A Rip in NTP | TechSNAP 237 | Jupiter Broadcasting

The OpenZFS summit just wrapped up and Allan shares the exciting new features coming to the file system, researchers warn about flaws in NTP & of course we’ve got some critical patches.

Plus a great batch of questions, a rockin’ round up & much, much more!

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— Show Notes: —

OpenZFS Dev Summit

Earlier this week the OpenZFS Developers Summit was held, as well as the 10th Anniversary party for the open sourcing of ZFS
The first day consisted of networking and presentations
Videos:
The second day was a hackathon at Github’s offices. People worked on a number of different projects, and Nexenta provided prizes to the projects voted to be the best prototypes
Hackathon Presentations
During the hackathon, I worked on a new feature of ZFS to make it easier to tell what command line features the current version of ZFS supports, so my replication script can determine if a new feature is supported or not

Researchers warn about flaws in NTP

NTP is one of the oldest protocols still in use on the Internet. The Network Time Protocol is used to keep a computer’s clock in sync. It is very important for many applications, including cryptography (if your clock is wrong, certificates cannot be verified, expired certificates may be accepted, one-time-passwords may not be valid yet or already expired, etc)
“The importance of NTP was highlighted in a 2012 incident in which two servers run by the U.S. Navy rolled back their clocks 12 years, deciding it was the year 2000. Computers that checked in with the Navy’s servers and adjusted their clocks accordingly had a variety of problems with their phones systems, routers and authentication systems”
Researchers from Boston University announced yesterday that it’s possible for an attacker to cause an organization’s servers to stopping checking the time altogether
“This research was first disclosed on August 20, 2015 and made public on October 21, 2015.”
“NTP has a rate-limiting mechanism, nicknamed the “Kiss O’ Death” packet, that will stop a computer from repeatedly querying the time in case of a technical problem. When that packet is sent, systems may stop querying the time for days or years, according to a summary of the research”
Post by researchers
PDF: Full research paper
The researchers outline 4 different attacks against NTP:
- Attack 1 (Denial of Service by Spoofed Kiss-o’-Death)
- Attack 2 (Denial of Service by Priming the Pump)
- Attack 3 (Timeshifting by Reboot)
- Attack 4 (Timeshifting by Fragmentation)
It is recommended you upgrade your version of NTP to ntp-4.2.8p4
“With the virtual currency bitcoin, an inaccurate clock could cause the bitcoin client software to reject what is a legitimate transaction”
The paper goes on to describe the amount of error that needs to be induced to cause a problem:
- TLS Certificate: years. Make a valid certificate invalid by setting the time past its expiration date, or make an expired certificate valid by turning the clock back
- HSTS: a year. This is a header sent by websites that says “This site will always use a secure connection”, for sanity’s sakes, this header has an expiration date set some time in the future, usually a year. If you forward the clock past then, you can trick a browsers into accepting an insecure connection.
- DNSSEC: months.
- DNS Caches: days.
- Routing (if security is even enabled): days
- Bitcoin: hours
- API Authenticate: minutes
- Kerberos: minutes
Alternatives:
- Ntimed
- OpenNTPd
  - Interesting feature: It can validate the ‘sanity’ of the time returned by the NTP server by comparing it against the time in an HTTPS header from a set of websites you select, like Google.com etc. It doesn’t set the time based on that (too inaccurate), but if the value from the time server is more than a few seconds off from that, ignore that time server as it might be malicious
- tlsdate
- NTPSec (a fork of regular NTP being improved)
Additional Coverage: ArsTechnica

Adobe and Oracle release critical patches

Adobe has issued a patch to fix a zero-day vulnerability in its Flash Player software
All users should upgrade to Flash 19.0.0.226
If you are worried, consider switching Flash to Click-to-Play mode
Oracle has also released its quarterly patch update for Java, addressing at least 25 security vulnerabilities
“According to Oracle, all but one of those flaws may be remotely exploitable without authentication”
All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Java 8 Update 65
Again, consider using click-to-play mode, to avoid allowing unexpected execution of Java
“The latest versions of Java let users disable Java content in web browsers through the Java Control Panel.”
“Alternatively, consider a dual-browser approach, unplugging Java from the browser you use for everyday surfing, and leaving it plugged in to a second browser that you only use for sites that require Java”

A Rip in NTP | TechSNAP 237