ITSEC Newsletter 2024-08-22

After the past several decades of humanity putting all of its collective knowledge online, we are seeing more ways to prevent us from accessing it. Not only is good information harder to find, bad information is drowning it out. There are increasing incentives to gatekeep and collect rent on important resources, and to disseminate junk that is useless at best, and harmful at worst. In all of this chaos, the real threat is the loss of useful, verified, and trusted information, for the sake of monetizing the opposite. Fortunately, there are still hackers. For every smokescreen that clouds our vision, hackers help to clear the air. For every new garden wall erected, hackers forge a path around it. For every lock placed on our own ideas and cultural artifacts, hackers craft durable picks to unshackle them. Hackers try to understand what lies beyond their perspective. Hackers focus on what is real, and what is here.

This is the second post in a series on Identity-Driven Offensive Tradecraft, which is also the focus of the new course we will launch in October. In the previous post, I asked, “How does one discover and abuse new attack paths?” In this post, I will share a framework I developed for discovering known and unknown attack paths.

Let’s start from, in my opinion, the most interesting Base64 quirk / feature – that is unused bits in the last coding character. Where do we even take these “unused bits” from? As I mentioned before, Base64 encodes (maps) 3 bytes to 4 characters. To be more precise – entering into “bit maths”, 24 input bits, originally packed into 3 bytes – 8 bits each (what is currently the standard but wasn’t always), are outputted using 4 characters, 6 bits each (3 8 = 4 6).