With two decades of improvement, JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages of all time. The journey started in 1995 when Brendan Eich created JavaScript in just 10 days. From there, it has seen multiple revisions, drafts, and growth in the form of frameworks, API's, modules, etc. Today, we will go forward and list the top JavaScript blogs from the internet so that you can enjoy the lastest development in the field of JavaScript.
According to RedMonk programming language rankings and GitHut.info, JavaScript is leading the pack in the terms of repositories and the most discussed programming language on StackOverFlow. The numbers itself speaks about the future of JavaScript as it has grown beyond the initial capabilities of simple DOM manipulations.
Learning JavaScript, on the other hand, can be a tricky proposition. New libraries, features, API's or Style Guide, pop up almost every day. The speed of iteration is beyond imagination, and that is why reading leading JavaScript blogs are the best approach to keep up with new changes.
JavaScript is blessed with experts that regularly contribute to the community using live streams, videos, blogs, podcasts, conferences and open source projects. An example of a cool experienced Javascript programmer is evilsoft who broadcasts awesome Javascript projects weekly on LiveEdu..
Some blogs are just gold even when they are not updated frequently. To help you reach the best content on JavaScript, let's list the best JavaScript blogs on the internet. The following blogs have a huge fan following and contain epic JavaScript content.
David Walsh is a renowned name in the JavaScript world. He started his career with DZone, but his first real break came while working for SitePen as a Software Engineer. His blog composes of topics related to JavaScript, personal thoughts, guides and much more. The blog design is captivating and is going to hook you up on the first visit. Currently, he is working as a Senior Web Developer at Mozilla.
2. DailyJS
DailyJS is one of the best JavaScript blogs on the internet. The blog was started by Alex R. Young, an entrepreneur and Node.js expert in 2009. However, there are recent changes that don't sound great. Currently, the blog is no longer updated, but that does not make the content useless at all. The blog covers diverse content on JavaScript including frameworks, API's, libraries, etc.
SitePoint is one of the leading web development portals since 2000. The main attraction of SitePoint is the collection of highly detailed articles. They are aimed at teaching something new to the readers. JavaScript, on the other hand, is one of the leading topics on the website where experts around the world contribute regularly. The rate of the new blog post is high, and you won't find a blog post that doesn't teach you something new. Truly, a great learning place for any JavaScript developer.
Not technically a blog, but if you love JavaScript, then you need to follow the website's offerings. JavaScript.com news section is an aggregator for excellent JavaScript news, tutorials, guides, and much more. All you need to do is move to their news section and discover tons of new content surrounding JavaScript. The domain is owned by CodeSchool and is mainly utilized to contribute to the community and a landing page to their courses.
What's the best place to find JavaScript knowledge? The inventor? Well, you are right. Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, keeps his blog with filled with his musings and other excellent thought processes about JavaScript. You can also find videos on the blog. Virtually, the blog is the mind of JavaScript where you understand it in an entirely different manner.
JavaScript Playground is yet another great place to get started with all the different JavaScript frameworks, API, and libraries. The focus is to work with the JavaScript ecosystem and provide high quality blog articles, screencast, and podcast for the audience. They also blog about different JavaScript guidelines, tips, and tricks.
If you are looking for a superhero to fetch you the best resources on JavaScript, then you have finally found one. Superhero.js is a simple website that aims to collect everything related to JavaScript including videos, articles, presentations, etc. The content is divided into meaningful sections such as "Understanding JavaScript", "Organize Your Code", etc. Also, the page is regularly updated with new information.
Another "not a blog entry" into the list — JavaScript Jabber is a weekly podcast on JavaScript. Each podcast is around 1 hour of jabber and will sure have something for you to learn. They keep their tab on everything related to JavaScript, including core concepts to popular Framework discussions.
Is medium a blog? Technically, not, but it contains high quality JavaScript articles. Medium is a way to connect to the audience so be ready to read many opinions on how JavaScript should have been, and what's wrong with JavaScript. Other than the ramblings, it hosts amazing JavaScript content such as Speed Up Web Apps.
Smashing Magazine is one of the oldest websites covering web designing and development. They have a dedicated section for JavaScript, which is constantly updated with tutorials of high caliber. The tutorials surround other web development ideas such as UX, Productivity, etc.
Conclusion
Here are the ten best JavaScript blogs to improve your coding skills. The blogs and mix of other content types will help you to keep up with new changes in JavaScript field, and improve yourself accordingly.
If you are new to JavaScript and want to get started as soon as possible, check out the JavaScript learn section on LiveEdu.tv. And, yes, it is the most popular programming language on LiveEdu.tv which can benefit from your attention! Also, don't forget to leave a comment on how the JavaScript category page can be improved. We are listening!
Dr. Michael J. Garbade
About Author Dr. Michael Jurgen Garbade is the founder of LiveEdu.TV, Kyuda, Education Ecosystem. He is future Venture Capitalist, Future Politician and always on the lookout for the Next Big Challenge. Obtained Masters in business administration and physics, and a Ph.D. in finance with professional work experience in high-paced environments at Fortune 500 companies like Amazon and General Electric. Expertize: Python, PHP, Sencha Touch & C++, SEO, Finance, Strategy & E-commerce. He speaks English and German and has worked in the US, Europe, and Asia. At Education Ecosystem he is the CEO and runs business operations.
How do I get started with bug bounty hunting? How do I improve my skills?
These are some simple steps that every bug bounty hunter can use to get started and improve their skills:
Learn to make it; then break it! A major chunk of the hacker's mindset consists of wanting to learn more. In order to really exploit issues and discover further potential vulnerabilities, hackers are encouraged to learn to build what they are targeting. By doing this, there is a greater likelihood that hacker will understand the component being targeted and where most issues appear. For example, when people ask me how to take over a sub-domain, I make sure they understand the Domain Name System (DNS) first and let them set up their own website to play around attempting to "claim" that domain.
Read books. Lots of books. One way to get better is by reading fellow hunters' and hackers' write-ups. Follow /r/netsec and Twitter for fantastic write-ups ranging from a variety of security-related topics that will not only motivate you but help you improve. For a list of good books to read, please refer to "What books should I read?".
Join discussions and ask questions. As you may be aware, the information security community is full of interesting discussions ranging from breaches to surveillance, and further. The bug bounty community consists of hunters, security analysts, and platform staff helping one and another get better at what they do. There are two very popular bug bounty forums: Bug Bounty Forum and Bug Bounty World.
Participate in open source projects; learn to code. Go to https://github.com/explore or https://gitlab.com/explore/projects and pick a project to contribute to. By doing so you will improve your general coding and communication skills. On top of that, read https://learnpythonthehardway.org/ and https://linuxjourney.com/.
Help others. If you can teach it, you have mastered it. Once you discover something new and believe others would benefit from learning about your discovery, publish a write-up about it. Not only will you help others, you will learn to really master the topic because you can actually explain it properly.
Smile when you get feedback and use it to your advantage. The bug bounty community is full of people wanting to help others so do not be surprised if someone gives you some constructive feedback about your work. Learn from your mistakes and in doing so use it to your advantage. I have a little physical notebook where I keep track of the little things that I learnt during the day and the feedback that people gave me.
Learn to approach a target. The first step when approaching a target is always going to be reconnaissance — preliminary gathering of information about the target. If the target is a web application, start by browsing around like a normal user and get to know the website's purpose. Then you can start enumerating endpoints such as sub-domains, ports and web paths.
A woodsman was once asked, "What would you do if you had just five minutes to chop down a tree?" He answered, "I would spend the first two and a half minutes sharpening my axe." As you progress, you will start to notice patterns and find yourself refining your hunting methodology. You will probably also start automating a lot of the repetitive tasks.
A step by step lab based mini course on analyzing your car network
I wanted to learn about hacking cars. As usual I searched around the internet and didn't find any comprehensive resources on how to do this, just bits and pieces of the same info over and over which is frustrating. I am not a car hacking expert, I just like to hack stuff. This mini course will run in a fully simulated lab environment available from open garages, which means in 5 minutes from now you can follow along and hack cars without ever bricking your girlfriends car. Since you obviously wouldn't attack your own Lambo, totally use your girlfriends Prius.
Below are the topics covered in this blogseries so you can decide if you want to read further:
Whats covered in this car hacking mini course:
Setting up Virtual Environments for testing
Sniffing CAN Traffic
Parsing CAN Traffic
Reverse Engineering CAN IDs
Denial of service attacks
Replaying/Injecting Traffic
Coding your own CAN Socket Tools in python
Targeted attacks against your cars components
Transitioning this to attacking a real car with hardware
The first thing we are going to do before we get into any car hacking specifics such as "WTF is CAN?", is get your lab up and running. We are going to run a simple simulated CAN Bus network which controls various features of your simulated car. Its better to learn by doing then sit here and recite a bunch of car network lingo at you and hope you remember it.
I also don't want you to buy a bunch of hardware and jack into your real car right away. Instead there are options that can get you started hacking cars RIGHT NOW by following along with this tutorial. This will also serve to take away the fear of hacking your actual car by understanding what your doing first.
Video Playlist:
Setting up your Lab:
First things first, set yourself up with an Ubuntu VMware install, and load it up. Optionally you could use a Kali Iinux VM, however, that thing drives me nuts with copy paste issues and I think Kayak was giving me install problems. So support is on you if you would like to use Kali. However, I do know Kali will work fine with OpenGarages virtual car.. So feel free to use it for that if you have it handy and want to get started right away.
Install PreReq Libraries:
Once you load this up you are going to want to install CAN utilities and pre-requisite libraries. This is really easy to do with the following Apt-get commands:
Once this is done we can startup the simulator by changing directories to the downloaded repo and running the following 2 commands, which will setup a virtual CAN interface and a simulator GUI Cluster:
Run the setup Script to get the vcan0 interface up:
root@kali:~/ICSim# ./setup_vcan.sh
root@kali:~/ICSim# ./icsim vcan0
On a new terminal tab we will open up our simulators controller with the following command,
root@kali:~/ICSim#./controls vcan0
Note: that the controller must be the in-focus GUI screen to send keyboard commands to the simulator.
How to Use the Simulator:
The simulator has a speedometer with Right and Left turn signals, doors etc. Below are the list of commands to control the simulator when the Control panel is in focus. Give them each a try and note the changes to the simulator.
Up and Down keys control the gauges clusters speedometer
Left and Right keys Control the Blinkers
Right Shift + X, A or B open doors
Left Shift + X, A or be Close doors
Try a few of the above commands for example Right Shift +X and you will see the interface change like so, notice the open door graphic:
Awesome, thanks to OpenGarages you now you have your very own car to hack
Notice in the setup commands above we used a VCan0 interface. Run Ifconfig and you will now see that you indeed have a new network interface that speaks to the CAN network over VCan0.
ficti0n@ubuntu:~/Desktop/ICSim$ ifconfig vcan0
vcan0 Link encap:UNSPECHWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
Car networks run on a variety of protocols most prevalent being CAN. You can think of a CAN Bus like an old school networking hub where everyone can see everyone elses traffic. This is true to some extent although you may not see all of the cars traffic if its not connected to that particular bus your plugged into. You can think of CAN traffic kind of like UDP in that its send and forget, the main difference being parts of the CAN bus network don't actually have addresses and everything runs off arbitration IDs and priorities. Thats enough background to get you doing rather then reading.
With a little knowledge out of the way lets check if we can see our CAN traffic from our virtual car via the CanDump utility, which you installed as part of CanUtils package above. Using the following command on the vcan0 interface our simulator uses you can view a stream of traffic:
ficti0n@ubuntu:~/Desktop/ICSim$ candump vcan0
Above we can see a bunch of CAN frames, and if we perform actions on the vehicle we will see changes to data values in the CanDump output.However this may happen very fast, and we may not be able to see if for example we unlocked our simulators door. This is because things are changing constantly in the cars IDLE state. One single value changing may not stand out enough for us to take notice or may scroll so fast we cant see it.
Capture and Replay CAN Actions:
One option would be to perform an action and replay it, we should see the actions happen again in the replay if the traffic for the action we recorded is on the same bus network our device is plugged into. There are loads of networks within a car and its not guaranteed our network tap for example an OBD2 port plugin is connected to the same network as door we opened.Or the door may not be connected to the network at all depending on your car and its age or how its configured.
Replaying dumps with CanPlayer:
Another useful tool included with CanUtils package is CanPlayer for replaying traffic. If the functionality we are trying to capture is on the same Bus as the adaptor plugged into the car, or in this case our Virtual CAN interface, we can use CanDump to save traffic to a file. We then use CanPlayer to replay the traffic on the network. For example lets run CanDump and open a door and then replay the functionality with CanPlayer.
Lab 1 Steps:
Run CanDump
Right Shift + X to open a door
Cancel CanDump (ctrl+c)
Left Shift + X to close the door
Run can player with the saved dump and it will replay the traffic and open the door
Recording the door opening:(-l for logging)
ficti0n@ubuntu:~/Desktop/ICSim$ candump -l vcan0
Replaying the CanDump file:(use the file your can dump created)
Nice, so if all went well you should see that your door is now open again. If this did not happen when attacking a real car, just try to replay it again. CAN networks are not like TCP/IP, they are more like UDP in that you send out your request and its not expecting a response. So if it gets lost then it gets lost and you have to resend. Perhaps something with higher priority on the network was sending at the time of your replay and your traffic was overshadowed by it.
Interacting with the Can Bus and Reversing Traffic:
So thats cool, but what about actually understanding what is going on with this traffic, CanDump is not very useful for this, is scrolls by to quickly for us to learn much from.Instead we can use CanSniffer with colorized output to show us the bytes within packets that change. Below is an example of CanSniffer Traffic:
You will see 3 fields, Time, IDand Data. Its pretty easy to figure out what these are based on thier name. The most important part for our usage in this blog are the ID and the Data fields.
The ID field is the frame ID which is loosely associated with the device on the network which is effected by the frame being sent. The ID to also determines the priority of the frame on the network.The lower the number of the CAN-ID the higher priority it has on the network and more likely it will be handled first.The data field is the data being sent to change some parameter like unlocking a door or updating output. You will notice that some of the bytes are highlighted RED. The values in red are the values that are changing during the idle state you are currently in.
Determine which ID and Byte controls the throttle:
So with the terminal sniffing window open put the simulator and the controller into the foreground, with the controller being the window you have clicked and selected.Pay attention to the CanSniffer output while hitting the UP ARROW and look for a value that was white but is now Red and increasing in value as the throttle goes up.This might take you a few minutes of paying attention to whats going on to see.
The following 2 pictures show ID 244 in the IDLE state followed by pressing the up button to increase the speed. You will notice a byte has turned red and is increasing in value through a range of HEX values 0-F. It will continue to enumerate through values till it reaches its max speed.
The byte in ID 244 which is changing is the value while the throttle is engaged, so 244 associated in some way with the increasing speed. The throttle speed is a good value to start with as it keeps increasing its value when pressed making it easier to spot while viewing the CanSniffer output.
Singling out Values with Filters:
If you would like to single out the throttle value then click the terminal window and press -000000 followed by the Enter key which will clear out all of the values scrolling. Then press +244 followed by the Enter key which will add back the throttle ID. You can now click the controller again and increase the speed with your Up arrow button without all the noise clouding your view.You will instead as shown below only have ID 244 in your output:
To get back all of the IDs again click the terminal window and input +000000 followed by the Enter key. Now you should see all of the output as before.Essentially 000000 means include everything. But when you put a minus in front of it then it negates everything and clears your terminal window filtering out all values.
Determine Blinker ID:
Now lets figure out another ID for the blinkers. If you hit the left or right arrow with the controls window selected you will notice a whole new ID appears in the list, ID 188 shown in the picture below which is associated with the blinker.
This ID was not listed before as it was not in use within the data output until you pressed the blinker control.Lets single this value out by pressing -000000 followed by +188. Just like in the throttle example your terminal should only show ID 188, initially it will show with 00 byte values.
As you press the left and the right blinker you will see the first Byte change from 00 to 01 or 02. If neither is pressed as in the screenshot above it will be 00. Its kind of hard to have the controller in focus and get a screenshot at the same time but the ID will remain visible as 00 until it times out and disappears from the list when not active. However with it filtered out as above you can get a better view of things and it wont disappear.
Time for YOU to do some Protocol Reversing:
This lab will give you a good idea how to reverse all of the functionality of the car and associate each action with the proper ID and BYTE. This way you can create a map of intended functionality changes you wish to make.Above we have done a few walk throughs with you on how to determine which byte and ID is associated with an action. Now its time to map everything out yourself with all the remaining functionality before moving on to attacking individual components.
Lab Work Suggestion:
Take out a piece of paper and a pencil
Try unlocking and locking doors and write down the ID which controls this action (remember your filters)
Try unlocking each door and write down the BYTES needed for each door to open
Try locking each doors and what Bytes change and what are their values, write them down
Do the same thing for the blinkers left and right (Might be different then what I did above)
What ID is the speedometer using?What byte changes the speed?
Attacking Functionality Directly:
With all of the functionality mapped out we can now try to target various devices in the network directly without interacting with the controllers GUI. Maybe we broke into the car via cellular OnStar connectionor the center console units BLE connection which was connected to the CAN network in some way. After an exploit we have direct access to the CAN network and we would like to perform actions. Or maybe you have installed a wireless device into an OBD2 port under the dashboard you have remote access to the automobile.
Using the data from the CAN network reversing lab above we can call these actions directly with the proper CAN-ID and Byte.Since we are remote to the target we can't just reach over and grab the steering wheel or hit the throttle we will instead send your CAN frame to make the change.
One way we can do this is via the CanSend utility. Lets take our information from our lab above and make the left turn signal flash with the following ID 188 for the turn signal by changing the first byte to 01 indicating the left signal is pressed. CanSend uses the format ID#Data. You will see this below when sending the turn signal via CanSend.
You should have noticed that the left signal flashed. If not pay more attention and give it another try or make sure you used the correct ID and changed the correct byte.So lets do the same thing with the throttle and try to set the speed to something with ID 244 that we determined was the throttle.
My guess is that nothing happened because its so fast the needle is not going to jump to that value. So instead lets try repeating this over and over again with a bash loop which simply says that while True keep sending the throttle value of 11 which equates to about 30mph:
ficti0n@ubuntu:~/Desktop/ICSim$ while true; do cansend vcan0 244#00000011F6;done
Yes thats much better, you may notice the needle jumping back and forth a bit. The reason the needle is bouncing back and forth is because the normal CAN traffic is sent telling the car its actually set to 00 in between your frames saying its 30mph.But it worked and you have now changed the speed the car sees and you have flashed the blinker without using the cars normal blinker controls. Pretty cool right?
Monitor the CAN Bus and react to it:
Another way to handle this issue is to monitor the CAN network and when it sees an ID sent it will automatically send the corresponding ID with a different value.. Lets give that a try to modify our speed output by monitoring for changes. Below we are simply running CanDump and parsing for ID 244 in the log output which is the throttle value that tells the car the speed. When a device in the car reports ID 244 and its value we will immediately resend our own value saying the speed is 30mph with the value 11.See below command and try this out.
ficti0n@ubuntu:~/Desktop/ICSim$ candump vcan0 | grep " 244 " | while read line; do cansend vcan0 244#00000011F6; done
With this running after a few seconds you will see the speed adjust to around 30MPH once it captures a legitimate CAN-ID 244 from the network traffic and sends its own value right after.
Ok cool, so now while the above command is still running click the controller window and start holding down the Up arrow with the controller in focus.. After a few seconds or so when the speed gets above 30MPH you will see the needle fighting for the real higher value and adjusting back to 30MPH as your command keeps sending its on value as a replacement to the real speed.
So thats one way of monitoring the network and reacting to what you see in a very crude manner.Maybe someone stole your car and you want to monitor for an open door and if they try to open the door it immediately locks them in.
Conclusion and whats next:
I am not an expert car hacker but I hope you enjoyed this. Thats about as far as I want to go into this subject today, in the next blog we will get into how to code python to perform actions on the CAN network to manipulate things in a similar way.With your own code you are not limited to the functionality of the tools you are provided and can do whatever you want. This is much more powerful then just using the CanUtils pre defined tools. Later on I will also get into the hardware side of things if you would like to try this on a real car where things are more complicated and things can go wrong.
Saw that a lot of people were looking for a pcap with WannaCry spreading Using EthernalBlue.
I have put together a little "petri dish" test environment and started looking for a sample that has the exploit. Some samples out there simply do not have the exploit code, and even tough they will encrypt the files locally, sometimes the mounted shares too, they would not spread.
Once I got the sample from the VxStream Sandbox site, dropped it in the test environment, and monitored it with Security Onion. I was super happy to see it spreading, despite the fact that for the first run my Windows 7 x64 VM went to BSOD as the EthernalBlue exploit failed.
This post is about PKCE [RFC7636], a protection mechanism for OAuth and OpenIDConnect designed for public clients to detect the authorization code interception attack.
At the beginning of our research, we wrongly believed that PKCE protects mobile and native apps from the so called „App Impersonation" attacks. Considering our ideas and after a short discussion with the authors of the PKCE specification, we found out that PKCE does not address this issue.
In other words, the protection of PKCE can be bypassed on public clients (mobile and native apps) by using a maliciously acting app.
OAuth Code Flow
In Figure 1, we briefly introduce how the OAuth flow works on mobile apps and show show the reason why we do need PKCE. In our example the user has two apps installed on the mobile phone: an Honest App and an Evil App. We assume that the Evil App is able to register the same handler as the Honest App and thus intercept messages sent to the Honest App. If you are more interested in this issue, you can find more information here [1].
Figure 1: An example of the "authorization code interception" attack on mobile devices.
Step 1: A user starts the Honest App and initiates the authentication via OpenID Connect or the authorization via OAuth. Consequentially, the Honest App generates an Auth Request containing the OpenID Connect/OAuth parameters: client_id, state, redirect_uri, scope, authorization_grant, nonce, ….
Step 2: The Browser is called and the Auth Request is sent to the Authorization Server (usually Facebook, Google, …).
The Honest App could use a Web View browser. However, the current specification clearly advice to use the operating system's default browser and avoid the usage of Web Views [2]. In addition, Google does not allow the usage of Web View browser since August 2016 [3].
Step 3: We asume that the user is authenticated and he authorizes the access to the requested resources. As a result, the Auth Response containing the code is sent back to the browser.
Step 4: Now, the browser calls the Honest App registered handler. However, the Evil App is registered on this handler too and receives the code.
Step 5: The Evil App sends the stolen code to the Authorization Server and receives the corresponding access_token in step 6. Now, the Evil App can access the authorized ressources.
Optionally, in step 5 the App can authenticate on the Authorization Server via client_id, client_secret. Since, Apps are public clients they do not have any protection mechanisms regarding the storage of this information. Thus, an attacker can easy get this information and add it to the Evil App.
Proof Key for Code Exchange - PKCE (RFC 7636)
Now, let's see how PKCE does prevent the attack. The basic idea of PKCE is to bind the Auth Request in Step 1 to the code redemption in Step 5. In other words, only the app generated the Auth Request is able to redeem the generated code.
Figure 2: PKCE - RFC 7636
Step 1: The Auth Request is generated as previosly described. Additionally, two parameters are added:
The Honest App generates a random string called code_verifier
The Honest App computes the code_challenge=SHA-256(code_verifier)
The Honest App specifies the challenge_method=SHA256
Step 2: The Authorization Server receives the Auth Request and binds the code to the received code_challenge and challenge_method.
Later in Step 5, the Authorzation Server expects to receive the code_verifier. By comparing the SHA-256(code_verifier) value with the recieved code_challenge, the Authorization Server verifies that the sender of the Auth Request ist the same as the sender of the code.
Step 3-4: The code leaks again to the Evil App.
Step 5: Now, Evil App must send the code_verifier together with the code. Unfortunatelly, the App does not have it and is not able to compute it. Thus, it cannot redeem the code.
PKCE Bypass via App Impersonation
Again, PKCE binds the Auth Request to the coderedemption.
The question rises, if an Evil App can build its own Auth Request with its own code_verifier, code_challenge and challenge_method.The short answer is – yes, it can.
Figure 3: Bypassing PKCE via the App Impersonation attack
Step 1: The Evil App generates an Auth Request. The Auth Request contains the client_id and redirect_uri of the Honest App. Thus, the User and the Authorization Server cannot recognize that the Evil App initiates this request.
Step 2-4: These steps do not deviate from the previous description in Figure 2.
Step 5: In Step 5 the Evil App sends the code_verifier used for the computation of the code_challenge. Thus, the stolen code can be successfully redeemed and the Evil App receives the access_token and id_token.
OAuth 2.0 for Native Apps
The attack cannot be prevented by PKCE. However, the IETF working group is currently working on a Draft describing recommendations for using OAuth 2.0 for native apps.
