James Kettle from PortSwigger presented his research on Browser-Powered Desync Attacks: A New Frontier in HTTP Request Smuggling (whitepaper / slides). The new class of HTTP request smuggling attack turns the victim’s browser into a desync delivery platform, which allowed him to compromise Amazon, Akamai, Varnish and Apache, and to mangle HTTPS into an MITM-powered desync on Apache.
Lennert Wouters presented his research on Starlink UT (slides). He managed to bypass the firmware signature verification. With a modified second stage bootloader he could extract the ROM bootloader and eFuse memory. Additionally, he created a custom printed circuit board modchip that automatically performs the voltage fault injection attack. The modchip design and example scripts are on GitHub: an RP2040 microcontroller briefly shorts the SoC core voltage to ground to glitch past the signature check in the ROM bootloader. This is only the first step to freely explore the Starlink network. SpaceX responded to Wouters’ presentation and invited security researchers to “bring on the bugs”. Expect future talks in this area.
Sick Codes presented his work on jailbreaking John Deere tractors. He targeted a John Deere tractor 4240 touchscreen controller with an Arm-compatible NXP I.MX 6 system-on-chip running Wind River Linux 8. One goal was putting Doom on the jailbroken John Deere @sickcodes, @kwiens. Another was to promote the right-to-repair. Farmers need to be able to repair their equipment and had to resort to hacking their tractors. However, manufacturers have been implementing digital locks on their vehicles and undermining private property. At DEF CON 29 Sick Codes also did a talk about Agricultural Data Arms Race.
Emoji Shellcoding was presented at DEF CON 30 (slides). Hаdrien Ваrrаl and Georges-Axel Jaloyan presented their respective tool. Basically, it is an emoji unpacker. For any target shellcode (non-emoji), the tool will produce an emoji shellcode with the unpacker and the packed version of your shellcode. Run it on a RISC-V simulator/cpu and enjoy!