Publications

Inside the iOS bug that made deleted photos reappear

23/05/2024 Last week, Apple released iOS 17.5. Since then multiple people reported seeing photos on their phone they had previously deleted. The bug was fixed in 17.5.1. In this blogpost we will dive into how the bug appeared and how it was fixed by Apple.

Exploiting American Conquest

16/04/2024 Back in 2023, we looked for vulnerabilities in American Conquest as a side research project. We found and reported multiple stack buffer overflow. Despite the publisher will not fix the bugs because the game is too old, we share today the details of our research. This is an interesting article for those who want to get started in researching and exploiting vulnerabilities.

Arlo: I'm watching you

08/03/2024 The consumer-focused Pwn2Own competition returned in Toronto in 2023 with the "SOHO smashup" category, but also added cameras under a new "Surveillance Systems" category. While we already had success with the Wyze Cam v3 and Synology BC500 in this category, other targets were also looked at. Therefore, this blog post aims at bootstrapping vulnerability research on Arlo cameras.

Exploring Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Attack Surface

08/01/2024 Back in 2021, we studied the attack surface of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as a side research project. We found and reported a relative heap out-of-bounds write vulnerability triggerable remotely, impacting code that is no longer present with the release of Counter-Strike 2. In fact, no patch was released in the meantime despite multiple follow-ups. We share today the details of this bug and our research about the attack surface and generic exploitation primitives.

Leveraging Binary Ninja IL to Reverse a Custom ISA: Cracking the “Pot of Gold” 37C3

05/01/2024 This article explores the process of reversing a custom instruction set architecture (ISA) of the Pot of Gold CTF challenge (37C3 CTF) using Binary Ninja Intermediate Language (IL) to decompile the challenge code. Next, it describes the exploitation part, first getting code execution in the emulator, then pivoting to a second process and ultimately exploiting the opcode emulation to retrieve the flag.

Frinet: reverse-engineering made easier

18/12/2023 By combining Frida with an enhanced version of Tenet, Frinet facilitates the study of large programs, vulnerability research and root-cause analysis on iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, and most architectures.

Pcapan: a PCAP analysis helper

22/11/2023 This post showcases a small but very useful tool that can be used to classify expected and suspicious traffic in a network capture file, and, more importantly, what the process is for writing such a tool.

Behind the Shield: Unmasking Scudo's Defenses

05/10/2023 When writing an exploit for a memory corruption vulnerability, knowing the heap allocator internals is often required to shape the heap as desired. Following our previous blogpost focusing on jemalloc (new), this article will dive into another one of Android libc allocators: Scudo.

Exploring Android Heap allocations in jemalloc 'new'

30/05/2023 When writing an exploit for a memory corruption vulnerability, knowing the heap allocator internals is often required to shape the heap as desired. This article will dive into one of Android libc allocators: jemalloc 'new' (jemalloc version 5 and superior). Whereas scudo is the latest allocator introduced in the platform, jemalloc 'new' is still very used today but not well documented.

The printer goes brrrrr!!!

25/05/2022 Network printers have been featured for the first time at Pwn2Own competition in Austin 2021. Three popular LaserJet printers were included in the completion: HP, Lexmark and Canon. During the event, we (Synacktiv) managed to compromise all of them allowing us to win the whole competition. In this post, we will focus on how we achieved code execution on the Canon printer.