application development Archives

application development

AllSeen Alliance Announces Smart Lighting Framework

October 8, 2014 Paul Roberts

Smart lightbulbs aren’t anything new. In fact, products like the Philips Hue bulb have been in the market for years. The devices, which typically couple a standard incandescent or CF bulb with a wireless transmitter, allow lights to be managed via mobile device and also respond to environmental changes monitored by other sensors. But – as with much of the Internet of Things – each family of smart bulbs is something of an island: interacting- and communicating mostly with other smart home products from the same manufacturer. That’s good for the lightbulb maker, but bad for smart home advocates, see out-of-the box connectivity across product silos as a precursor to broad adoption of smart home technologies. It’s also been the case that the products that have been released have often fallen short in areas like security. In August, 2013, security researcher Nitesh Dhanjani disclosed a proof of concept hack […]

FDA Issues Guidance on Security of Medical Devices

October 1, 2014 Paul Roberts

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued final guidance on Wednesday that are designed to strengthen the safety of medical devices. The FDA called on medical device manufacturers to consider cyber security risks as part of the design and development of devices. The document, “Content of Premarket Submissions for Management of Cybersecurity in Medical Devices,” asks device makers to submit documentation to the FDA about any “risks identified and controls in place to mitigate those risks” in medical devices. The guidance also recommends that manufacturers submit documentation of plans for patching and updating the operating systems and medical software that devices run. The document, which will be released on Thursday, does not contain specific requirements. Rather, it describes the kinds of things that medical device manufacturers should consider when preparing pre-market submissions for medical devices in areas such as information confidentiality, integrity, and availability, the FDA said. The release of the document follows the […]

Whack-A-Bash: New Vulnerabilities add to Patch Confusion

September 29, 2014 Paul Roberts

The good news about the rapid, industry response to the revelations about exploitable security holes in GNU Bash (Bourne Again Shell) (aka “Shellshock”) is that Linux users had a fix in hand almost as soon as they became aware of the problem those patches addressed. The bad news about the quick fixes for the two issues, CVE-2014-6271 and CVE-2014-7169, from the likes of Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian and others is that – in being early- they fail to fix the problems we don’t yet know about. And that’s what we’re seeing in the wake of last week’s storm of patches: a steady drip-drip of disclosures that suggest that Bash may contain other problems worthy of new fixes. Within hours of the disclosure of the first holes, there were problems discovered by Red Hat Product Security researcher Todd Sabin, who found additional “off by one” errors in Bash that were assigned CVE-2014-7186 and CVE-2014-7187 and […]

Infographic: Possible Attacks on The Internet of Things

September 24, 2014 Paul Roberts

The folks over at Trend Micro have put together a nice infographic that reminds us that all those smart devices connected to the Internet communicate through some well worn channels, namely: standard communications protocols like Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Bluetooth that connect devices to each other and the global Internet, as well as HTTP that are used to transmit data to and from cloud based resources like management interfaces. Of course those standard protocols also leave IoT devices vulnerable to a wide range of commodity attacks: from brute force password cracking on web based management consoles to Man in the Middle attacks that can sniff out authentication credentials and hijack sessions. Trend’s infographic does a good job of depicting the various layers in the IoT stack and some of the likely attack vectors for each layer. It also gives advice on how to protect yourself (use encryption, patch software vulnerabilities, disable unused ports). Nothing ground breaking […]

You’re Invited: A Conversation on Password Security and Targeted Attacks

September 23, 2014 Paul Roberts

A note to Security Ledger readers that I’ll be facilitating a really interesting conversation this afternoon on password (in)security and how weak user authentication can undermine even the best laid security plans. The SANS Webinar, Security for the People: End User Authentication Security on the Internet” kicks off at 3:00 PM Eastern today (12:00 PM Pacific). You can register to join us using this link. My guest is DUO Security researcher Mark Stanislav, a frequent Security Ledger contributor and one of the smartest guys out there when it comes to passwords, authentication and securing the Internet of Things. There’s plenty to talk about: weak authentication schemes are the root cause of any number of prominent breaches – from the recent attacks the Apple iCloud accounts of A-list celebrities, to the breach at retailer Target (reportedly the result of a phishing attack on an HVAC contractor that Target used.) Mark and I […]