Publications

Dumping the Sonos One smart speaker

09/03/2021
Hardware
Twice a year, ZDI organizes a computer hacking contest called Pwn2Own. It challenges security experts to exploit widely used hardware and software. In November 2020, the contest was held in Vancouver and on-line. We already published an article on our success on TP-Link AC1750 Smart Wifi Router, but this wasn't the only device we focused on. This article presents the first step of our vulnerability research on the Sonos One Gen 2 smart speaker. Sonos speakers use encrypted firmware so the first thing to do for a sof...

Pentesting Cisco ACI: LLDP mishandling

05/03/2021
Pentest
Synacktiv had a chance to perform a security assessment during a couple of weeks on a SD-LAN project based on the Cisco ACI solution. The following article is a brief explanation of some of the internal mechanisms of auto-discovery and initialization of the Cisco ACI and the weaknesses identified during the security assessment including CVE-2021-1228 and CVE-2021-1231.

An Interesting Feature in the Samsung DSP Driver

02/03/2021
Exploit
In February 2021 Samsung made some changes in one of its low level drivers : the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) Linux driver. They removed one interesting feature : the ability for untrusted apps to load a custom DSP firmware of their choice. The driver is present on Galaxy S20 and Galaxy S21 Exynos based phones (and probably on Galaxy Note 20 too). This article presents how to use this feature to boot the DSP on a custom firmware, and how to use this custom firmware along with bugs in the DSP driver to gain ker...

Pwn2Own Tokyo 2020: Defeating the TP-Link AC1750

01/03/2021
Exploit
A team of Synacktiv security experts participated to the last edition of Pwn2Own by submitting a LAN-side exploit against the TP-Link AC1750. This blogpost aims to describe the process of discovery and exploitation of this vulnerability, including the presentation of exploitation code.

GPGme used confusion, it's super effective !

16/02/2021
Pentest
In the world of logic vulnerabilities, there is an interesting subclass which is confusing API designs. Usually in this subclass the vulnerability does not lie in how the API is implemented but how it's used by a third party, which makes it particularly difficult to fix once and for all for everyone. In this blogpost, we will see an example regarding gpgme which was revealed in July 2020 and how easy it is to find a vulnerable downstream codebase using a simple variant analysis.

Typo3: leak to Remote code execution.

17/12/2020
Pentest
Typo3 is an open source CMS we have recently encountered during one of our missions. We successfully exploited a configuration leak on this CMS to gain remote code execution on this application. This article describes the different steps to go from unauthenticated user to unsafe object deserialization and gain code execution.

Investigating IDA Lumina feature

15/12/2020
Tools
Reverse-engineering
Lumina is a built-in function recognition feature of the well-known IDA pro disassembler that relies on an online signature database. Unfortunately, the database server is not available for local private use. Have you ever raged at a misstyped hotkey that sent your database content to the Lumina servers, wondered how it works, what kind of data is sent, and wished for a local server under your control? This blog post might answer some of your questions.