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.