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8 stories in the last 3d

Forgery of C2PA on a Pixel 10

Researcher forged a Google Pixel 10 C2PA content credential with genuine signatures, showing root-level attackers can fake photo provenance.

A Hacker Factor blog post demonstrates an AI-generated 'unicorn glitter milk' news photo carrying a valid, cryptographically signed C2PA manifest traceable to Google's Pixel camera certificate chain, passing validation in Adobe Inspect and the CAI Verify tool with a verified timestamp. The author, working with UMBC's PASAWG working group, reported to Google and C2PA in November 2025 that root access on a Pixel device could sign arbitrary images as camera captures; after 90 days without resolution, details were published. The finding undermines C2PA Assurance Level 2 claims made for Pixel 10 Content Credentials.

Lobsters · security · 8h agoResearch

Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

Two developers built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini in one month via clean-room reverse engineering.

Niklas and the author reverse engineered Apple's AGX GPU firmware ABI and user-space components in about a month, a process that normally takes years, producing an OpenGL ES 3.0 conformant driver fast enough to run Minecraft at 200fps on an M4 Mac Mini. The work was done transparently using hypervisor traces without examining Apple binaries, following clean-room practices, and included a custom shader compiler, command stream builder, and a full Linux kernel driver for the firmware ABI. The A18 Pro firmware ABI proved significantly more complex than the M1's, with 1.5x as many structs and twice as many pointers. All experiments and provenance evidence were published in public agx-re repositories.

No Bit Left Behind: Using Brute-Force Lifting to Achieve Fully Static Binary Recompilation

Prototype binary lifter brute-force lifts every byte offset of x86-64 binaries to LLVM IR, enabling fully static cross-ISA recompilation without runtime support.

The paper presents a fully static, whole-program binary lifting system that treats every byte offset as a potential branch target, constructing a superset control flow graph that conservatively contains all feasible control flows. Statically unresolvable computed branches are reduced to lookups in a dispatch table pointing to translated control flow paths, eliminating runtime translation machinery on the target machine. A prototype recompiles x86-64 binaries to LLVM IR with no code/data heuristics and achieves fully static cross-compilation to AArch64 using unmodified LLVM backends.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

SEMA-GUARD: Semantic and Graph-Based Vulnerability Detection in Assembly Code

SEMA-GUARD uses semantic analysis and graph neural networks to detect vulnerabilities in assembly code, achieving 85.1% accuracy on a Juliet-derived benchmark.

SEMA-GUARD is a framework that detects vulnerabilities in compiled programs when source code is unavailable, targeting malware, firmware, and embedded systems analysis. It enriches control flow graphs with low-level execution semantics including stack manipulations, memory accesses, and data flow. Evaluated on a Juliet Test Suite set compiled to assembly and split into function-level chunks, it achieves 85.1% accuracy and an F1 score of 0.801, outperforming purely statistical or structural approaches.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch1

Efficient Branch-and-Bound Testing and Verification of zkVMs

ZEBRA verifies zkVM constraint systems via branch-and-bound cardinality counting, finding 11 zero-day bugs across five real-world zkVMs and running 51.5x faster than SMT verification.

ZEBRA reduces zkVM correctness to a solution-set cardinality problem requiring that each constraint system admit exactly one valid execution trace, eliminating redundancies like null-row padding and non-deterministic permutations before counting. It lifts analysis from finite-field witnesses to an integer interval lattice, exploiting that constraints across 5 real-world zkVMs use only 14.0% of theoretical connectivity capacity on average, enabling tight interval propagation. A parallel branch-and-bound search produces concrete counterexamples or certifies absence of violations within a bounded region. ZEBRA discovers 11 zero-day bugs (6 independently confirmed, 3 fixed), is 51.5x faster than SMT-based verification, and verifies 16.5 percentage points more instances.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

SCHERI: Provably Secure Speculation Under the Constant-Time Policy for CHERI (Extended Version)

Researchers formally prove existing CHERI speculation proposals leak secrets and present SCHERI, a processor design with end-to-end Spectre-resistant constant-time guarantees.

The paper builds a formal framework reasoning jointly about capability safety, speculative execution, and information-flow security on CHERI architectures. It demonstrates that existing secure-speculation proposals fail to preserve constant-time confidentiality guarantees and can transiently leak isolated secrets. The authors present SCHERI, a new processor design formally proven to provide end-to-end secure speculation for the constant-time policy, resilient to Spectre attacks.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

GAUGE: A Formal Framework for Measuring Cryptographic Security under Heterogeneous Adversary Cost Models

GAUGE frames cryptographic security as profiles over adversary cost models, certifying a ranking reversal between ML-KEM-512 and AES-128 from a 4–5% memory pricing shift.

GAUGE represents cryptographic security as a function over admissible adversary cost models (a security profile), proves profiles are piecewise-linear and concave, and establishes a rating trilemma when two profiles cross. A polynomial-time linear-programming procedure certifies whether the ranking of two schemes is robust, reverses under admissible models, or is genuinely incomparable. Applied to NIST post-quantum standards, the framework certifies a ML-KEM-512 versus AES-128 ranking reversal from a 4–5% shift in memory pricing and measures lattice-sieving cost drift of 9.79 bits per year over eight years. A hybrid X25519 + ML-KEM-768 handshake reduces combined-break probability twenty-fold at a 2.3 kilobyte cost.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

How Attackers Abuse VSS, and How Huntress Detects It

Huntress details how attackers abuse Windows Volume Shadow Copies for ransomware recovery sabotage and NTDS.dit credential theft, plus detection logic.

Huntress explains that attackers abuse VSS in three ways: deleting shadow copies to inhibit recovery before ransomware detonation, creating shadow copies to extract the NTDS.dit Active Directory database for offline credential theft, and manipulating shadow copy configuration. Because backup agents and RMM tools routinely create and delete shadow copies, raw events are too noisy to alert on alone. Huntress detections instead correlate VSS activity with lateral movement and credential harvesting over a time window, such as an observed sequence of PsExec spawning SYSTEM shells on a domain controller, vssadmin create shadow, a blocked deletion attempt, and DNS reconnaissance against another host.

Huntress · 2d agoResearch