnerabilities, Big Risks

IOActive case study detailing the trivial vulnerabilities with big risks for the users of the Brazilian National Justice Council Processo Judicial Eletrônico (CNJ PJe) judicial data processing system.

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Tiago Assumpcao & Robert Connolly
Research | INSIGHTS, RESEARCH | April 6, 2021

Watch Your Step: Research Into the Concrete Effects of Fault Injection on Processor State via Single-Step Debugging

Fault injection, also known as glitching, is a technique where some form of interference or invalid state is intentionally introduced into a system in order to alter the behavior of that system. In the context of embedded hardware and electronics generally, there are a number of forms this interference might take. Common methods for fault injection in electronics include: Clock glitching (errant clock edges are forced onto the input clock line of an IC) Voltage fault injection (applying voltages higher or lower than the expected voltage to IC power lines)…

Ethan Shackelford