Last week we announced our public side-channel mitigation test and benchmarking lab in light of the publication of the TAA variant of ZombieLoad. This new lab will enable us to evaluate new side-channel attacks and new mitigations and answer questions such as:

• Do the mitigations work?
• How much performance does each individual mitigation cost?
• How much performance do the combined mitigations cost?
• Are there platforms that stand out in performance cost?

In this article we will take a closer look at these questions with a comparison of a Linux kernel compile benchmark on different hardware plattforms with different Linux kernels.

Today a new variant of the ZombieLoad family of side-channel attacks has been made public. This new variant is called TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA). TAA works on all recent Intel processors that support Intel TSX, including Intel’s most recent Cascade Lake processors.

In light of yet another side-channel attack, Cyberus Technology announces the start of a public side-channel mitigation test and benchmarking lab. This new lab will enable us to evaluate new side-channel attacks and new mitigations against such attacks in a quick and automated manner. Please refer to the release announcement for in-depth information.

In light of yet another side-channel attack, Cyberus Technology announces the a public side-channel mitigation test and benchmarking lab. This new lab will enable us to evaluate new side-channel attacks and new mitigations against such attacks in a quick and automated manner.

Before diving deep into the analysis of unknown malware, some basic knowledge about its behavior is required. As a starting point, it is useful to observe the files the malware touches and changes. Tycho can help to automate the observation of file creation and modification, giving the malware analyst a good overview of its behavior. In this blog entry, I will show you how to build a file tracker with Tycho.

Reverse engineering a software is not an easy task. Especially not if you do this for the first time.

Hi, my name is Sebastian Manns. I study “general and digital forensics”. Since one month I am a trainee at Cyberus Technology and my job is Software/Malware Analysis with Tycho.

In my first blog entry I will show you how easy it is to evaluate and manipulate system calls with Tycho using Pafish as an example.

Do you recall the year change 2017/18? Of course, I am not referring to the New Year’s resolutions usually getting out of sight after a couple of weeks. Back then, I (together with a small team of other security researchers) was waiting for Intel to disclose security vulnerabilities we had discovered in its microprocessor hardware. We expected a fair bit of excitement because the industry had been scrambling to get mitigations in place. However I was thoroughly gobsmacked by the kind of delayed fireworks unfolding in the media. More than a year has elapsed since then so it is only fair to ask what is left beyond the sound and smoke - and why it was not the beginning of the end of the familiar IT universe, as predicted by a couple of pessimists.

ZombieLoad is a novel category of side-channel attacks which we refer to as data-sampling attack. It demonstrates that faulting load instructions can transiently expose private values of one Hyperthread sibling to the other. This new exploit is the result of a collaboration between Michael Schwarz, Daniel Gruss and Moritz Lipp from Graz University of Technology, Thomas Prescher and Julian Stecklina from Cyberus Technology, Jo Van Bulck from KU Leuven, and Daniel Moghimi from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

In this article, we summarize the implications and shed light on the different attack scenarios across CPU privilege rings, OS processes, virtual machines, and SGX enclaves, and give advice over possible ways to mitigate such attacks.

We are proud to announce that today we are releasing Tycho 1.2. This release features Process Listing, Cuckoo Sandbox Integration and the Autostart Semantic Breakpoint.

We are proud to announce that today we are releasing Tycho 1.1. This release features USB 3 Debug Port Support, System Call Interpretation, and a plugin for IDA Pro that shows memory information directly within IDA.

After Meltdown (see also our article about Meltdown) and Spectre, more vulnerabilities in out-of-order CPUs have been uncovered that use similar side channels. This article is about the L1 Terminal Fault vulnerability, a meltdown-style attack that is also effective against up-to-date system software incorporating KPTI-like patches. L1 Terminal Fault actually refers to three different vulnerabilities with the ancestor being the Foreshadow vulnerability that was published at this year’s USENIX Security Symposium. While the article authors focus on SGX security aspects we are more concerned about implications for virtualization as it also enables crossing virtual machine borders with uncomfortable ease.

After Meltdown (see also our article about Meltdown) and Spectre, which were publicly disclosed in January, the Spectre V3a and V4 vulnerabilities followed in May (see also our article about Spectre V4). According to the German IT news publisher Heise, the latter might be part of 8 new vulnerabilities in total that are going to be disclosed in the course of the year.

Earlier this year, Julian Stecklina (Amazon) and Thomas Prescher (Cyberus Technology) jointly discovered and responsibly disclosed another vulnerability that might be part of these, and we call it LazyFP. LazyFP (CVE-2018-3665) is an attack targeting operating systems that use lazy FPU switching. This article describes what this attack means, outlines how it can be mitigated and how it actually works.

After Meltdown (see also our article about Meltdown) and Spectre, more vulnerabilities in out-of-order CPUs have been uncovered that use similar attack vectors.

This article is about the new variant 4 of the Spectre attack that works without misleading the branch predictor. Instead, it exploits an implementation detail of Intel’s memory disambiguation technique inside the CPU’s pipeline.

The Cyberus Tycho Malware Forensics Tool is now available for purchase.

Tycho is a uniquely powerful malware forensics tool suite which aids and expedites the work of manual malware analyst and software reverse engineers – a malware debugger on steroids.

As an important step towards automating the creation of Windows disk assets/images, we will take a closer look at the Critical Device Database (CDDB) inside the Windows registry. The goal is to transform any locally installed instance to be bootable from iSCSI without having to run a full installation onto an iSCSI disk before.

In this article, we will describe how an ordinary Windows 7 installation can be converted to be booted from iSCSI. We will cover the particularities of the Windows network boot process and and elaborate on the differences to the normal boot. We then describe our solution using some registry modifications.

This series of three posts is about installing Windows 7 on an iSCSI disk. In this first article, we install it using qemu and iPXE and cover some of the pitfalls and particularities of this install method, as well as the topic of duplicating the resulting disk for use in machines of the same type. Two more follow-up posts will cover details of the network boot process, leading to a method of converting an existing installation to be iSCSI-bootable.

In the last article, we have shown how to interrupt a process running in an unpatched Windows system on top of the Cyberus virtualization platform before it executes specific system calls using the Tycho Python API. This time, we demonstrate how to implement a short but useful script that logs which files are accessed by a process of our choice.

Due to its introspection capabilities, the Cyberus virtualization platform is able to analyze Windows system calls. In this article we demonstrate how simple it is to extract system call parameters out of a running windows machine with Python using the Tycho API.

In this article we are going to play with a DLL injection tool on a Windows system that is running on top the Cyberus Virtualization Platform. Using the Tycho Python API, we will see how dead simple it is to check if a process has been subject to DLL injection.

Meltdown is an attack on the general memory data security of computers with the Intel x86 architecture. Two members of the founder team of Cyberus Technology GmbH were among the first experts to discover this vulnerability. This article describes how Meltdown actually works and also examines the mitigations that have been patched into the most widespread operating systems while the information embargo was still intact.

This article demonstrates how simple it is to setup our analysis tool Tycho and plays with the Tycho Python API in order to outline its potential. We will pause and resume processes, read interesting process information, and inject errors using the Tycho Python API.