Homeland Insecurity | TechSNAP 220

chris

7 years ago

Google’s datacenter secrets are finally being revealed & we’ll share the best bits. Why The US Government is in no position to teach anyone about Cyber Security, how you can still get hacked offline, A batch of great questions, a huge round up & much, much more!

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— Show Notes: —

After years of wondering, we can finally find out about Google’s Data Center Secrets

“Google has long been a pioneer in distributed computing and data processing, from Google File System to MapReduce to Bigtable and to Borg. From the beginning, we’ve known that great computing infrastructure like this requires great datacenter networking technology.”
“For the past decade, we have been building our own network hardware and software to connect all of the servers in our datacenters together, powering our distributed computing and storage systems. Now, we have opened up this powerful and transformative infrastructure for use by external developers through Google Cloud Platform.”
““We could not buy, for any price, a data-center network that would meet the requirements of our distributed systems,” Vahdat said. Managing 1,000 individual network boxes made Google’s operations more complex, and replacing a whole data center’s network was too disruptive. So the company started building its own networks using generic hardware, centrally controlled by software. It used a so-called Clos topology, a mesh architecture with multiple paths between devices, and equipment built with merchant silicon, the kinds of chips that generic white-box vendors use. The software stack that controls it is Google’s own but works through the open-source OpenFlow protocol.“
“At the 2015 Open Network Summit, we are revealing for the first time the details of five generations of our in-house network technology.”
“Our current generation — Jupiter fabrics — can deliver more than 1 Petabit/sec of total bisection bandwidth. To put this in perspective, such capacity would be enough for 100,000 servers to exchange information at 10Gb/s each, enough to read the entire scanned contents of the Library of Congress in less than 1/10th of a second.”
“We use a centralized software control stack to manage thousands of switches within the data center, making them effectively act as one large fabric, arranged in a Clos topology”
“We build our own software and hardware using silicon from vendors, relying less on standard Internet protocols and more on custom protocols tailored to the data center”
“Putting all of this together, our datacenter networks deliver unprecedented speed at the scale of entire buildings. They are built for modularity, constantly upgraded to meet the insatiable bandwidth demands of the latest generation of our servers. They are managed for availability, meeting the uptime requirements of some of the most demanding Internet services and customers. Most importantly, our datacenter networks are shared infrastructure. This means that the same networks that power all of Google’s internal infrastructure and services also power Google Cloud Platform. We are most excited about opening this capability up to developers across the world so that the next great Internet service or platform can leverage world-class network infrastructure without having to invent it.”
““The amount of bandwidth that we have to deliver to our servers is outpacing even Moore’s Law,” Vahdat said. Over the past six years, it’s grown by a factor of 50. In addition to keeping up with computing power, the networks will need ever higher performance to take advantage of fast storage technologies using flash and non-volatile memory, he said.”
“For full details you’ll have to wait for a paper we’ll publish at SIGCOMM 2015 in August”
Official Google Cloud Platform Blog Post

The US Government is in no position to teach anyone about Cyber Security

“Why should anyone trust what the US government says on cybersecurity when they can’t secure the systems they have full control over?”
“IRS employees can use ‘password’ as a password? No wonder they get hacked”
As I have long said, you have to assume the worst until you can prove otherwise: “The effects of the massive hack of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) continue to ripple through Washington DC, as it seems every day we get more information about how the theft of millions of government workers’ most private information is somehow worse than it seemed the day before. (New rule: if you read about a hack of a government or corporate database that sounds pretty bad, you can guarantee it be followed shortly thereafter by another story detailing how the same hack was actually much, much “worse than previously admitted.”)”
“It’d be one thing if this incompetence was exclusively an OPM problem, but despite the government trying to scare private citizens with warnings of a “cyber-Armageddon” or “cyber-Pearl Harbor” for years, they failed to take even the most basic steps to prevent massive data loss on their own systems. As OTI’s Robyn Greene writes, 80-90% of cyber-attacks could be prevented or mitigated with basic steps like “encrypting data, updating software and setting strong passwords.””
Of course, using Multi-Factor Authentication would help a lot too
“The agency that has been singled out for some of the worst criticism in recent years is the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that is supposedly in charge of securing all other government systems. The New York Times reported this weekend that the IRS’s systems still allow users to set their passwords to “password,” along with other hilariously terrible mistakes. “
“Instead of addressing their own problems and writing a bill that would force the government to upgrade all its legacy systems, implement stronger encryption across federal agencies and implement basic cybersecurity best practices immediately, members of both parties have been pushing dangerous “info-sharing” legislation that will end with much more of citizens’ private data in the hands of the government. And the FBI wants tech companies to install “backdoors” that would give the government access to all encrypted communications – thereby leaving everyone more vulnerable to hackers, not less. Two “solutions” that won’t fix any of the glaring problems staring them in the face, and which may make things a lot worse for ordinary people.”
There are plenty of examples of large networks that are fairly well secured, so it isn’t impossible to secure a large network. However, the number of insecure government and corporate networks suggests that more needs to be done.
The solution isn’t something sold by a vendor, it is the same stuff security experts have been preaching for decades:
- Need to know — Only those who actually need data should have access to it. Lets not just store everything in a giant shared network drive with everyone having read/write access to it
- Patching — Software has flaws. These flaws get fixed and then become public (sometimes the other way around, the dreaded Zero-Day flaw). If you do not patch your software quickly, you increase the chance of the flaw being used against you
- Strong Authentication — Password complexity requirements can be annoying, because they are often too vague. Requiring a number, a lower case letter, an upper case letter, and a symbol isn’t necessarily as secure as a passphrase which is longer. Worse, many systems do not securely store the passwords, making them less secure
- Multi-Factor Authentication — Requiring more than one factor, to ensure that if an attacker does shoulder surf, key log, phish, or otherwise gain access to someones password, that they cannot access the secure data
- Encryption — This one is hard, as many solutions turn out to not be good enough. “The harddrive on my laptop is encrypted”, this is fine, except if the attacker gets access while your machine is powered on and logged in. Sensitive data should be offlined when it is not in use, rather than being readily accessible in its decrypted form
- Logging — Knowing who accessed what, and when is useful after-the-fact. Having an intelligence system that looks for anomalies in this data can help you detect a breach sooner, and maybe stop it before the baddies make off with your data
- Auditing — A security appliance like the FUDO to only allow access to secure systems when such access is recorded. This way the actions of all contractors and administrators are recorded on video, and there is no way to access the protected systems except through the FUDO.
As we discussed before in TechSNAP 214, there are other techniques that can be used to help safeguard systems, including whitelisting software, and only allowing approved applications on sensitive systems. The key is deciding which protections to use where, while generating the least amount of ‘user resistance’

Google Project Zero researcher discloses 15 new vulnerabilities

Researcher Mateusz Jurczyk has disclosed 15 new remote code execution vulnerabilities
The most interesting of these including a flaw in Adobe Reader and Windows that appears to get past all known exploit defenses.
“The extremely powerful primitive provided by the vulnerability, together with the fact that it affected all supported versions of both Adobe Reader and Microsoft Windows (32-bit) – thus making it possible to create an exploit chain leading to a full system compromise with just a single bug – makes it one of the most interesting security issues I have discovered so far.”
“Any of the 15 vulnerabilities Jurczyk pulled from this old but seemingly unexplored area could trigger remote code execution or privilege escalation in Adobe Reader or the Windows kernel.”
Researcher Blog
Video of Exploit
PDF of Slides
Project Zero has also published some other interesting vulnerabilities recently
Owning Internet Printing — A Case Study in Modern Software Exploitation
Microsoft’s MemoryProtector feature actually counters Microsoft’s new extended ASLR protections
“It is possible to use a timing attack on MemoryProtector to reveal the offset used by High-Entropy Bottom-Up Randomization, thus completely bypassing it.”
Analysis and Exploitation of an ESET Vulnerability — Do we understand the risk vs. benefit trade-offs of security software?
In-Console-Able — Developing a sandbox escape chain for Chrome