Greg's blog

Thanks to the Dr. Dobb's Report newsletter, I've learned about nvidia CUDA. It's a SDK that aims to use nvidia GPUs for computing. It includes a C compiler, hardware debugger based on gdb interface), and a profiler. It also includes standard FFT and BLAS libraries. For even more fun, it provides a low level assembly language layer and driver interface. CUDA is supported on Linux and Windows XP. As one may guess, nvidia only provides binary files.

A comprehensive FAQ is available.

Elcomsoft has already find a usage for CUDA, it recently made some buzz in the news (press release in pdf) by adding support for GPUs in their password recovery products. For an overview of password cracking check this except from the book Endpoint Security. Password cracking with FPGAs was presented at conferences (like Cracking Wifi... Faster! at layerone) mainly for wep and wpa cracking. But now there is a growing interest in commodity hardware (like Sony PS3 with ps3-wepcrack). In fact, why spending money and time in FPGAs if you can use commodity - almost cheap - hardware? I hope we'll see soon john the ripper using CUDA :).

When Michal Zawleski does something, it's often worth seeing it. His last project, announced on Bugtraq, is Bunny the fuzzer. It is described as a "a closed loop, high-performance, general purpose protocol-blind fuzzer for C programs.". There is still a lot of buzz about fuzzers. They help to spot vulnerabilities in code with or without source code available. Combining tracing with a debugger and fuzzing can be a quick way to find the most superficial vulnerabilities. Need to find a target to give a try to Bunny,

I am reading Scroogled, a short novel by Cory Doctorow. French readers may like the translation. It tells the not so far story of a former Google employee who is tracked by data Google had stored about him.

I think it stressed the ubiquitous surveillance that is taking place nowadays, the difficulty of reliability processing this kind of data and how our privacy can be exposed. Sometimes privacy seems to be kept when we provide data to one application. But when all data from all the web applications we are using are correlated, it exposes hardly our whole public life. Ok, everybody already knows that. It's like contactless transportation cards, credit cards, etc... You can be tracked by so many means. But there, in countries like France you have the choice to manage the data that is stored about you. It is stated in the Loi Informatiques et libertes which application is monitored by the CNIL. It means you need to manage the data about yourself. In somewhat Google is now a bit something already well known, the current target is FaceBook.

Talking about surveillance, check AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance that quotes http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p... from Andrew Appel (yes you actually read the man who wrote Modern Compiler Implementation.

To be continued...

Today after a quick review of recent vulnerabilities, I decided to focus on OpenSSL, libvorbis and QEmu. OpenSSL SSL_Get_Shared_Ciphers() is an update of a year-old buffer overflow vulnerability that was fixed but not fully :). It results in a off-by-one overflow. I didn't find any exploit for this vuln.

In the libvorbis side, DoS and Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities were discovered. No exploit neither. A for QEmu, the advisory says ''Multiple local vulnerabilities''.

I'll begin by working on the OpenSSL vuln. This is work-in-progress and I'll update the blog regularly.

I have also seen a interesting lighttpd fastcgi module vulnerability. Not enough time to do everything, I'll see it later.

Hey, last week was happening Black Europe 2007 in Amsterdam. Conference materials are now online and there is some interesting stuff. You may probably like to read Kicking Down the Cross Domain Door (One XSS at a Time) which was covered by Darkreading.

If you like Ajax you may like JavaScript Hijacking ;).