All is relatively well
here at Woesnotgone Meadow, where everyone has above average bandwidth.
In the Meadow, the residents are a bit located off the beaten
path. Our highlight for the week tends to be driving to Margie’s Ice Cream
Parlor on Friday night. On a special occasion, we may see turkeys in the field
on the way there. Although we may seem not to be on the leading edge of
technology, we certainly try and use the
latest smartphones and laptops. With these devices, there have been various
issues with antennas, batteries, and other hardware. A recent vulnerability
involved the firmware on WiFi chips.
WiFi chips are used in numerous
devices we use in the Meadow on a daily basis. These include gaming equipment, personal
computers, business equipment, communications, IoT devices, and many other
examples.
With the hardware WiFi process for
the individual piece of equipment, the device beacons out, seeking the WiFi
points the device is familiar with, with no regard as to the access password. In
effect, it is seeking to know what is local and proximate it may connect with. This
feature/vulnerability may allow the device to attach to the attacker’s device
without any interaction.
Other attacks involve rewriting
the pointer to the next free block of memory and controlling the allocation for
the next memory block to be used. This may prima facie appears to be mundane
and not very exciting. By being able to have the ability to change the pointer
for the next block, the attacker could adjust the flow to an out-of-process
run-time pointer. The attacker could tell the target/victim computer to alter its
normal operation, without authorization. This could run the attacker’s code or
process. There are also other vulnerabilities with this.
Vulnerability
The firmware on these devices
varies greatly. These, unfortunately, have various levels of security applied to
them through the development process. In this particular instance, a
vulnerability was detected in Thread X. Thread X is a real-time operating
system (RTOS) created by ExpressLogic.
This is not a low usage RTOS, as
there are over 6.2B deployments. This makes the vulnerability one of the most
widely used software packages. One vulnerability detected involved the block
and pool overflow. This issue could be initiated when the chip scans for
networks to connect with. The process is done every five minutes, regardless if
the device is connected or not.
Uses
The firmware is more expansive in
numbers and device usage. This is found in the Avastar 88W 8897 SOC (system on
chip), WiFi, Bluetooth, and near field communications (NFC) in Marvell, Sonly
Playstation 4 and Pro, Microsoft Surface and Pro tablets, Xbox One, Samsung
Chromebook, Galaxy J1 smartphone, and Valve Steam Link.
Thanks for visiting Woesnotgone Meadow, where the encryption is
strong, and the O/Ss are always using the latest version.
Resources
BeauHD. (2019, January 18). Firmware vulnerability in
popular wi-fi chipset affects laptops, smartphones, routers, gaming devices. Retrieved
from https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/01/18/2333237/firmware-vulnerability-in-popular-wi-fi-chipset-affects-laptops-smartphones-routers-gaming-devices
Ilascu, I. (2019, January 18). Vulnerabilities found in
highly popular firmware for wifi chips. Retrieved from https://www.bleepingcomputer.comnews/security/vulnerabilities-found-in-highly-pupular-fimrware-for-wifi-chips/
Information Security Newspaper. (2019, January 18).
Vulnerabilities found in wifi chips firmware. Retrieved from https://www.securitynewspaper.com/2019/01/18/vulnerabilities-found-in-wifi-chips-firmware/
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