GnuPG | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A "severe" vulnerability in GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG)'s Libgcrypt encryption software could have allowed an attacker to write arbitrary data to the target machine, potentially leading to remote code execution. The flaw, which affects version 1.9.0 of libgcrypt, was discovered on January 28 by Tavis Ormandy of Project Zero, a security research unit within Google dedicated to finding zero-day bugs in hardware and software systems. No other versions of Libgcrypt are affected by the vulnerability. "There is a  heap buffer overflow  in libgcrypt due to an incorrect assumption in the block buffer management code," Ormandy  said . "Just decrypting some data can overflow a heap buffer with attacker controlled data, no verification or signature is validated before the vulnerability occurs." GnuPG addressed the weakness almost immediately within a day after disclosure, while urging users to  stop using  the vulnerable version. The latest version can be dow...

A security researcher has discovered a critical vulnerability in some of the world's most popular and widely used email encryption clients that use OpenPGP standard and rely on GnuPG for encrypting and digitally signing messages. The disclosure comes almost a month after researchers revealed a series of flaws, dubbed eFail , in PGP and S/Mime encryption tools that could allow attackers to reveal encrypted emails in plaintext , affecting a variety of email programs, including Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and Outlook. Software developer Marcus Brinkmann discovered that an input sanitization vulnerability, which he dubbed SigSpoof , makes it possible for attackers to fake digital signatures with someone's public key or key ID, without requiring any of the private or public keys involved. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-12020 , affects popular email applications including GnuPG, Enigmail, GPGTools and python-gnupg, and have now been patched in their latest available so...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Security boffins have discovered a critical vulnerability in a GnuPG cryptographic library that allowed the researchers to completely break RSA-1024 and successfully extract the secret RSA key to decrypt data. Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is popular open source encryption software used by many operating systems from Linux and FreeBSD to Windows and macOS X. It's the same software used by the former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden to keep his communication secure from law enforcement. The vulnerability, labeled CVE-2017-7526 , resides in the Libgcrypt cryptographic library used by GnuPG, which is prone to local FLUSH+RELOAD side-channel attack. A team of researchers — from Technical University of Eindhoven, the University of Illinois, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, and the University of Adelaide — found that the "left-to-right sliding window" method used by the libgcrypt library for carrying out the mathematics o...

As far sci-fi movies have been entertaining the public, but their ideas have always been a matter of adoption in real life. Just like in any other sci-fi movie, simply touching a laptop can be enough to extract the cryptographic keys used to secure data stored on it. A team of computer security experts at Tel Aviv University (Israel) has come up with a new potentially much simpler method that lets you steal data from computers — Just Touch it — literally. WAYS TO ATTACK ENCRYPTION There are different ways of attacking encryption systems. On one side, there are security vulnerabilities and weakness in the encryption algorithms themselves that make it possible to figure out the cryptographic keys. On the other side, there are flaws and weaknesses in the people themselves that make it easier than it should be to force them to offer up the keys to decrypt something. But, Flaws and weaknesses in neither of which is necessarily quick or easy to find out, as there are seve...

' RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis ', is an interesting paper recently published by Three Israeli Security Researchers at Tel Aviv University . They claimed that, they have successfully broken one of the most secure encryption algorithms, 4096-bit RSA , just by capturing Computer's CPU Sound while it runs decryption routines. Daniel Genkin, Adi Shamir (who co-invented RSA), and Eran Tromer , uses a side channel attack and through a process called " acoustic cryptanalysis ", they successfully extracted 4096-bit RSA key From GnuPG. " We experimentally demonstrate that such attacks can be carried out, using either a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer, or a more sensitive microphone placed 4 meters away, " The paper specifies some possible implementations of this attack. Some email-client softwares i.e. Enigmail can automatically decrypt incoming e-mail (for notification purposes) using GnuPG. An attacker can e-mail suitably-...