Next time you go to the loo, bring your locked laptop with you
CanSecWest | DaisyDukes brings memory sniffing to the masses
By Dan Goodin • Friday 28 Mar 2008 11:02

Building off recent research that showed how to extract encryption keys from a computer's memory, a penetration testing company has unveiled a tool that sniffs out passwords, documents, and other sensitive data in a matter of minutes.

DaisyDukes is a memory sniffer that resides on a USB device. A researcher can plug it into an unattended machine that is turned on but has been locked and reboot the machine off a compact operating system contained on the drive. Depending on the user's needs, it can be configured to capture the entire contents of a computer's memory, or sniff out only certain types of data - say a password to access the company network or unlock a user's private encryption key.

It turns out both Windows and Linux retain "boatloads and boatloads" of passwords in memory, said Sherri Davidoff, a security analyst with IntelGuardians, the penetration-testing firm that developed the tool. It's already been able to isolate passwords for Thunderbird, AOL Instant Messenger, GPG, SSH, Outlook, Putty and TrueCrypt, among others, and with additional research they believe they can find many more.

"The idea here is let's see if we can hit an office building, get in and out in 25 minutes or less and walk out with some interesting passwords," said Tom Liston, an IntelGuardians security consultant who along with Davidoff co-presented the tool at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver.

How safe is VMware's hypervisor?
CanSecWest | The debate rages on
By Dan Goodin • Thursday 27 Mar 2008 16:03

CanSecWest VMware researcher Oded Horovitz got an earful when he told a group of security buffs his company's virtualization software was theoretically impenetrable. Speaking at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, his hour-long presentation, titled Virtually Secure, included a slide titled "VM Escape" that carried the following bullet point:

"Though impossible by design, the hypervisor can still have implementation vulnerabilities."

It was more than some attendees could bear.

"And the Titanic was unsinkable," Mike Poor, a senior security analyst for IntelGuardians shot back. Other attendees complained that security increasingly looked like an afterthought as VMware continued to add new bells and whistles to its Workstation and ESX Server products - many from third party companies.

"I take strong issue with your saying 'trust the hypervisor' when you're expanding it to run other people's APIs," one attendee, who asked not to be identified, told Horovitz immediately following his talk.