a zero-day baseband vulnerability affectingVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilityHuawei smartphones , laptop WWAN modules , and IoT components . Baseband is firmware used on smartphones to connect to cellular networks , to make voice calls , and transmit data . An attacker can exploit baseband flaws to eavesdropAttack.Databreachmobile communications , take over the device making calls and sending SMS messages to premium numbers or to exfiltrateAttack.Databreachdata . The expert revealedVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilitythe flaw this week at the Infiltrate Conference , the vulnerability could be exploitedVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilityby attackers to execute a memory-corruption attack against affected devices over the air . Fortunately , the attack is quite difficult to conduct . The baseband vulnerability resides inVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilitythe HiSilicon Balong integrated 4G LTE modems . The Balong application processor is called Kirin , it is produced by the Hisilicon Technologies , a subsidiary of Huawei Technologies . The affected firmware is present in several Huawei Honor smartphones , including the P10 , Huawei Mate 9 , Honor 9 , 7 , 5c and 6 . Weinmann believes that millions of Honor smartphones could be exposed to the to attack . Weinmann presentedVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilitymultiple baseband vulnerabilities found inVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilitythe Kirin application processor . The expert also revealed that many laptops produced by IT vendors leverage the HiSilicon Balong integrated modem , such as a number IoT devices . “ This baseband is much easier to exploit than other basebands . Why ? I ’ m not sure if this was intentional , but the vendor actually published the source code for the baseband which is unusual , ” Weinmann said . “ Also , the malleability of this baseband implantation doesn ’ t just make it good for device experimenting , but also network testing. ” Weinmann speculates HiSilicon may have wrong released the Kirin source code as part of a developer tar archive associated with the Huawei H60 Linux kernel data . Weinmann demonstrated several attack scenarios against mobile phones . A first attack scenario presented by the researcher involves setting up a bogus base station using open-source software called OpenLTE that is used by an attacker to simulate a network operator . The attacker can send specially crafted packets over the air that trigger a stack buffer overflow in the LTE stack causing the phone crashing . Once the phone rebooted an attacker can gain persistence installing a rootkit . In a second attack scenario , the attacker with a physical access to the phone and private key pair data would install malicious tools on the firmware . “ It requires key material that is stored both by the carrier and on the SIM card in order to pass the mutual authentication between the phone and the network . Without this key material , a base station can not pose as a legit network towards the device. ” Weinmann used for its test his own VxWorks build environment using an evaluation version of VxWorks 7.0 that shipped with Intel Galileo several years ago . The expert explained that the existence of a Lua scripting interpreter running in the baseband gives him further offensive options . Weinmann did not disclose the technical details to avoid threat actors in the wild will abuse his technology . “ I have chosen to only disclose lower-severity findings for now . Higher severity findings are in the pipeline. ” Weinmann said .
Git has disclosedVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilitya security vulnerability that allows for arbitrary code execution in malicious repositories , Microsoft reports . The vulnerability , CVE-2018-11235 , was addressedVulnerability-related.PatchVulnerabilityand fixedVulnerability-related.PatchVulnerabilityin Git 2.17.1 and Git for Windows 2.17.1 ( 2 ) , which were both releasedVulnerability-related.PatchVulnerabilitytoday . In addition , the Visual Studio Team Services ( VSTS ) team has blocked malicious repositories from being pushed to VSTS to ensure that Visual Studio can not be used as a vector for transmitting malicious repositories to clients who have not yet patchedVulnerability-related.PatchVulnerabilitytheir clients . The vulnerability is caused when repositories are cloned . When cloning a repository , Git checks out the parent repository into the working directory as it prepares to clone the submodule . Then , Git realizes that it does not need to perform the clone of submodule because the submodule ’ s repository already exists on the disk from when it was checked in to the parent , and then was written to the working directory when the parent repository was checked out . According to Microsoft , the problem lies in the fact that when Git repositories are cloned , there are important configuration details not obtained from the server , such as hooks , which are scripts that can be run at certain points in the Git workflow . The configuration is not cloned from a remote server because that would lead to a vulnerability where remote servers could provide code that would be executed on the end user ’ s computer . Unfortunately , with the new vulnerability , that is exactly what happens , Microsoft explained . Because the submodule ’ s repository is checked in to a parent repository , it is not actually cloned . Therefore , the submodule repository can already have a hook configured . Additionally , if a user recursively cloned a malicious parent repository , it first checks out the parent , reads the submodule ’ s checked-in repository and prepares to write that submodule to the working directory , then it executes post-checkout hooks , Microsoft explained . In order to eliminate this vulnerability , submodule ’ s folder names are examined more closely by Git clients . Now , submodule folder names can no longer contain “ .. ” as a path segment and they can not be symbolic links . As a result , they now will have to be within the .git repository folder instead of in the actual repository ’ s working directory . According to Microsoft , Git now refuses to work with repositories that do not follow this newly specified configuration . Visual Studio Team Services and other hosting providers will also reject users from pushing repositories that do not adhere to this submodule configuration to protect clients that have not been patchedVulnerability-related.PatchVulnerabilityyet .
The Git community has disclosedVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilitya security vulnerability affectingVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilitythe clone and submodule commands that could enable remote code execution when vulnerable machines access malicious repositories . The vulnerability , which has been assignedVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilityCVE–2018–17456 by Mitre , has been fixedVulnerability-related.PatchVulnerabilityin Git 2.19.1 . To trigger the vulnerability , a malicious repository could forge a .gitmodules containing an URL starting with a dash . This would affectVulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerabilityboth git clone -- recurse-submodules and git submodule update -- recursive in that they would recursively pass the URL starting with a dash to a git clone or git submodule subprocess that would interpret the URL as a command option . This could lead to executing an arbitrary command on the local machine . This vulnerability is similar to CVE–2017–1000117 , which also enabled an option-injection attack by forging ssh URLs starting with a dash that would be interpreted as an option by the ssh subprocess executed by git . No exploits are known at the moment . We were also able to use the time to scan all repositories on GitHub for evidence of the attack being used in the wild . As shown in the PR fixingVulnerability-related.PatchVulnerabilitythe vulnerability , submitted by @ joernchen , the fix is quite trivial in itself . Yet , this discovery provided the opportunity for an overall audit of .gitmodules , which led to implementing stricter checks on both paths and URLs found inside of it . As mentioned , the fix for this vulnerability is included in Git 2.19.1 . Additionally , it has been backportedVulnerability-related.PatchVulnerabilityto versions 2.14.5 , 2.15.3 , 2.16.5 , 2.17.2 , and 2.18.1 . Since git is integrated in GitHub projects such as GitHub Desktop and Atom , those have been patchedVulnerability-related.PatchVulnerabilityas well , so you will be better off upgradingVulnerability-related.PatchVulnerabilitythem as soon as possible .