ThinkstScapes

Q3’25 ThinkstScapes
Microsoft-induced security woes
One Token to rule them all - obtaining Global Admin in every Entra ID tenant via Actor tokens
Dirk-jan Mollema
[Blog post]
Turning Microsoft's Login Page into our Phishing Infrastructure
Keanu Nys
[Slides] [Video]
You snooze you lose: RPC-Racer winning RPC endpoints against services
Ron Ben Yizhak
[Slides] [Code] [Video]
Internal Domain Name Collision 2.0
Philippe Caturegli
[Slides] [Video]
Logs are not always as they appear
Source IP Spoofing in Cloud Logs: A Hands-On Look Across AWS, Azure, and GCP
Eliav Livneh
[Video]
I'm in Your Logs Now, Deceiving Your Analysts and Blinding Your EDR
Olaf Hartong
[Slides] [Code]
From Spoofing to Tunneling: New Red Team's Networking Techniques for Initial Access and Evasion
Shu-Hao Tung
[Slides] [Paper] [Video]
Autobots roll out!
Automating software security with LLMs
Tyler Nighswander
[Site] [Code] [Video]
Agents Built From Alloys
Albert Ziegler
[Blog post] [Dataset]
AI Agents for Offsec with Zero False Positives
Brendan Dolan-Gavitt
[Slides]
Are CAPTCHAs Still Bot-hard? Generalized Visual CAPTCHA Solving with Agentic Vision Language Model
Xiwen Teoh, Yun Lin, Siqi Li, Ruofan Liu, Avi Sollomoni, Yaniv Harel, and Jin Song Dong
[Site] [Paper] [Code]
Good vibrations
Invisible Ears at Your Fingertips: Acoustic Eavesdropping via Mouse Sensors
Mohamad Habib Fakih, Rahul Dharmaji, Youssef Mahmoud, Halima Bouzidi, and Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque
[Site] [Paper]
TimeTravel: Real-time Timing Drift Attack on System Time Using Acoustic Waves
Jianshuo Liu, Hong Li, Haining Wang, Mengjie Sun, Hui Wen, Jinfa Wang, and Limin Sun
[Paper]
Nifty sundries
Crescent library brings privacy to digital identity systems
Christian Paquin, Guru-Vamsi Policharla, and Greg Zaverucha
[Blog post] [Paper] [Code]
Journey to the center of the PSTN: How I became a phone company, and how you can too
Enzo Damato
[Slides] [Video]
Safe Harbor or Hostile Waters: Unveiling the Hidden Perils of the TorchScript Engine in PyTorch
Ji'an Zhou and Lishuo Song
[Slides]
Ghosts in the Machine Check – Conjuring Hardware Failures for Cross-ring Privilege Escalation
Christopher Domas
[Slides] [Code] [Video]
Machine Against the RAG: Jamming Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Blocker Documents
Avital Shafran, Roei Schuster, and Vitaly Shmatikov
[Paper] [Code]
Inverting the Xorshift128+ random number generator
Scott Contini
[Blog post] [Code]

ThinkstScapes Q2’25
Networking is always tricky
Beyond the Horizon: Uncovering Hosts and Services Behind Misconfigured Firewalls
Qing Deng, Juefei Pu, Zhaowei Tan, Zhiyun Qian, and Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy
[Paper]
0.0.0.0 Day: Exploiting Localhost APIs From The Browser
Avi Lumelsky and Gal Elbaz
[Blog post] [Video]
Local Mess: Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android
Aniketh Girish, Gunes Acar, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Nipuna Weerasekara, and Tim Vlummens
[Website]
Transport Layer Obscurity: Circumventing SNI Censorship on the TLS-Layer
Niklas Niere, Felix Lange, Juraj Somorovsky, and Robert Merget
[Code] [Paper]
Language models large and small
The road to Top 1: How XBOW did it
Nico Waisman
[Blog post]
AI and Secure Code Generation
Dave Aitel and Dan Geer
[Blog post]
A look at CloudFlare’s AI-coded OAuth library
Neil Madden
[Blog post]
How I used o3 to find CVE-2025-37899, a remote zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s SMB implementation
Sean Heelan
[Blog post] [Code]
Enhancing Secret Detection in Cybersecurity with Small LMs
Danny Lazarev and Erez Harush
[Blog post] [Video]
BAIT: Large Language Model Backdoor Scanning by Inverting Attack Target
Guangyu Shen, Siyuan Cheng, Zhuo Zhang, Guanhong Tao, Kaiyuan Zhang, Hanxi Guo, Lu Yan, Xiaolong Jin, Shengwei An, Shiqing Ma, and Xiangyu Zhang
[Code] [Paper]
When parsing goes right, and when it goes wrong
3DGen: AI-Assisted Generation of Provably Correct Binary Format Parsers
Sarah Fakhoury, Markus Kuppe, Shuvendu K. Lahiri, Tahina Ramananandro, and Nikhil Swamy
[Slides] [Paper]
GDBMiner: Mining Precise Input Grammars on (Almost) Any System
Max Eisele, Johannes Hägele, Christopher Huth, and Andreas Zeller
[Paper] [Code]
Parser Differentials: When Interpretation Becomes a Vulnerability
Joernchen / Joern Schneeweisz
[Slides] [Video]
Inbox Invasion: Exploiting MIME Ambiguities to Evade Email Attachment Detectors
Jiahe Zhang, Jianjun Chen, Qi Wang, Hangyu Zhang, Shengqiang Li, Chuhan Wang, Jianwei Zhuge, and Haixin Duan
[Slides] [Paper] [Code]
Nifty sundries
Impostor Syndrome: Hacking Apple MDMs Using Rogue Device Enrolments
Marcell Molnár and Magdalena Oczadły
[Slides] 
Your Cable, My Antenna: Eavesdropping Serial Communication via Backscatter Signals
Lina Pu, Yu Luo, Song Han, and Junming Diao
[Paper]
GoSonar: Detecting Logical Vulnerabilities in Memory Safe Language Using Inductive Constraint Reasoning
Md Sakib Anwar, Carter Yagemann, and Zhiqiang Lin
[Paper] [Code]
Show Me Your ID(E)!: How APTs Abuse IDEs
Tom Fakterman and Daniel Frank
[Slides] [Video]
Inviter Threat: Managing Security in a new Cloud Deployment Model
Meg Ashby
[Video]
Carrier Tokens—A Game-Changer Towards SMS OTP Free World!
Kazi Wali Ullah
[Slides] [Code] [Video]

ThinkstScapes Q1’25
Putting it into practice
Homomorphic Encryption across Apple features
Rehan Rishi, Haris Mughees, Fabian Boemer, Karl Tarbe, Nicholas Genise, Akshay Wadia, and Ruiyu Zhu
[Code] [Paper] [Video]
Beyond the Hook: A Technical Deep Dive into Modern Phishing Methodologies
Alexandre Nesic
[Blog] 
How to Backdoor Large Language Models
Shrivu Shankar
[Blog] [Code] 
Buccaneers of the Binary: Plundering Compiler Optimizations for Decompilation Treasure
Zion Leonahenahe Basque
[Code] [Video]
Software Screws Around, Reverse Engineering Finds Out: How Independent, Adversarial Research Informs Government Regulation
Andy Sellars and Michael A. Specter
[Video] [Website]
Understanding things all the way down
PhantomLiDAR: Cross-modality Signal Injection Attacks against LiDAR
Zizhi Jin, Qinhong Jiang, Xuancun Lu, Chen Yan, Xiaoyu Ji, and Wenyuan Xu
[Paper] [Demo Videos]
Full-stack Reverse Engineering of the Original Microsoft Xbox
Markus Gaasedelen
[Video]
Wallbleed: A Memory Disclosure Vulnerability in the Great Firewall of China
Shencha Fan, Jackson Sippe, Sakamoto San, Jade Sheffey, David Fifield, Amir Houmansadr, Elson Wedwards, and Eric Wustrow
[Paper]
Scaling software (in)security
Low-Effort Denial of Service with Recursion
Alexis Challande and Brad Swain
[Paper] [Video]
Is this memory safety here in the room with us?
Thomas Dullien (Halvar Flake)
[Slides] [Video]
How to gain code execution on millions of people and hundreds of popular apps
Eva
[Blog]
Node is a loader
Tom Steele
[Blog]
Mixing up Public and Private Keys in OpenID Connect deployments
Hanno Böck
[Blog] [Code]
Nifty sundries
Will It Run? Fooling EDRs With Command Lines Using Empirical Data
Wietze Beukema
[Tool site] [Code] [Video]
Homoglyph-Based Attacks: Circumventing LLM Detectors
Aldan Creo
[Paper] [Code] [Video]
28 Months Later - The Ongoing Evolution of Russia's Cyber Operations
The Grugq
[Slides] [Podcast interview]
‘It's Not Paranoia If They're Really After You’: When Announcing Deception Technology Can Change Attacker Decisions
Andrew Reeves and Debi Ashenden
[Paper]
Off-Path TCP Hijacking in Wi-Fi Networks: A Packet-Size Side Channel Attack
Ziqiang Wang, Xuewei Feng, Qi Li, Kun Sun, Yuxiang Yang, Mengyuan Li, Ganqiu Du, Ke Xu, and Jianping Wu
[Paper] [Code]

ThinkstScapes Q4’24
Wins and losses in the Microsoft ecosystem
Pointer Problems - Why We’re Refactoring the Windows Kernel
Joe Bialek
[Video]
Defending off the land
Casey Smith, Jacob Torrey, and Marco Slaviero
[Slides] [Code]
Unveiling the Power of Intune: Leveraging Intune for Breaking Into Your Cloud and On-Premise
Yuya Chudo
[Slides] [Code]
From Simulation to Tenant Takeover
Vaisha Bernard
[Video]
From Convenience to Contagion: The Libarchive Vulnerabilities Lurking in Windows 11
NiNi Chen
[Slides] [Video]
LLM hype continues, as do the security issues
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
Simon Willison
[Blog]
AI Meets Git: Unmasking Security Flaws in Qodo Merge
Nils Amiet
[Slides] [Video] [Blog]
Suicide Bot: New AI Attack Causes LLM to Provide Potential “Self-Harm” Instructions
Gadi Evron
[Blog]
Diving deep, then diving deeper
Breaking NATO Radio Encryption
Lukas Stennes
[Paper] [Video]
Exploiting File Writes in Hardened Environments
Stefan Schiller
[Blog] [Video]
Hacking yourself a satellite - recovering BEESAT-1
PistonMiner
[Video]
IRIS: Non-Destructive Inspection of Silicon
Andrew 'bunnie' Huang
[Blog] [Paper] [Video]
SQL Injection Isn't Dead
Paul Gerste
[Slides] [Video]
Nifty sundries
What Developers Get for Free?
Louis Nyffenegger
[Video]
Dialing into the Past: RCE via the Fax Machine – Because Why Not?
Rick de Jager and Carlo Meijer
[Video]
Broken isolation - Draining your Credentials from Popular macOS Password Managers
Wojciech Reguła
[Slides] [Video]
I'll Be There for You! Perpetual Availability in the A8 MVX System
André Rösti, Stijn Volckaert, Michael Franz, and Alexios Voulimeneas
[Code] [Paper]
Exploring and Exploiting an Android “Smart POS” Payment Terminal
Jacopo Jannone
[Video]

Themes covered in this episode
Edge cases at scale still matter
Works from this theme exploit rarely-occurring issues, but with an internet-wide aperture to end up with impressive results. Look for: mechanising bit-squatting; static code analysis for vulnerabilities across all browser extensions, or across web ecosystems; and how Let’s Encrypt worries about revoking and reissuing 400M certificates in a week.
Going above and beyond
Talks and papers often use state-of-the-art tooling to measure/detect an interesting phenomenon. This theme highlights four works that could have followed that path, but also built robust tooling/research data to help others push the state-of-the-art forward. Look for: large scale collection and remediation of dangling domains and static secret leaks, preventing memory-corruption vulnerabilities across the Android ecosystem, remote timing attack frameworks, and SSH testing at scale.
What goes on behind the curtain can be dangerous
Modern IT systems are composed of many layers. Usually the details at lower levels can be abstracted and safely put out of mind. This theme highlights work that shows that what happens in these oft-ignored places can have significant impacts. See: AWS-internal resources built on your behalf, BGP security weaknesses, stealthy hardware backdoors in access control systems spanning over 15 years, Wi-Fi management plane vulnerabilities, VPN-OS interactions, and a legacy file-system hack in Windows.
Nifty sundries
As always, we wanted to showcase work that didn’t fit into the major themes of this issue. We cover: bypassing voice authentication with only a picture of the victim’s face, racking up bills on locked credit cards, email parsing confusion, scanning IPv6, and a timing attack on remote web clients.
Edge cases at scale still matter
Flipping Bits: Your Credentials Are Certainly Mine
Joohoi and STÖK
[Code] [Video]
Universal Code Execution by Chaining Messages in Browser Extensions
Eugene Lim
[Blog] [Video]
CVE Hunting Made Easy
Eddie Zhang
[Blog] [Code] 
How To Revoke And Replace 400 Million Certificates Without Breaking The Internet
Aaron Gable
[Slides] [Video]
Going above and beyond
Secrets and Shadows: Leveraging Big Data for Vulnerability Discovery at Scale
Bill Demirkapi
[Blog]
Eliminating Memory Safety Vulnerabilities at the Source
Jeff Vander Stoep and Alex Rebert
[Blog]
Listen to the Whispers: Web Timing Attacks that Actually Work
James Kettle
[Slides] [Paper] [Code]
Secure Shells in Shambles
HD Moore and Rob King
[Slides] [Code] [Video]
What goes on behind the curtain can be dangerous
Breaching AWS Accounts Through Shadow Resources
Yakir Kadkoda, Michael Katchinskiy, and Ofek Itach
[Slides] [Code]
Crashing the Party: Vulnerabilities in RPKI Validation
Niklas Vogel, Donika Mirdita, Haya Schulmann, and Michael Waidner
[Slides] [Paper]
MIFARE Classic: exposing the static encrypted nonce variant... and a few hardware backdoors
Philippe Teuwen
[Blog] [Paper] [Code]
Fallen Tower of Babel: Rooting Wireless Mesh Networks by Abusing Heterogeneous Control Protocols
Xin'an Zhou, Zhiyun Qian, Juefei Pu, Qing Deng, Srikanth Krishnamurthy, and Keyu Man
[Slides] [Paper] [Code]
Attacking Connection Tracking Frameworks as used by Virtual Private Networks
Benjamin Mixon-Baca, Jeffrey Knockel, Diwen Xue, Deepak Kapur, Roya Ensafi, and Jed Crandall
[Paper]
MagicDot: A Hacker's Magic Show of Disappearing Dots and Spaces
Or Yair
[Slides] [Blog] [Video] [Code]
Nifty sundries
Can I Hear Your Face? Pervasive Attack on Voice Authentication Systems with a Single Face Image
Nan Jiang, Bangjie Sun, Terence Sim, and Jun Han
[Paper] [Code]
In Wallet We Trust: Bypassing the Digital Wallets Payment Security for Free Shopping
Raja Hasnain Anwar, Syed Rafiul Hussain, and Muhammad Taqi Raza
[Slides] [Paper]
Splitting the Email Atom: Exploiting Parsers to Bypass Access Controls
Gareth Heyes
[Slides] [Paper] [Code]
6Sense: Internet-Wide IPv6 Scanning and its Security Applications
Grant Williams, Mert Erdemir, Amanda Hsu, Shraddha Bhat, Abhishek Bhaskar, Frank Li, and Paul Pearce
[Slides] [Paper] [Code]
SnailLoad: Anyone on the Internet Can Learn What You're Doing
Daniel Gruss and Stefan Gast
[Slides] [Paper]
Conclusions
While we started off 2024 with a modest amount of high-quality works, this has scaled up significantly. As conference publications increase, we do see a slight decline in the number of blogs; there does appear to be some inverse correlation between the two tallies.
We highlighted three themes for this quarter:
Rare events that happen at internet-scale have big impacts.
Going above and beyond in tooling development.
Cross-layer gotchas.
We’re looking forward to seeing how the year closes out with our year in review and the final quarter of 2024.