Personal Greeting for your mobile phone, using a bash script, Kali Linux and the Raspberry Pi

First of all, this is a quick way for making your Kali Linux speak. I am going to tell about a couple of ways to do text-to-speech on your Linux box. I used this for fun, for having audio alerts embedded to my applications and finally for recording a personal greeting for my phone. 

I started playing with espeak, and experimented with the different voices. The espeak application is fantastic but the different voices/languages it has, are too computerised. They do not sound as natural as you would have expected. However, for some quick tasks like listening to your LAN and/or WAN IP address, it can be useful, and cool.

Adult Friend Finder data breach, the aftermath...

Did you hear about the Adult Friend Finder data breach? Of course you did, it’s all over the news [1] [2] and it is getting major attention due to the spicy nature of the content. 
The online adult service was breached and 3.8 million accounts became public. 

The information including sexual preference, marital status and other personal data (such as, date of birth, email addresses and postal/home addresses) are now all publicly available. 

Well, we have seen data breaches before, but how is this data breach a little bit different??

Up to now, every article I read online about this incident treats it as yet another data breach, without paying any attention to the effects such a data breach will bring to people. Let us see the issues that come to mind, one by one in the following lines. 

Logjam attack - Diffie-Hellman key exchange weakness (a quick and brief explanation)

A study was published regarding the security of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. This popular cryptographic algorithm can be found among many protocols such as HTTPS, SSH, IPsec, SMTPS and it is used for sharing a key and establishing a secure connection. 

The weaknesses uncovered affect websites, mail servers, and other TLS-dependent services that support DHE_EXPORT ciphers. The exploitation of this vulnerability  was given the name Logjam attack [1] and depends on how Diffie-Hellman key exchange has been deployed in each case. 

The Logjam attack against TLS can be performed by downgrading vulnerable TLS connections to 512-bit export-grade cryptography, allowing the man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacker to read and modify any data passed over the connection. At the moment, this attack affects all modern web browsers. 

ozwpan driver - Remote packet-of-death vulnerabilities in Linux Kernel

"The ozwpan driver accepts network packets, parses them, and converts them into various USB functionality. There are numerous security vulnerabilities in the handling of these packets. Two of them result in a memcpy(kernel_buffer, network_packet, -length), one of them is a divide-by-zero, and one of them is a loop that decrements -1 until it's zero." [1]

1. A remote packet can be sent, resulting in funny subtractions of
signed integers, which causes a memcpy(kernel_heap, network_user_buffer, -network_user_provided_length).

There are two different conditions that can lead to this:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/5/13/740
https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/5/13/744

2. A remote packet can be sent, resulting in divide-by-zero in softirq, causing hard crash:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/5/13/741

3. A remote packet can be sent, resulting in a funny subtraction, causing an insanely big loop to lock up the kernel: https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/5/13/742

4. Multiple out-of-bounds reads, resulting in possible information leakage, explained in the last paragraph of the introductory email here: https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/5/13/739

The above is a repost of this: http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2015/q2/446

You may find more information about ozwpan here: https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/5/13/739

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/5/13/739

VENOM Vulnerability - Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation

VENOM is short for Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation and it is a vulnerability in the QEMU’s virtual Floppy Disk Controller (FDC). The vulnerable code is used in numerous virtualization platforms and appliances such as Xen, KVM, and the native QEMU client. 

The vulnerability has been assigned the following CVE (CVE-2015-3456). As far as we know, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and the Bochs hypervisors are not impacted by this. 

The interesting fact about VENOM is that it applies to a wide range of virtualization platforms (using the default configurations) and it allows for arbitrary code execution. Due to the fact that the vulnerability exists in the hypervisor’s codebase, it affects all host and guest Operating Systems. 

However, the vulnerability can be exploited only with escalated privileges (root, administrator).