RSA – Jupiter Broadcasting

State Sponsored Audiophiles | TechSNAP 307

chris — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 21:41:43 +0000

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Trend Micro’s Own Cybersecurity Blog Gets Hacked

We covered the WordPress bug in TechSNAP 306
See also [Security Firm Trend Micro’s Blog Falls Victim To Content Spoofing Attack]https://www.silicon.co.uk/security/trendmicro-blog-security-205197
and WordPress Quietly Fixes Zero-Day Flaw Tom
WordPress was alerted to the flaw on 20 January
WordPress officially released WordPress 4.7.2 to the world on Thursday 26 January.
- “The release went out over our autoupdate system and, over a couple of hours, millions of WordPress 4.7.x users were protected without knowing about the issue or taking any action at all.”
Dan confirms the above upgrade timeline; his WordPress sites were updated on 26 January, between 2:30 and 3:30 EST
Researcher’s Feb 1 blog post with details
WordPress’ Feb 1 10:59 AM blog post
NOTE: Virally growing attacks on unpatched WordPress sites affect ~2m pages
Attacks on websites running an outdated version of WordPress are increasing at a viral rate. Almost 2 million pages have been defaced since a serious vulnerability in the content management system came to light nine days ago. The figure represents a 26 percent spike in the past 24 hours
Google trend chart

Hackers who took control of PC microphones siphon >600 GB from 70 targets

Real information in the blog post
Suggestions: put such devices on their own VLAN, but I’m not sure how their connections work
Large-scale ~= 70 organisations
Most of the targets are located in the Ukraine, but there are also targets in Russia and a smaller number of targets in Saudi Arabia and Austria. Many targets are located in the self-declared separatist states of Donetsk and Luhansk, which have been classified as terrorist organizations by the Ukrainian government.

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Open Server Sadness Layer | TechSNAP 256

chris — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 17:20:45 +0000

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OpenSSL issues a major security advisory, we break down the important details, then go in depth on the real world impact of these flaws.

Plus some great storage and networking question, a packed round up & much, much more!

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OpenSSL issues major security advisory

OpenSSL has released versions 1.0.2g and 1.0.1s to address a number of vulnerabilities:
CVE-2016-0800 (DROWN): HIGH: Cross-protocol attack on TLS using SSLv2
CVE-2016-0703: HIGH: Divide-and-conquer session key recovery in SSLv2
CVE-2016-0702 (CacheBleed): LOW: Side channel attack on modular exponentiation
CVE-2016-0704: MODERATE: Bleichenbacher oracle in SSLv2
CVE-2016-0705: LOW: Double-free in DSA code
CVE-2016-0798: LOW: Memory leak in SRP database lookups
CVE-2016-0797: LOW: BN_hex2bn/BN_dec2bn NULL pointer deref/heap corruption
CVE-2016-0799: LOW: Fix memory issues in BIO_*printf functions
As per previous announcements, support for OpenSSL version 1.0.1 will cease on 31st December 2016. No security updates for that version will be provided after that date
Support for versions 0.9.8 and 1.0.0 ended on 31st December 2015. Those versions are no longer receiving security updates.

As many as one third of all HTTPS sites vulnerable to DROWN

“More than 11 million websites and e-mail services protected by the transport layer security protocol are vulnerable to a newly discovered, low-cost attack that decrypts sensitive communications in a matter of hours and in some cases almost immediately”
The researchers have dubbed the latest vulnerability DROWN, short for Decrypting RSA with Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption
DROWN Attack
“The attack works against TLS-protected communications that rely on the RSA cryptosystem when the key is exposed even indirectly through SSLv2, a TLS precursor that was retired almost two decades ago because of crippling weaknesses. The vulnerability allows an attacker to decrypt an intercepted TLS connection by repeatedly using SSLv2 to make connections to a server. In the process, the attacker learns a few bits of information about the encryption key each time. While many security experts believed the removal of SSLv2 support from browser and e-mail clients prevented abuse of the legacy protocol, some misconfigured TLS implementations still tacitly support the legacy protocol when an end-user computer specifically requests its use.”
LibreSSL is not affected by DROWN because support for SSLv2 was removed long ago
“Recent scans of the Internet at large show that more than 5.9 million Web servers, comprising 17 percent of all HTTPS-protected machines, directly support SSLv2. The same scans reveal that at least 936,000 TLS-protected e-mail servers also support the insecure protocol. That’s a troubling finding, given widely repeated advice that SSLv2—short for secure sockets layer version 2—be disabled. More troubling still, even when a server doesn’t allow SSLv2 connections, it may still be susceptible to attack if the underlying RSA key pair is reused on a separate server that does support the old protocol.”
So even a locked down and tightened up server can be compromised, if a less secure server shares the same certificate
I have seen this with my bank, when I changed settings in my browser to be more restrictive on what TLS versions and algorithms were used, a specific subdomain of the bank’s site would no longer load properly
“A website, for instance, that forbids SSLv2 may still be vulnerable if its key is used on an e-mail server that allows SSLv2”
How many people think to adjust the settings on their email server to protect their web server?
TLS security hit a new low last May with the discovery of Logjam, a vulnerability caused by deliberately weakened cryptography that allowed eavesdroppers to read and modify data passing through tens of thousands of Web and e-mail servers
“It’s pretty practical because if you know you want to target certain websites and they’re vulnerable, you can pretty much set up shop and the next thing you know you have all of these secure connections, the passwords, and everything else,” Matt Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University who has read the research paper, told Ars. “It’s amazing to me that we keep finding one or two of these [vulnerabilities] per year for protocols that are this old. This shouldn’t keep happening. It kind of makes me feel like we’re not doing our jobs.”
“Tuesday’s OpenSSL updates make it impossible for ordinary end users to enable SSLv2 without declaring explicit intent to do so. The patch also removes support for extremely weak 1990s-era ciphers that are key to making DROWN attacks work. The weak ciphers were added to all SSL and TLS versions prior to 2000 as part of US government’s export regulations”
“Microsoft’s IIS versions 7.0 and on and versions 3.13 and above of the NSS crypto library all have SSLv2 disabled by default. Anyone using older versions of either of these programs should upgrade right away.”
“The most general DROWN attack exploits 1990s-era cryptography that uses extremely weak 40-bit symmetric encryption so software would comply with export restrictions. The attacker captures roughly 1,000 RSA key exchanges made between an end user and a vulnerable TLS server, and the connections can use any version of the SSL or TLS protocols, including the current TLS 1.2. The attacker then uses the intercepted RSA ciphertexts to initiate several thousand SSLv2 connection attempts that include an instruction for the server to use the 40-bit cipher. The attacker then compares the ciphertext to all the 240 possibilities”
“Decrypting the TLS connection requires just 250 computations, a task that in a worst-case scenario Amazon’s EC2 service can perform in eight hours for just $440. The researchers devised an alternate decryption method that uses a cluster of graphics cards and takes 18 hours”
“The researchers also devised a significantly more severe version of DROWN that works against servers running versions of OpenSSL that haven’t been patched since March 2015. It allows attackers to decrypt the “premaster secret” almost instantly. An attacker can use the technique to perform man-in-the-middle attacks that cryptographically impersonate a vulnerable server. Scans performed by the researchers show that a significant percentage of servers vulnerable to DROWN are also susceptible to this more severe version of the exploit. The finding suggests that a surprisingly large number of OpenSSL users have yet to install the March 2015 update, which unknowingly fixed the vulnerabilities that make the more severe attack possible.”
“DROWN is an extension of what cryptographers call the 1998 Bleichenbacher attack, named after Daniel Bleichenbacher, the Swiss cryptographer who discovered the underlying weakness in the PKCS#1 v1 encoding function. While considered a seminal exploit for the mathematical insight it provided, it wasn’t considered especially practical, because it required attackers to make hundreds of thousands or millions of connections to the victim server to compromise a single session key.”
“Ironically, some of the Bleichenbacher countermeasures built into the SSLv2 provided precisely the type of data required to carry out the type of so-called “padding oracle” attack that Bleichenbacher discovered. The Bleichenbacher defenses, it turned out, provided its own oracle that exposed TLS version 1.0 and later exposed it to plaintext recovery attacks. The DROWN research is notable not only because it requires many fewer queries to the server, but also because its cross-protocol nature allows attackers to exploit the SSLv2 weakness to defeat the separate TLS specification. The DROWN findings are also significant because they were the first to identify the ineffectiveness of the Bleichenbacher countermeasures, some two decades after they were added to SSLv2.”
Additional Coverage: CSO Online — Latest attack against TLS shows the pitfalls of intentionally weakening encryption
There is actually a second major exploit that is fixed by this recent OpenSSL update
While this one requires local access to the machine, and is much harder to pull off, the results could be quite disastrous
CacheBleed: A Timing Attack on OpenSSL Constant Time RSA
“CacheBleed is a side-channel attack that exploits information leaks through cache-bank conflicts in Intel processors. By detecting cache-bank conflicts via minute timing variations, we are able to recover information about victim processes running on the same machine. Our attack is able to recover both 2048-bit and 4096-bit RSA secret keys from OpenSSL 1.0.2f running on Intel Sandy Bridge processors after observing only 16,000 secret-key operations (decryption, signatures). This is despite the fact that OpenSSL’s RSA implementation was carefully designed to be constant time in order to protect against cache-based (and other) side-channel attacks.”
“While the possibility of an attack based on cache-bank conflicts has long been speculated, this is the first practical demonstration of such an attack. Intel’s technical documentation describes cache-bank conflicts as early as 2004. However, these were not widely thought to be exploitable, and as a consequence common cryptographic software developers have not implemented countermeasures to this attack.”
“We believe that all Sandy Bridge processors are vulnerable. Earlier microarchitectures, such as Nehalem and Core 2 may be vulnerable as well. Our attack code does not work on Intel Haswell processors, where, apparently, cache-bank conflicts are no longer an issue”
“Cache timing attacks exploit timing differences between accessing cached vs. non-cached data. Since accessing cached data is faster, a program can check if its data is cached by measuring the time it takes to access it.”
“In one form of a cache timing attack, the attacker fills the cache with its own data. When a victim that uses the same cache accesses data, the victim’s data is brought into the cache. Because the cache size is finite, loading the victim’s data into the cache forces some of the attacker’s data out of a cache. The attacker then checks which sections of its data remain in the cache, deducing from this information what parts of the victim’s memory were accessed.”
“To facilitate access to the cache and to allow concurrent access to the L1 cache, cache lines are divided into multiple cache banks. On the processor we tested, there are 16 banks, each four bytes wide. The cache uses bits 2-5 of the address to determine the bank that a memory location uses. In the Sandy Bridge microarchitectures, the cache can handle concurrent accesses to different cache banks, however it cannot handle multiple concurrent accesses to the same cache bank. A cache-bank conflict occurs when multiple requests to access memory in the same bank are issued concurrently. In the case of a conflict, one of the conflicting requests is served immediately, whereas other requests are delayed until the cache bank is available.”
“The main operation OpenSSL performs when decrypting or signing using RSA is modular exponentiation. That is, it calculates cd mod n where d is the private key. To compute a modular exponentiation, OpenSSL repeatedly performs five squaring operations followed by one multiplication. The multiplier in the multiplications is one of 32 possible values. All the numbers involved in these operations are half the size of the key. That is, for a 2048 bit RSA key, the numbers are 1024 bits long.”
“Knowing which multiplier is used in each multiplication reveals the secret exponent and with it the private key. Past cache timing attacks against OpenSSL and GnuPG recover the multipliers by monitoring the cache lines in which the multipliers are stored. To protect against such attacks, OpenSSL stores the data of several multipliers in each cache line, ensuring that all of the cache lines are used in each multiplication. However, the multipliers are not spread evenly across cache banks. Instead, they are divided into 8 bins, each bin spanning two cache banks. More specifically, multipliers 0, 8, 16 and 24 only use bin 0, which spans cache banks 0 and 1. Multipliers 1, 9, 17, and 25 only use bin 1, which spans cache banks 2 and 3, etc. As a result of this memory layout, each multiplication accesses two cache banks slightly more than it accesses the other cache banks. For example, in the case of 4096-bit RSA, the multiplication makes 128 additional accesses to the multiplier’s cache banks.”
“Recovering a 4096 RSA key from 60% of the key material requires around two CPU hours and can be accomplished on a high-end server in less than 3 minutes.”

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Hardware Insecurity Module | TechSNAP 232

chris — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 11:27:30 +0000

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How Groupon made the switch to FreeBSD & why. Researches extract keys from a hardware module & Intel’s new CPU backed malware protection.

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Researchers manage to exfiltrate keys from an HSM

“The Gemalto SafeNet Luna HSM allows remote authenticated users to bypass intended key-export restrictions by leveraging (1) crypto-user or (2) crypto-officer access to an HSM partition.”
An HSM (hardware security module) is a dedicated device that is meant to safely store private encryption keys. They usually also provide crypto processing
Rather than allowing a user to have access to a secret key, the user instead passes the file, message, certificate or whatever to the HSM, and it then signs or encrypts the payload and returns it to the user
The idea is that the user never has access to the keys this way
This is how all Certificate Authorities work
“HSMs may possess controls that provide tamper evidence such as logging and alerting and tamper resistance such as deleting keys upon tamper detection.”
Researchers found a flaw in the SafeNet HSMs
“PKCS#11 is a very complex standard with dozens of APIs and wide-range of cryptographic operations, called “mechanisms” for everything from encryption to random number generation. Safenet vulnerability involves the key derivation mechanisms. These are used to create a cryptographic key as a function of another key”
“For example BIP-32 for Bitcoin proposes the notion of hierarchical-deterministic wallets where a family of Bitcoin addresses are derived from a single “seed” secret. Designed properly, key-derivation provides such an amplification effect while protecting the primary secret. Even if a derived key is compromised, the damage is limited. One can not work their way back to the seed. But when designed improperly, the derived key has a simple relationship to the original secret and leaks information about it.”
“Related-key cryptanalysis is the specific branch specializing in these attacks. It turns out that for Safenet HSMs, we do not need to dig very deep into cryptanalytic results. There are at least two mechanisms that are easy to exploit and work generically against a wide-class of algorithms: extract-key-from-key and XOR-base-and-data.”
“Extract-key-from-key is defined in section 6.27.7 of PKCS#11 standard version 2.30. It may as well have been renamed “extract-substring” as the analog of standard operation on strings. This derivation scheme creates a new key by taking a contiguous sequence of bits at desired offset and length from an existing key.”
So, with access to the HSM, you can define a new key, as a sub-string of the secret key. In the case of the example here, they used the first 2 bytes of the AES256 key as a new key
They then used that key in a SHA256-HMAC to encrypt a chosen plaintext
They were then able to take that plaintext, and brute force the key offline (knowing that it was only 2 bytes)
Repeat this 16 times, for all 32 bytes, and you have now recovered the entire AES256 key
“Surprisingly this works not only against symmetric keys such as AES or generic HMAC secrets but also against elliptic-curve private keys (RSA, plain DSA and Diffie-Hellman were not affected.) This is an implementation quirk: these mechanisms are typically intended for symmetric-keys only. For elliptic-curve keys, the byte array being truncated is the secret scalar part of the key. For example the “secret” component for a Bitcoin ECDSA key is a discrete logarithm in secp256k1. Internally that discrete logarithms is just stored as 32-byte scalar value, and extract-key-from-key can be used to successively reveal chunks of that scalar value.”
“XOR-base-and-data suffers from a very similar problem. This operation derives a new key by XORing user-chosen data with original secret key. While there are cryptographic attacks exploiting that against specific algorithms such as 3DES, a design choice made by Safenet leads to simpler key recovery attack that works identically against any algorithm: when the size of data is less than size of the key, result is truncated to data size. XORing 256-bit AES key with one-byte data results in one-byte output. That provides another avenue for recovering a key incrementally: we derive new HMAC key by XORing with successively longer sequences of zero bytes, with only the last segment of new key left to brute-force at each step.”
“Regardless of the authentication mode, the client must have a logged in session with HSM to use existing keys. It is enough then for an attacker to compromise the client machine in order to extract keys. That may sound like a high barrier or even tautological- “if your machine is compromised, then your keys are also compromised.” But protecting against that outcome is precisely the reason for using cryptographic hardware in the first place. We offload key management to special-purpose, tamper-resistant HSMs because we do not trust our off-the-shelf PC to sufficiently resist attacks. The assumption is that even if the plain PC were compromised, attackers only have a limited window for using HSM keys and only as long as they retain persistence on the box, where they risk detection. They can not exfiltrate keys to continue using them after their access has been cut off. That property both limits damage and gives defenders time to detect/respond. A key extraction vulnerability such as this breaks that model. With a vulnerable HSM, temporary control over client (or HSM credentials, for that matter) allows permanent access to key outside the HSM.”
“The vulnerability applies to all symmetric keys, along with elliptic curve private-keys. There is one additional criteria required for exploitation: the key we are trying to extract must permit key-derivation operations. PKCS#11 defines a set of boolean attributes associated with stored objects that describe usage restrictions. In particular CKA_DERIVE determines whether a key can be used for derivation. A meta-attribute CKA_MODIFIABLE determines whether other attributes (but not all of them) can be modified. Accordingly an object that has CKA_DERIVE true or CKA_MODIFIABLE true— which allows arbitrarily changing the former attribute— is vulnerable.”
“Latest firmware update from Safenet addresses the vulnerability by removing weak key-derivation schemes. This is the more cautious approach. It is preferable to incremental tweaks such as attempting to set a minimum key-length, which would not be effective.”
Very interesting research, there is much more detail in the blog post

Operations at Group On, dealing with bit rot

In this free sample article from the latest edition of the “FreeBSD Journal”, Sean Chittenden of GroupOn tells the story of how the company dealt with switching from Linux to FreeBSD to have ZFS protect their important databases backed by SSDs
It turns out, if your organization is already supporting more than one flavour of Linux, supporting FreeBSD is not any more work
FreeBSD brought a lot of new things to the table, not just ZFS, but DTrace, easy custom kernels, fast custom package sets with poudriere, but also, never having to fsck again.
“now it’s one of the bigger items that no one missed or even talks about anymore. Imagine running a fsck(1) on a near line backup server with 288TB of storage.”
“One of the challenges of organizational change: personal anxiety from either learning something new, or trusting something new in production”
GroupOn used a number of 30 minute video call sessions to ease their database team into FreeBSD, with short demonstrations and open Q&A sessions
They filled in the missing bits by hiring external trainers to come in and give a one week crash course on FreeBSD to the entire operations team
In the end, the article is a good guide to adopting any technical change at a moderately sized organization, and talks about both the technical and personal challenges of such a change
Video from BayLISA on same topic

CheckPoint unveils new CPU-level malware protection called SandBlast

“The new software monitors CPU activity looking for anomalies that indicate that attackers are using sophisticated methods that would go unnoticed with traditional sandboxing technology”
“Traditional sandboxes, including Check Point’s, determine whether files are legitimate by opening them in a virtual environment to see what they do. To get past the sandboxes attackers have devised evasion techniques, such as delaying execution until the sandbox has given up or lying dormant until the machine it’s trying to infect reboots”
“SandBlast thwarts the evasion technique called Return Oriented Programming (ROP), which enables running malicious executable code on top of data files despite protection offered by Data Execution Prevention (DEP), a widespread operating system feature whose function is to block executable code from being added to data files.”
“ROP does this by grabbing legitimate pieces of code called gadgets and running them to force the file to create new memory page where malicious shell code can be uploaded to gain execution privileges. This process has the CPU responding to calls that return to addresses different from where they started.”
“SandBlast has a CPU-level detection engine that picks up on this anomaly and blocks the activity. The engine is available either on an appliance in customers’ data centers or as a cloud service running out of Check Point’s cloud. The engine relies on features of Intel’s Haswell CPU architecture”
It is interesting to see this new processor feature being used to detect attacks, but I wonder if it can also be used the other way around, to monitor a system for regular activity
“Check Point is also introducing a feature called Threat Extraction which makes it safe to open documents quickly before they can be run through the sandbox. It converts Word documents do PDF files, which neutralizes malware they may contain. It can convert PDF files to PDF files as well to reach the same end.”
A way to ‘cleanse’ common over-featured file formats of unwanted features like macros, embedded javascript, etc seems like a very useful way to combat malicious files

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Leaky RSA Keys | TechSNAP 231

chris — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 05:03:52 +0000

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Red Hat highlights how leaky many open source RSA implementations are, Netflix releases Sleepy Puppy & the Mac is definitely under attack.

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NetFlix releases new open source security tool, Sleepy Puppy

Sleepy Puppy is a delayed XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) vulnerability scanner
In a typical XSS scan, and attacker (or the scanner program) attempts to send a script as part of some user input (the comment on a blog or something like that, or via a URL variable). This content is then shown to that user, and often times, other users. If I can make a bit of my javascript run on your computer, when you visit someone else’s site, I have achieved XSS
There are a number of scanners out there, and they “fuzz test” all of the inputs and variables they can find, and attempt to get some code they submit to be returned to them
This new tool from NetFlix addresses second level vulnerabilities, and beyond
What if an attacker injects the code on the website, and the website mitigates this, but some other application, internal or public facing, also uses the data from the database, and it then ends up being vulnerable to the XSS
Sleepy Puppy is a “XSS payload management framework”, it generates unique code snippets for each injection, so that when a successful XSS happens, it can be tracked back to its source, even if that is outside of the application where the exploit took place
“Delayed XSS testing is a variant of stored XSS testing that can be used to extend the scope of coverage beyond the immediate application being tested. With delayed XSS testing, security engineers inject an XSS payload on one application that may get reflected back in a separate application with a different origin.”
- Show Diagram
“Here we see a security engineer inject an XSS payload into the assessment target (App #1 Server) that does not result in an XSS vulnerability. However, that payload was stored in a database (DB) and reflected back in a second application not accessible to the tester. Even though the tester can’t access the vulnerable application, the vulnerability could still be used to take advantage of the user. In fact, these types of vulnerabilities can be even more dangerous than standard XSS since the potential victims are likely to be privileged types of users (employees, administrators, etc.)”
SleepyPuppy ships with a default set of assessments includes, so is ready to use out of the box

Researchers announce new iOS vulnerability: brokenchain

The vulnerability allows a piece of malware to access the keychain in iOS, and copy your saved passwords and other secret keys
These keys can then be exfiltrated via SMS or HTTP etc
When the malware attempts to access the keychain, iOS presents a dialog asking them user to allow or deny the action, but the malware can simulate a tap on the screen and accept the dialog
Further, some malware seems to be able to cause the popup to appear off screen, so the user never even sees it
“Special-crafted commands can be triggered by malware — or even an image or video — which causes OS X to display a prompt to click an Allow button. But rather than relying on users clicking on a button that appears unexpectedly, the button is displayed very briefly off the edge of the screen or behind the dock, and is automatically pressed using a further command. It is then possible to intercept a user’s password and send it to the attacker via SMS or any other means.”
“Apple has been told about the vulnerability. The company has not only failed to issue a fix yet, but has not even responded to Jebara and Rahbani.”
Ars Technica found that parts of the vulnerability have existed since 2011, and have been used actively
“DevilRobber, the then new threat caught the attention of security researchers because it commandeered a Mac’s graphics card and CPU to perform the mathematical calculations necessary to mine Bitcoins, something that was novel at the time. Less obvious was the DevilRobber’s use of the AppleScript programming language to locate a window requesting permission to access the Keychain and then simulate a mouse click over the OK button.”
“The same technique was being used by the Genieo adware installer to gain access to a Safari extensions list that’s protected inside the Mac Keychain.”
The same day, another group of researchers independently found the same vulnerability
Windows UAC has a bunch of defenses against apps users accidentally accepting or malware auto-clicking the authorization popups. Maybe we need the same in mobile OSes
“Mac users should remember that the technique works only when invoked by an application already installed on their systems. There is no evidence the technique can be carried out through drive-by exploits or attacks that don’t require social engineering and end-user interaction. Still, the weakness is unsettling, because it allows the same app requesting access to the keychain to unilaterally approve it and to do so quickly enough for many users to have no idea what has happened. And by default, OS X will grant the access without requiring the user to enter a password. The Mac keychain is the protected place storing account passwords and cryptographic keys.”
Maybe the solution is to require the unlock code or password in order to authorize access to sensitive areas like the keychain
“I think that Apple needs to isolate that particular window,” Reed told Ars on Wednesday. “They need to pull that particular window out of the window list … in a way that an app can’t tell it’s on the screen and get its location.”

Factoring RSA keys with TLS Forward Secrecy

“Back in 1996, Arjen Lenstra described an attack against an optimization (called the Chinese Remainder Theorem optimization, or RSA-CRT for short). If a fault happened during the computation of a signature (using the RSA-CRT optimization), an attacker might be able to recover the private key from the signature (an “RSA-CRT key leak”). At the time, use of cryptography on the Internet was uncommon, and even ten years later, most TLS (or HTTPS) connections were immune to this problem by design because they did not use RSA signatures.”
“This changed gradually, when forward secrecy for TLS was recommended and introduced by many web sites.”
“We evaluated the source code of several free software TLS implementations to see if they implement hardening against this particular side-channel attack, and discovered that it is missing in some of these implementations. In addition, we used a TLS crawler to perform TLS handshakes with servers on the Internet, and collected evidence that this kind of hardening is still needed, and missing in some of the server implementations: We saw several RSA-CRT key leaks, where we should not have observed any at all.”
“An observer of the private key leak can use this information to cryptographically impersonate the server, after redirecting network traffic, conducting a man-in-the-middle attack. Either the client making the TLS handshake can see this leak, or a passive observer capturing network traffic. The key leak also enables decryption of connections which do not use forward secrecy, without the need for a man-in-the-middle attack. However, forward secrecy must be enabled in the server for this kind of key leak to happen in the first place, and with such a server configuration, most clients will use forward secrecy, so an active attack will be required for configurations which can theoretically lead to RSA-CRT key leaks.”
“Does this break RSA? No. Lenstra’s attack is a so-called side-channel attack, which means that it does not attack RSA directly. Rather, it exploits unexpected implementation behavior. RSA, and the RSA-CRT optimization with appropriate hardening, is still considered secure.“
While it appears that OpenSSL and NSS properly implement the hardening, some other products do not
It seems RedHat discovered this issue some time ago, and reported it to a number of vendors
Oracle patched OpenJDK back in April
“None of the key leaks we observed in the wild could be attributed to these open-source projects, and no key leaks showed up in our lab testing, which is why this additional hardening, while certainly desirable to have, does not seem critical at this time.”
“Once the necessary data is collected, the actual computation is marginally more complicated than a regular RSA signature verification. In short, it is quite cheap in terms of computing cost, particularly in comparison to other cryptographic attacks.”
Then the most important question came up
“Does this vulnerability have an name? We think that “RSA-CRT hardening” (for the countermeasure) and “RSA-CRT key leaks” (for a successful side-channel attack) is sufficiently short and descriptive, and no branding is appropriate. We expect that several CVE IDs will be assigned for the underlying vulnerabilities leading to RSA-CRT key leaks. Some vendors may also assign CVE IDs for RSA-CRT hardening, although no key leaks have been seen in practice so far.”
Crypto Rundown, Hardened:
- GnuPG
- NSS
- OpenSSL 1.0.1l
- OpenJDK8 (after the April patch)
- cryptlib (hardening disabled by default)
Unhardened:
- GNUTLS (via libgcrypt and Nettle)
- Go 1.4.1
- libgcrypt (1.6.2)
- Nettle (3.0.0)
- ocaml-nocrypto (0.5.1)
- OpenSwan (2.6.44)
- PolarSSL (1.3.9)
Technical Record [PDF]

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Spy vs MSpy | TechSNAP 216

chris — Thu, 28 May 2015 08:36:33 +0000

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Spyware creator mSpy hacked, find out why this breach is particularly egregious, what’s wrong with pcap & why RSA’s death has been greatly exaggerated.

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What is wrong with pcap filters

pcap filters are the language used to filter packet captures, and is used by tcpdump, wireshark and the like
This post is an attempt to look at some classes of problems that the pcap filtering language fails on, why those deficiencies exist, and why I continue using it even despite the flaws.
It also includes a link to a video about the history of pcap
Just to be clear, libpcap is an amazing piece of software. It was originally written for one purpose, and it really is my fault that I end up too often using it for a different one.
pcap is a usermode implementation of BPF, allowing
BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) is a UNIX interface that allows an application to read and write raw packets
In addition to providing the interface to get raw packets into an application (like tcpdump) so you can read them, it also has the ability to filter the packets, so you only have to read the ones you care about
This is especially important when there are gigabits per second of traffic flowing back and forth
BPF Internals – Part 1
Why We Need eBPF
Towards Faster Trace Filters using eBPF and JIT

Mobile Spyware Maker mSpy Hacked, Customer Data Leaked

mSpy, the makers of a dubious software-as-a-service product that claims to help more than two million people spy on the mobile devices of their kids and partners, appears to have been massively hacked.
Last week, a huge trove of data apparently stolen from the company’s servers was posted on the Deep Web, exposing countless emails, text messages, payment and location data on an undetermined number of mSpy “users.”
KrebsOnSecurity learned of the apparent breach from an anonymous source who shared a link to a Web page that is only reachable via Tor.
The Tor-based site hosts several hundred gigabytes worth of data taken from mobile devices running mSpy’s products, including some four million events logged by the software.
The message left by the unknown hackers who’ve claimed responsibility for this intrusion suggests that the data dump includes information on more than 400,000 users, including Apple IDs and passwords, tracking data, and payment details on some 145,000 successful transactions.
There is a crazy amount of personal and sensitive data in this cache, including photos, calendar data, corporate email threads, and very private conversations. Also included in the data dump are thousands of support request emails from people around the world who paid between $8.33 to as much as $799 for a variety of subscriptions to mSpy’s surveillance software.
U.S. regulators and law enforcers have taken a dim view of companies that offer mobile spyware services like mSpy. In September 2014, U.S. authorities arrested a 31-year-old Hammad Akbar, the CEO of a Lahore-based company that makes a spyware app called StealthGenie. The FBI noted that while the company advertised StealthGenie’s use for “monitoring employees and loved ones such as children,” the primary target audience was people who thought their partners were cheating. Akbar was charged with selling and advertising wiretapping equipment.
mSpy Denies Breach, Even as Customers Confirm I
Child spy firm hit by blackmailers – BBC News

About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

Last week a blog was posted claiming to have published the factoring of a 4096-bit RSA key
“The key in question was the PGP key of a well-known Linux kernel developer.”
The other of the rebuttal post, thinks that the researchers are mistaken
He thinks this because, he once thought that he had factored the same key, but then found out otherwise.
A little background:
- “RSA public keys consist of two values called N and e. The N value, called the modulus, is the interesting one here. It is the product of two very large prime numbers. The security of RSA relies on the fact that these two numbers are secret. If an attacker would be able to gain knowledge of these numbers he could use them to calculate the private key. That’s the reason why RSA depends on the hardness of the factoring problem. If someone can factor N he can break RSA. For all we know today factoring is hard enough to make RSA secure (at least as long as there are no large quantum computers).”
- “Now imagine you have two RSA keys, but they have been generated with bad random numbers. They are different, but one of their primes is the same. That means we have N1=pq1 and N2=pq2. In this case RSA is no longer secure, because calculating the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two large numbers can be done very fast with the euclidean algorithm, therefore one can calculate the shared prime value.”
“PGP keyservers have been around since quite some time and they have a property that makes them especially interesting for this kind of research: They usually never delete anything. You can add a key to a keyserver, but you cannot remove it, you can only mark it as invalid by revoking it. Therefore using the data from the keyservers gives you a large set of cryptographic keys.”
He noticed that some keys appeared to contain subkeys that are near identical copies of a valid subkey, but with tiny errors
“I don’t know how they appear on the key servers, I assume they are produced by network errors, harddisk failures or software bugs. It may also be that someone just created them in some experiment.”
“The important thing is: Everyone can generate a subkey to any PGP key and upload it to a key server. That’s just the way the key servers work. They don’t check keys in any way. However these keys should pose no threat to anyone. The only case where this could matter would be a broken implementation of the OpenPGP key protocol that does not check if subkeys really belong to a master key.”
“However you won’t be able to easily import such a key into your local GnuPG installation. If you try to fetch this faulty sub key from a key server GnuPG will just refuse to import it. The reason is that every sub key has a signature that proves that it belongs to a certain master key. For those faulty keys this signature is obviously wrong.”
“Now here’s my personal tie in to this story: Last year I started a project to analyze the data on the PGP key servers. And at some point I thought I had found a large number of vulnerable PGP keys – including the key in question here. In a rush I wrote a mail to all people affected. Only later I found out that something was not right and I wrote to all affected people again apologizing. Most of the keys I thought I had found were just faulty keys on the key servers.”

Feedback:

digital preservation
Pfsense question
ZFS … is Raidz2 fault tolerance offset by rebuild stress/time?
FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS has been sent to the publisher

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The post Spy vs MSpy | TechSNAP 216 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Apple’s Pebble Prejudice | Tech Talk Today 162

chris — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 12:38:24 +0000

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Google’s has launched ‘Project Fi’, a new MVNO. We debate whether the merits of the service. Plus Iran exaggerations, a new cybersecurity bill, apple rejecting pebble, dropbox notes & more!

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Official Google Blog: Say hi to Fi: A new way to say hello

Google’s MVNO is called Project Fi, costs $20/month + $10/GB for data in US and abroad, available for Nexus 6, runs on Sprint and T-Mobile networks

How Google’s Project Fi pricing stacks up to the competition | Ars Technica

Security Companies Accused of Exaggerating Iran’s Cyberthreats Against the US

A widely-read report accusing Iran of hundreds of thousands of cyberattacks against the U.S. is being criticized as hugely inaccurate as well as motivated by marketing and politics, according to a new whitepaper and critics around the security industry. The original report, solicited by a conservative think tank and published by Norse in the lead up to the RSA Security Conference, hit the front page of the New York Times by calling handshakes and network scans “sophisticated cyberattacks.”

House passes cybersecurity bill | TheHill

The House on Wednesday passed the first major cybersecurity bill since the calamitous hacks on Sony Entertainment, Home Depot and JPMorgan Chase.

Passed 307-116, the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (PCNA), backed by House Intelligence Committee leaders, would give companies liability protections when sharing cyber threat data with government civilian agencies, such as the Treasury or Commerce Departments.

“This bill will strengthen our digital defenses so that American consumers and businesses will not be put at the mercy of cyber criminals,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

“Apple now rejecting applications with Pebble support”

We have just had the latest version of our SeaNav US iOS app rejected by Apple because we support the Pebble Smartwatch and say so in the app description and meta-data (we also state in the review notes that “This application was approved for use with the Pebble MFI Accessory in the Product Plan xxxxxx-yyyy (Pebble Smartwatch)”. See copy of rejection reason below.

SeaNav US has previously been approved by Apple with no problem, we have had Pebble support in SeaNav for nearly 2 years and there are no changes to our support for the Pebble in this version. What are Apple doing? Have they gone Apple Watch crazy? What can we do?

Amazon to deliver parcels to Audi boots in Germany

It is not clear when the service might become more widely available but Amazon said the pilot was a “first step” towards allowing all Prime customers to order goods to their vehicles, regardless of the vehicle brand.

Dropbox’s Collaborative Note-Taking Service, Dropbox Notes, Heads Into Beta Testing

Earlier this month, Dropbox was spotted testing an early version of an online note-taking service dubbed “Project Composer,” which appeared to have roots in the company’s 2014 acquisition of collaborative docs startup HackPad. Now Dropbox is rolling out this new service into private beta as “Dropbox Notes” and is inviting teams to sign up.

Onion Omega: Build Hardware with JavaScript, Python, PHP by Onion — Kickstarter

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Ghost of Crypto Past | TechSNAP 204

chris — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 17:58:25 +0000

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We’ll break down the technical baggage that led to the new FREAK SSL flaw & the security ramifications of top executives using personal email accounts…

Plus why just need to stop hiding file extensions. Plus some great feedback & much, much more!

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— Show Notes: —

FREAK attack, new SSL flaw

To really understand this vulnerability we need to go back to the early days of encryption on the internet
In the 80s, the US government imposed restrictions of the export of cryptographic technology
The idea was to prevent other countries from having access to strong cryptography that the NSA could not easily break
The law restricted the export of symmetric crypto over 40 bits, and asymmetric over 512 bits
Use of stronger crypto inside the US and a few other countries was allowed
So, when Netscape invented SSL, they had to have a way to support this weaker “export” crypto
So the web servers that served SSL would negotiate a 40 bit DES encrypted session using a 512 bit RSA key, if the user’s browser did not support stronger crypto
This is one of the historic reasons that OpenBSD was always built and released from Canada, to avoid the crypto export restrictions
The restrictions on strong cryptography export from the US were changed in 1996, allowing the world to upgrade to better crypto
This new attack takes advantage of the fact that this code was never removed from the servers or browsers
An attacker in a MitM position, can modify the initial request sent from the client (which isn’t protected by SSL/TLS yet), to request export grade crypto, instead of strong crypto
The server sees the request for the old crypto, and unless export crypto has specifically been disabled, accepts the connection with the weak key
The client should notice this, and refuse to complete the connection without strong crypto, but due to bugs in OpenSSL and Apple’s
It also turns out, since generating these keys used to be relatively expensive, most web servers like Apache, only do it upon restart, so a long running server will use the same key until Apache is restarted
The attacker could then factor the weak key, and decrypt the session. In the experiments, the keys were cracked in 7.5 hours using Amazon EC2 instances with high end GPUs at a cost of around $100
A researcher project from the University of Michigan found that 36.7 percent of browser-trusted sites still support export crypto, and could be vulnerable to this attack
Many sites still seem to have export crypto enabled, especially government websites, but also large CDNs like Akamai have had it enabled (until the last few days where they have started to disable it). This was likely to continue to support older browsers
“In practice, I don’t think this is a terribly big issue, but only because you have to have many “ducks in a row”: 1) find a vulnerable server that offers export cipher suites; 2) it should reuse a key for a long time; 3) break key; 4) find vulnerable client; 5) attack via MITM (easy to do on a local network or wifi; not so easy otherwise),” said Ivan Ristic of Qualys (which runs SSLLabs.com)
Mozilla’s guide to configuring the crypto algorithms for your web server
Make sure your SSL Ciphers’s directive contains !EXPORT (and !DES, !MD5, !LOW etc)
Additional Coverage – Cryptography Engineering: Factoring the NSA for Fun and Profit
The MITM attack works as follows:
In the client’s Hello message, it asks for a standard ‘RSA’ ciphersuite.
The MITM attacker changes this message to ask for ‘export RSA’.
The server responds with a 512-bit export RSA key, signed with its long-term key.
The client accepts this weak key due to the OpenSSL/SecureTransport bug.
The attacker factors the RSA modulus to recover the corresponding RSA decryption key.
When the client encrypts the ‘pre-master secret’ to the server, the attacker can now decrypt it to recover the TLS ‘master secret’.
From here on out, the attacker sees plaintext and can inject anything it wants.
Additional Coverage – Threat Post
Additional Coverage – Researcher’s Site, covers many TLS attacks

Hilory Clinton uses private email instead of government account to conduct all business at the US State Department

“Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.”
“Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.”
“It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. “
“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.
“Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.”
“How many emails were in Mrs. Clinton’s account is not clear, and neither is the process her advisers used to determine which ones related to her work at the State Department before turning them over.”
It is not clear where the private email was hosted
There are obvious security implications to government business being conducted on email hosted by large public providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook/live or Hotmail
There are even larger security concerns related to bespoke private email hosting
It is unclear if any encryption was ever involved in the emails in question
This same concern can be seen in private companies, where some emails must be kept for 7+ years for legal reasons, yet some employees routinely use a private email address
The other concern with using a private email address is that, when an employee (or Secretary of State) leaves the company, they do not cease to have access to their old emails that may contain privileged informations, and any new emails sent to that address are not redirected to the person now in that role
House committee subpoenas Clinton emails in Benghazi probe

Why we should stop hiding file extensions

An interesting article over at TheStack discusses common problems with user interfaces
In addition to discussing a number of other issues:
Web browsers turning into dumb TV type appliances (hiding the protocol prefix, hiding the URL bar)
The tablet-ification of the web (not everyone is using a tablet, responsive designs are only useful when they don’t reduce functionality for non-tables)
The scroll bar – Apple has inverted the way the scrollbar works, while this new design may feel more natural if you are using a touch screen or a trackpad, it doesn’t make sense for a desktop
But the big one, is the default in many popular operating systems to hide file extensions
This has been a security issue since someone discovered (15 years ago) that if you name a file porn.jpg.exe on windows, people will click on it thinking it is a picture
“Windows users still need to activate extension visibility manually – even though email-transmitted viruses depend most on less-savvy users who will never do this”
This is even more of an issue since we have moved away from 8.3 and “long file names”
In the age of interoperability with other file systems, we now have files that have extensions longer than 3 characters
Thankfully we no longer have to call our pages something.htm instead of .html

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The post Ghost of Crypto Past | TechSNAP 204 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Firewalls Aren’t Magic | TechSNAP 144

chris — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 17:35:04 +0000

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The NSA chilling effect is in full force, and you can probably guess where many companies are feeling too.

Then hidden problem facing IT security and why users expect magic.

Plus it’s a great batch of your questions, and our answers.

All that and more, on this week’s TechSNAP!

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— Show Notes: —

Companies start moving data and jobs to Canada to avoid the NSA

“U.S. industry stands to lose billions as companies spooked by security leaks seek to store banks of personal data outside U.S.”
“It’s also a question of perception. The Europeans want to say to their clients that their information is not in the United States even though it stays in North America.”
Canada is also attractive due to the availability of skilled labour, the cooler climate (requiring less air conditioning) and cheap electricity
Compared to moving data to Europe, the latency to Canada is much lower because of its proximity and diversity of fibre paths
“No one will say which companies have decided to flee the U.S., but they are said to vary from European banking and insurance firms with operations in the U.S. to American oil and gas companies and retail outlets, according to Canadian industry representatives interviewed by the Star”
Cisco has chosen Ontario as the destination of a $4 billion investment that will create 1700 engineering and tech jobs
The 10 year deal will see more than half of the $4 billion spent on salaries
The number of jobs could grow as high as 5000

FreeNAS Mini on Amazon

Some speakers quit RSA conference and call for boycott

After the revelation that RSA received $10 million from the NSA to make a flawed algorithm the default in their BSafe product, a number of speakers and panel participants have pulled our of the yearly conference run by RSA
RSA denies it entered into a contract for the purpose of weaking its products
RSA issued a warning against using the flawed algorithm in September when NIST issued a similar warning after the Snowden documents were leaked
Researchers who have pulled out of the conference include:
Mikko Hypponen – F-Secure’s Chief Researcher – Talk: Governments as Malware Authors
Adam Langley – Google Security Expert
Chris Palmer – Google Chrome security engineer
Taia Global is developing a product called Chimera, a commercial database of “rival state research and development projects” on the basis that knowing what the attackers are working on, lets you know which of your assets they may be out to steal
“Organisers have said that next month’s conference in San Francisco will host 560 speakers, and that they expect more participants than the 24,000 who showed up last year”
Additional Coverage

The hidden threat to network security? Management

A survey and study by Stroz Friedberg called Information Security Risk in American Business was recently released
The study shows much what you would expect, few people take security seriously, although everyone claims to care about it
Most people expect the IT experts to somehow magically keep everything security, while end users go around sprinkling sensitive files all over the Internet and clicking the link in every spam email they get, and opening every attachment
“Insiders are by far the biggest risk to the security of a company’s sensitive information, whether it’s a careless executive or a disgruntled employee”
The horrible stats:
- 87% of senior managers frequently or occasionally send work materials to a personal email or cloud account in order to work remotely
- 58% of Senior management have accidentally sent sensitive information to the wrong person (compared to 25% of workers overall)
- 51% of Senior management, and 37% of mid-level management have taken files with them after leave a job
  +45% of senior management say that C-level leadership are responsible for protecting companies against cyber-attacks
- “Yet, 52% of this same group indicated they are falling down on the job, rating corporate America’s ability to respond to cyber-threats at a “C” grade or lower.”
- Employees disagree, 54% say IT professionals should be responsible for cyber security
- 73% of Employees fears their personal details such as Social Security numbers, birth date, banking information and home address could be stolen
- “Only 35% of respondents reported receiving regular training and communications on mobile device security from their employers”
“BYOD and the use of personal online accounts have become prevalent in American businesses, as workers use their personal smartphones, tablets, and preferred cloud providers to stay productive while at work and out of the office. This is opening the door for businesses to encounter new and emerging threats from hackers, malware, and viruses.”
Full Study

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The post Firewalls Aren't Magic | TechSNAP 144 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The Sound of Security | TechSNAP 142

chris — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 13:27:18 +0000

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Researches prove its possible to extract an RSA key from the noises your computer makes, the NSA foils the great BIOS plot, but we’re a little skeptical….

Then it’s a batch of your questions, our answers, and much much more!

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— Show Notes: —

RSA Key Extraction via Acoustic Cryptanalysis

Many computers emit a high-pitched noise during operation, due to vibration in some of their electronic components.
These acoustic emanations are more than a nuisance: they can convey information about the software running on the computer, and in particular leak sensitive information about security-related computations.
In the report they describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG\’s current implementation of RSA.
The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of some chosen ciphertexts.
Experimentally they 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 (13 feet) away.
A modern mobile phone placed next to the computer is sufficient to carry out the attack, but up to four meters have been successfully tested using specially designed microphones.
They have disclosed the attack to GnuPG developers under CVE-2013-4576, suggested suitable countermeasures, and worked with the developers to test them. New versions of GnuPG 1.x and of libgcrypt (which underlies GnuPG 2.x), containing these countermeasures and resisting our current key-extraction attack, were released concurrently with the first public posting of these results
PDF Report
Adi Shamir – Wikipedia
Inventor of SSSS (Shamir\’s secret-sharing scheme)
CVE – CVE-2013-4576

NSA Says It Foiled the BIOS Plot

Called a BIOS plot, the exploit would have ruined, or \”bricked,\” computers across the country, causing untold damage to the national and even global economy.
Debora Plunkett, director of cyber defense for the The National Security Agency described for the first time a cataclysmic cyber threat the NSA claims to have stopped On Sunday\’s \”60 Minutes.\”
CBS suggest China is to Blame, the NSA does not confirm or deny that in the interview.
CBS reported the “virus” would be delivered via a software update to every computer’s BIOS.
The NSA says it closed this vulnerability by working with computer manufacturers.
No further technical, or general details provided.
CBS Airs NSA Propaganda Informercial Masquerading As \’Hard Hitting\’ 60 Minutes Journalism By Reporter With Massive Conflict Of Interes
In the end, this appears to be the NSA stealing the plot from our book recommendation a few weeks ago. Mark Russinovich’s Zero Day – which is very much the same plot (Copyright March 2011), except the attackers were wealthy backers of Al Qaeda instead of the Chinese
In the sequel Trojan Horse , China uses APT techniques to compromise computers at the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, and alter a report about Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program to disrupt international attempts to prevent Iran from getting Nuclear Weapons. Look for this story on the news next year…

Krebs: The Case For a Global, Compulsory Bug Bounty

Security experts have long opined that one way to make software more secure is to hold software makers liable for vulnerabilities in their products
This idea is often dismissed as unrealistic and one that would stifle innovation in an industry that has been a major driver of commercial growth and productivity over the years. But a new study released this week presents perhaps the clearest economic case yet for compelling companies to pay for information about security vulnerabilities in their products
Stefan Frei, director of research at NSS Labs, suggests compelling companies to purchase all available vulnerabilities at above black-market prices.
The director of research for Austin, Texas-based NSS Labs examined all of the software vulnerabilities reported in 2012, and found that the top 10 software makers were responsible for more than 30 percent of all flaws fixed.
Even if vendors were required to pay $150,000 per bug, it would still come to less than two-tenths of one percent of these companies\’ annual revenue
To ensure that submitted bugs get addressed and not hijacked by regional interests, Frei also proposes building multi-tiered, multi-region vulnerability submission centers that would validate bugs and work with the vendor and researchers.
The questions is, would this result in a reduction in cybercrime overall, or would it simply hamper innovation? As one person quoted in the article points out, a majority of data breaches that cost companies tens of millions of dollars have far more to do with other factors unrelated to software flaws, such as social engineering, weak and stolen credentials, and sloppy server configurations.
The Case for a Compulsory Bug Bounty — Krebs on Security
How many Zero-Days hit you today?

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The post The Sound of Security | TechSNAP 142 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Cryptocrystalline | BSD Now 16

chris — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 10:53:55 +0000

We\’ll be showing you how to do a fully-encrypted installation of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. We also have an interview with Damien Miller – one of the lead developers of OpenSSH – about some recent crypto changes in the project. If you\’re into data security, today\’s the show for you. The latest news and all your burning questions answered, right here on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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iXsystems: This is what 80 cores and 1TB of RAM looks like!

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Secure communications with OpenBSD and OpenVPN

Starting off today\’s theme of encryption…
A new blog series about combining OpenBSD and OpenVPN to secure your internet traffic
Part 1 covers installing OpenBSD with full disk encryption (which we\’ll be doing later on in the show)
Part 2 covers the initial setup of OpenVPN certificates and keys
Parts 3 and 4 are the OpenVPN server and client configuration
Part 5 is some updates and closing remarks

FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter

The December 2013 semi-annual newsletter was sent out from the foundation
In the newsletter you will find the president\’s letter, articles on the current development projects they sponsor and reports from all the conferences and summits they sponsored
The president\’s letter alone is worth the read, really amazing
Really long, with lots of details and stories from the conferences and projects

Use of NetBSD with Marvell Kirkwood Processors

Article that gives a brief history of NetBSD and how to use it on an IP-Plug computer
The IP-Plug is a \”multi-functional mini-server was developed by Promwad engineers by the order of AK-Systems. It is designed for solving a wide range of tasks in IP networks and can perform the functions of a computer or a server. The IP-Plug is powered from a 220V network and has low power consumption, as well as a small size (which can be compared to the size of a mobile phone charger).\”
Really cool little NetBSD ARM project with lots of graphs, pictures and details

Experimenting with zero-copy network IO

Long blog post from Adrian Chad about zero-copy network IO on FreeBSD
Discusses the different OS\’ implementations and options
He\’s able to get 35 gbit/sec out of 70,000 active TCP sockets, but isn\’t stopping there
Tons of details, check the full post

Interview – Damien Miller – djm@openbsd.org / @damienmiller

Cryptography in OpenBSD and OpenSSH

Full disk encryption in FreeBSD & OpenBSD

Shows how to install both FreeBSD and OpenBSD with full disk encryption
We\’ll be using geli and bioctl and doing it step by step

News Roundup

OpenZFS office hours

Our buddy George Wilson sat down to take some ZFS questions from the community
You can see more info about it here

License summaries in pkgng

A discussion between Justin Sherill and some NYCBUG guys about license frameworks in pkgng
Similar to pkgsrc\’s \”ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES\” setting, pkgng could let the user decide which software licenses he wants to allow
Maybe we could get a \”pkg licenses\” command to display the license of all installed packages
Ok bapt, do it

The post Cryptocrystalline | BSD Now 16 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Phishin’ Hole | TechSNAP 113

chris — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:23:54 +0000

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We’ll go inside some clever bank malware, a dedicated server provider our very own Allan uses discovers a backdoor…

Plus: Picking the right virtual machine storage, a big batch of your questions, and much much more!

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Inside the Malware

Security researcher Sherri Davidoff profiles the Blackhole exploit kit
Walking us step by step through what the malware does once your computer is infected
It starts with a simple phishing email, in this example just a plain email that says “Hi, as promised your photos.” with a link
The unsuspecting user follows the link, and nothing much seems to happen and they continue about their day
In actuality, their computer has not been infected with the Blackhole exploit kit
A few days later, while visiting the website of their bank, the user is prompted by the page to verify their identity. Over a short period of time, the attack, using a man-in-the-browser attack, was able to gain:
- The victim’s name
- Phone number
- Answers to security questions
- RSA token
The attacker then used this information to wire themselves $49,500 out of the victim’s bank account
However, because this was a large corporate account, the bank requires a second person to authorize such a transfer
The attacker used the MITB attack to ask the victim for the name of that second person, which the user entered
The attacker then asked for the email address of the second person, however the user got suspicious, called the bank and the account was quickly frozen
Once the blackhole exploit kit is installed on a computer, it loads updates and then continues to phone home once every 20 minutes, using a simple HTTP POST request
The researcher also managed to capture a Man-In-The-Browser attack on video, when attempting to login to the BankofAmerica site, the infected computer injects a page after the user submits the login form, but before the information is actually sent to the bank
The injected page claims that the bank does “not recognize” your computer and asks you for a number of details, including your debit card number, social security number, date of birth and mother’s maiden name
These details are not sent to the bank, but rather to the attacker, who can use them later to drain your account
In more sophisticated attacks using this technique, the attacker is actually communicating with your system live, in order to take advantage of the information as you enter it, such as passing on to the victim the secret questions they are prompted for when trying to send a wire transfer
This also allows the attackers, in the situation where they are actively monitoring your computer when you are attempting to access your account, to take advantage of temporary information such as the output of your RSA security token

Dedicated server provider Hetzner finds backdoor

Administrators at Hetzner discovered a backdoor on their nagios monitoring server
After further investigation, they discovered that their web interface for managing dedicated servers (called the Hetzner Robot) had also been infected
This means some personal details of customers, including name, email address, phone number, hashed password, last 3 digits of credit card number, credit card type and expiration date
The actual card number is never stored by Hetzner, it is passed directly to the payment processor who returns a unique token that is used to reference that card in the future
However, customers using direct debit (debit note) from their bank account, may have been compromised. While the information is stored encrypted in the Hetzner database, the key may have been compromised
Passwords were SHA256 hashed with a salt, but it does not sound like they used sha256crypt
“The malicious code used in the “backdoor” exclusively infects the RAM. First
analysis suggests that the malicious code directly infiltrates running Apache
and sshd processes. Here, the infection neither modifies the binaries of the
service which has been compromised, nor does it restart the service which has
been affected.”
Hetzner has hired an external security company to do a more indepth investigation
English FAQ

Feedback:

BSDCan 2013 Videos:

Round Up:

The post Phishin' Hole | TechSNAP 113 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Packet Tells A Lot | TechSNAP 109

chris — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:34:22 +0000

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The nasty Apache Malware we’ve been telling you about has spread to Nginx and others, we’ll update you on the latest.

Plus hackers get access to control systems at Google, a big batch of your questions, and much much more.

On this week’s TechSNAP.

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BSDCan Live, May 17th and 18th

Cdorked Malware spreads to nginx and lighttpd as well

ESET has found more than 400 servers infected with Cdorked in the top 100,000 ranked sites on Alexa
Thanks to information shared with ESET by system administrators of some of the infected sites, ESET has the modified binaries of nginx and lighttpd as well as apache.
Originally I thought the story may have been incorrect, that it was just infected apache behind nginx, but there are actually modified nginx binaries as well
It is still unclear how the servers are being compromised to install the infected binaries, but the small footprint suggests that it is not a ‘class break’, and that the servers may be specifically targeted
ESET has managed to analyze the configuration of the backdoor and find even more ways that Cdorked attempts to evade detection
The configuration contains a very long blacklist of ips, who are not directed to the exploit kit, this list may be harvested from administrative logins of the compromised servers
The servers do not attempt to infect anyone with their language localization set to: Japanese, Finnish, Russian and Ukrainian, Kazakh or Belarusian
ESET says 100,000 of its users have browsed to a page with a Cdorked redirection which was then blocked by their software
Cdorked only seems to target Internet Explorer 7+ and Firefox on windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8, specifically ignoring Chrome, Opera and all devices running Linux or BSD
Cdorked seems to have a special redirection for iPhone and iPad devices, instead of delivering windows malware, the mobile devices are redirected to a page with links to pornographic pay sites
The malware currently being delivered by the infected sites is identified as Win32/Glupteba.G
SHA1 hashes of known-bad binaries:
a53a30f8cdf116de1b41224763c243dae16417e4 bad-apache
a51b1835abee79959e1f8e9293a9dcd8d8e18977 bad-nginx
dd7846b3ec2e88083cae353c02c559e79124a745 bad-lighthttpd
ee679661829405d4a57dbea7f39efeb526681a7f bad-apache-x64-with-symbols
5b87807b4a1796cfb1843df03b3dca7b17995d20 bad-apache-i386
03592b8147e2c84233da47f6e957acd192b3796a bad-apache

Cylance compromises Industrial control system as Google HQ in Australia

Cylance is running a world-wide project to identify vulnerable Industrial Control Systems
While reviewing the logs of their scans, they stumbled across a particularly interest result
The Tridium Niagara Building Management Systems (BMS) for Google Wharf 7, exposed on the internet
They were able to interrogate the device and find out it was running a slightly outdated version of Tridium Niagara, on an embedded QNX machine
They were also able to extract the config.bog file, which contains the username and ‘encoded’ (just encoded, not hashed) password for every user on the system
With the administrative password, Cylance could have rooted the device and had persistent access
The researchers reported the issue to Google, who quickly pulled the ICS system offline
“At the time of this blog post, this exact issue affects tens of thousands of devices on the Internet and thousands of different organizations”
Tridium claims on its website that “there are over 245,000 instances of the Niagara Framework deployed worldwide.”
Cylance scans showed 25,000 similarly vulnerable systems facing the Internet
“If Google can fall victim to an ICS attack, anyone can.”
Additional Coverage – ThreatPost

Dissecting RSA’s packet capture of the VOHO Watering hole attack

This story covers some of the interesting information to can get from even just a few packets off of someone elses network
By analyzing the packet capture RSA releases, a lot of information about RSAs network can be gleaned
First, the source MAC address in the captured frame starts with 00:50:56, a block assigned to VMWare, this is as you might expect, the researcher at VMWare was testing the exploit in a virtual machine
Now, the destination MAC address (the router on the local network) is assigned to 2Wire, suggesting a small home-grade router
The source IP address is 192.168.0.106, what you would expect for a device behind a home router
The destination IP address is the Command & Control server, 58.64.155.59, in Hong Kong
Looking at the IP TTL (128), this suggests the source machine (in the VMWare) is Windows, as FreeBSD and Linux use 64 as the default TTL
Looking at the source port and the fact that it is very low rather than high, suggests that the source OS is Windows XP, rather than a newer version of windows
Original RSA Story “Lions at the watering hole”

Feedback:

Round Up:

The post Packet Tells A Lot | TechSNAP 109 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

GIF me root | TechSNAP 101

chris — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:07:36 +0000

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We’ll explain the MiniDuke malware and the extremely clever way to slipped it’s way into victims systems.

Researchers discovered a way to bypass google two-factor authentication, we’ll explain the details, and we look back at 25 years of software vulnerabilities.

Plug a big batch of your questions, our answers, and so much more on this week’s TechSNAP!

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[asa]B0095ZMMCK[/asa]

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Miniduke malware used against European goverments

A new attack against many european governments has been detected using a new malware called Miniduke
The malware exploits a sandbox-bypass in Adobe Reader
The malware targeted a very small (59) but specific number of people from 23 different countries mostly in Europe
The spear phishing attacks were perpetrated using well crafted PDF files purporting to be NATO membership plans, Ukrainian foreign policy documents or a seminar on human rights
The malware allowed the attackers to copy and move files from the infected machines to their own servers, as well as kill other processes (like security software) and install additional malware
The attack was unique because of the unusual nature of the backdoor that was used and how specific and narrow the targets were
The backdoor contained components written in assembly, a relative rarity in viruses and vulnerabilities
The malware also used twitter as a command and control system, following specific users and looking for tweets containing encrypted commands prefixed with uri!
The malware also used .gif files as an update and distribution method, the gif files had regular images (like the RSS icon) but also contained malware binaries embedded in the image using steganography
The backdoor also gathered system specific information and used it to encrypt communications back and forth with the attacker’s servers (likely to avoid IDS and other forms to detection)
This system specific information was also used as part of the attack, many parts of the malware that were subsequently loaded on the machines, contained code to make them only work on that specific machine, making the job of the security analysts much more difficult, as they could not run the malware on controlled virtual machines or their own machines in order to analyze it
The researchers say the style and methods of the attack are reminiscent of attackers from the 90s
The attack pattern and programming style are reminiscent of hacking group that was thought to have been long disbanded
The group, called 29A (666 in hex) published their first malware magazine in December of 1996 and were active until February 2008, when the last standing member announced the group’s dismissal
Digital Underground Podcast – Intricacies of Miniduke
Full PDF with details

Researchers discovered a way to bypass google two-factor authentication

For the last 7 months, researchers from DuoSecurity and any attackers with knowledge of the vulnerability have been able to bypass Google’s two-factor authentication system, even for Google services such as Gmail
An attacker who managed to steal or guess a user’s application-specific password could then exploit the Android auto-login feature to take over full control of a user’s entire Google profile, without having to enter the result of the secondary authentication mechanism
Once they have access to the profile, they could then reset the master password and disable two-factor authentication entirely, allowing them to completely steal the account
Application specific passwords are a feature created by Google to allow you to use your Google account to authenticate to applications and services that do not support two-step login
This allows you to use your existing authentication to google to access other apps that do not support web based login (like IMAP/SMTP, Chat and Calendar apps)
“if a user has linked their Android device to their Google account, the Chrome browser will use local-device authentication to override Google’s two-factor authentication”
This is a classic case of trading the stronger security that two-factor authentication and strong passwords provide, for the higher convenience factor
The scary part is that this mechanism allowed an attacker to access the Google ‘Account Settings’ portal, where you can change your backup email address, the phone number linked to your google account, and other other settings that are extremely sensitive and important to the security of your account
Researchers clarify that the only way for this vulnerability to affect users in a desktop environment, is when their mobile authentication is compromised and used to seize their entire account
Google patched the vulnerability before it was announced last week
Researchers Post

Google introduces new compression algorithm

A key feature of Zopfli, is that the compression is deflate compatible, meaning the compressed data can be decompressed using the libraries already built into nearly all existing web browsers
Zopfli has a compression gain of 3–8% over zlib, but takes 2–3 orders of magnitude longer to compress, making it only really useful for compression of static data, rather than compressing dynamic data for HTTP streams
For example, to compress a 100mb sample of the english wikipedia, gzip takes 5.6 seconds, 7-zip takes 128 seconds, and zopfli takes 454 seconds
All three compressed files can be decompressed in under 1 second
Google’s goal is to save bandwidth and battery life by reducing the size of text and images transmitted to mobile devices
The research started as an offshoot of the WebP project (advanced lossy and lossless image compression)
Google has open sourced the code as a C library under the business friendly Apache 2.0 license
PDF Paper on the compression savings
Additional Coverage

VRT profiles 25 years of software vulnerabilities

VRT, the Sourcefire Vulnerability Research Team, dug through the CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) database and NIST NVD (National Vulnerability Database)
2012 was the first year since 2007 where the number of new vulnerability was greater than the previous year
However the number of vulnerabilities with a score over 7 (out of a possible 10) was still down each year since 2007
However 2012 had a record high number of vulnerabilities with scores of 10/10
The top types of vulnerabilities over the last 25 years have been buffer errors (buffer overflow etc), Cross Site Scripting, Access control, SQL Injection, Code Injection and Input Validation
Top Vendors with high severity vulnerabilities: Mozilla, Apple, Cisco, Sun, Adobe, IBM, Mozilla, HP, Google, and Oracle
Mobile Vulnerability Share: iPhone: 81%, Android: 9%, Windows: 6%, Blackberry: 4%
Full PDF

Feedback:

+What is the value of a hacked PC?
+ Steal your username/passwords (banking, games, web servers, skype)
+ Steal your CD keys (windows, office, games, etc)
+ Use your computer as a web server (host spam, malware, etc)
+ Join a botnet (click fraud, send spam, launch ddos)
+ Reputation hijacking (using your facebook account to ‘like’ businesses etc that pay the malware author)

Conference Round Up:

How to ask good questions at RSA
RSA – Researchers find ‘beta’ of Stuxnet, making it 2 years older than previously thought – Also found more evidence linking the developers of Stuxnet to the developers of Flame – Paper
Cyber Dialogue – Hacking Back, Signaling and State-Society Relations
RSA – Analysis of SEC filings under new cyber attack disclosure rules
RSA – [VIDEO] Key Source International makes Secure Logon Devices
RSA: [VIDEO] Self encrypting USB hard drive for all operating systems
RSA: [VIDEO] PwnPad – A steathly penetration testing platform
RSA: [VIDEO] BehavioSec – Behaviorial Biometrics for Authentication

The post GIF me root | TechSNAP 101 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

How I Met Your SSH | TechSNAP 99

chris — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:50:04 +0000

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cPanel’s helpdesk was recently compromised, exposing root credentials for many of their customers, plus the troubles at Zendesk that caused quite a headache for twitter and other popular sites.

And we debate if we’re living in a post-cryptography world, plus a big batch of your questions, and much more on, on this week’s TechSNAP.

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Zendesk servers compromised, affects Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest users

Zendesk is a SaaS (Software as a Service) that provides a ticket system, knowledge base and help desk for a monthly fee
It is quite popular, and used by large online services such as Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vodafone, 20th Century Fox, Denver Broncos, eLance, Fiverr, Gawker, Groupon, New Zealand Post, Rackspace Cloud, Scribd, Sears Canada, Sony Music, Xerox, and Yousendit
Zendesk’s blog post says they believe only 3 of their customers were affected (not named, but other sources and the end users who received emails about the issue suggest it was Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest)
Apparently the attackers got access to a database with all of the email addresses of users who contacted those Zendesk customers for support, in addition to the email subject lines, apparently the body of the emails was not disclosed
A help desk is likely to contain sensitive information, especially when used for billing inquiries and password resets, but could also contain API keys, vulnerability disclosures, internal comments, and other information that should not get out
Self-hosting vulnerable software could leave you just as exposed, so the question comes down to, do you trust a 3rd party to do a better job of protection your customers than you will?
Additional Coverage

sshd rootkit in the wild

The sshd rootkit actually targets libkeyutils rather than the sshd binary itself, because previous sshd binary rootkits, have been defeated by updates to the sshd binary
It is not yet clear what the original attack vector is, that allows the attackers to compromise the libkeyutils in the first place
Seems to targets Red Hat and other RPM Based Distros, not clear if other distros are vulnerable
The rootkit does a number of things, including allowing an attacker with a specific password to gain root access, open a listener, and steal all of the credentials that have been used to login to the infected sshd
cPanel support server compromised, seemingly via sshd rootkit
the cPanel support system often requests users enter the root credentials for their servers, so support staff can login and assess/fix problems. These credentials must be stored in a format that can be returned to plain text (rather than being hashed), because the support staff need the original password to login. Encrypting the password (normally not what you want) might work here, but the keys to decrypt would need to be accessible to either all support staff (a key management nightmare) or to the system itself (so it can decrypt the passwords for the users)
Many cPanel customers report that their servers were compromised after they provided their credentials to cPanel support staff, this correlation may be how cPanel determined that they had been compromised, and spawned the investigation

Adi Shamir (the S in the RSA algorithm) says we need to prepare for a post-cryptography world

Speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week as part of a panel Adi Shamir (of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel) spoke about the failure of traditional security mechanisms, including restricting access, virus scanners and IDS (Intrusion Detection Systems) to thwart APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) attacks.
“It’s very hard to use cryptography effectively if you assume an APT is watching everything on a system, We need to think about security in a post-cryptography world.”
The panel also included:
Ron Rivest of MIT (the R in the RSA algorithm)
Whitfield Diffie of ICANN (of the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange algorithm)
Dan Boneh of Stanford University
Ari Juels of RSA Labs
Rivest also talked about the problems with the current PKI systems, especially Certificate Authorities (the Comodo and DigiNotar compromises), as well as the more recent problems with TurkTrust, the Turkish CA who gave out signing certificates to a government contractor that used them to create valid but fake google certificates
Rivest suggests a new system with more tolerance for failures and where users have more control over whom they trust, especially in light of the growing trend where governments pressure CAs to fail, behave strangely or issue certificates they shouldn’t

Feedback:

Resources for Learning More about FreeBSD?
What’s so bad about a double NAT?
What are intermediate SSL Certs?
Fed Requirements Sometimes Force Equipment Online
Internships, Learning, Training up while working 40+ Hours a week? CAN IT BE DONE?
Last week we had a question of uPNP and pfSense – The pfSense blog has the official answer – pfSense uses an updated version of miniupnp, and has always done so, the vulnerable ones are more than 2 years old. Additionally, even if a new vulnerability in upnp is found, In order for your system to be vulnerable, you’d have had to manually add a firewall rule allowing access to upnp from the Internet.

Round Up:

The post How I Met Your SSH | TechSNAP 99 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Token Security | TechSNAP 64

chris — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 15:37:03 +0000

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How attackers can defeat an RSA token in as little as 15 minutes, FBI has taken down an online fraud ring, we’ve got the details. And a botched software update that shutdown a bank for days.

Plus some great audience questions and our answers.

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Show Notes:

Researchers can defeat RSA SecurID 800 tokens in under 15 minutes

Researchers were able to use a ‘Padding Oracle Attack’ to compromise the plain text of an imported encrypted key in under 15 minutes
A ‘Padding Oracle Attack’, is a side channel attack that allows an attacker to see if a message was decrypted successfully or not
By purposely corrupting the encrypted message and/or its padding in different ways, and watching the error message (or even just the amount of time the device takes to attempt the decryption) the attacker is able to gain more and more information about the encrypted message, until they are able to recover the entire message
The researchers developed a more efficient version of the ‘million messages attack’, that only requires to be carried out with only a few 10s of thousands of messages, and found that some devices can be attacked with as few as 3800 messages
Researcher Blog Post
Research Paper
Don’t Believe Everything You Read…Your RSA SecurID Token is Not Cracked
RSA contends that the researchers did not ‘crack’ the RSA SecurID Token, but rather that they exploited a flaw in PKCS#1v1.5
However the researchers show (Table 1 on Page 9 and Table 3 on Page 12) that because the RSA SecurID tokens use a very simple padding check (not checking the length of the encrypted message), they disclose more information about the encrypted message during each attempt, this results in the RSA SecurID tokens taking the least amount of time to compromise
The researchers were not able to afford an HSM, but postulate that their attack could compromise even the more secure ones in mere hours

PayPal starts Bug Bounty Program

Paypal joins the ranks of Google, Mozilla, Facebook, Barracuda and others with bug bountry programs
This resolves a potential legal ambiguity where researchers that were attempting to forge or modify data being sent to the paypal site, might be accused of unauthorized access rather than legitimate research
Colin Percivals BSDCan 2012 Presentation – Crowdsourcing Security

FBI run sting operation nets 26 arrests of attempted ‘carders’

The operation intercepted over 400,000 compromised credit cards
The FBI estimates it prevented $200 million in losses (likely exaggerated)
The FBI notified 47 companies, government entities, and educational institutions of the breach of their networks
Example charges:
zer0 used hacking tools to steal information from the internal databases of a bank, a hotel, and various online retailers, and then sold the information to others, including an individual he believed to be a fellow carder, but who in fact was an undercover FBI agent
JoshTheGod (apparently a member of UGNazi) met in Manhattan with an undercover FBI agent to accept delivery of counterfeit cards encoded with stolen information. He was then arrested after attempting to withdraw funds from an ATM using one of the cards
kool+kake sold stolen CVVs and advertised to fellow carders that he got fresh CVV’s on a daily basis from hacking into databases around the world
- According to the PCI-DSS (Security standard for processing credit cards, CVVs are NOT allowed to be stored in database, they are specifically designed to make databases of stolen credit cards useless, since the attacker will NOT have the CVV value (which is a 3 or 4 digit numeric hash of the credit card data and the banks secret key)

Botched software update as Royal Bank of Scotland freezes customer accounts for days

On Monday the 18th, a glitch was introduced into the banking system at RBS, that prevented new deposits from being credited to customers’ accounts
2012–06–22 – No solution in sight after four days
2012–06–25 – Confidence in the bank starts to slide sharply
2012–06–25 – Details start to emerge about the cause of the problem, the batch processing software (run by an outsourced team in India)
2012–06–26 – Glitch is identified as a problem with an update to the CA–7 batch processing software
2012–06–28 – Confirmation that half the team that runs the CA–7 batch processing software were outsourced to india
Mishandling of batch schedule data while backing out of an update to CA–7 batch processing software last week caused the disruption that led to 16.9 million customers at RBS, Natwest and Ulsterbank being frozen out of their accounts for days, and ongoing issues in some cases.
“When they did the back-out, a major error was made. An inexperienced person cleared the whole queue … they erased all the scheduling”

Feedback:

Q: Alex Asks about: Mirroring Changes Across Hosts
Q: Lawal asks: How do VPNs Work Exactly?

Round-Up:

The post Token Security | TechSNAP 64 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

First Day Fail | TechSNAP 45

chris — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:03:18 +0000

A first day on tech job war story, that’s as rough as they get! Plus details on recent doubt researchers have cast around the fundamental security technology behind SSL.

Plus: Microsoft was caught storing customer passwords in clear text, we’ve got the story, and some questions!

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Show Notes:

Only 99.8% of the worlds PKI uses secure randomness

PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) is a type of encryption system known as asymmetric cryptography
This means there is one key used to encrypt data, and then a different key is used to decrypt the data
In the RSA algorithm, a public/private key pair are generated by selecting two large prime numbers and multiplying them together. This value serves as the modulus (n) for both the public and private keys
Then a public exponent (e) is selected, typically 65537 because it was found to provide more efficient encryption
The private exponent (d) is then calculated as: (d*e)mod φ(n) = 1 Euler’s totient function
An encrypted message (c), is calculated by turning the plaintext message (m) in to an integer, using a padding algorithm: c = m^e (mod n)
To decrypt the message: m = c^d (mod n)
This all seems relatively simple, one just has to remember the scale of the numbers being computed, in a 2048bit RSA key like the one used by your bank or amazon.com, each of the prime numbers has over 300 digits, and then you multiply them together.
Researchers have found that some RSA keys in use on the internet had the same modulus (meaning they were using the same secret prime numbers). This means that the two parties that happen to end up using the same key, could compromise each other
The researchers also found some public keys where it was possible to compromise the private key
Overall, many of the compromisable keys appear to belong to expired certificates and old PGP keypairs, and the danger to modern properly generated RSA keys is much lower
Rebuttal by Dan Kaminsky
New York Times Coverage
Research Paper

Cryptome hit by blackhole exploit kit

Cryptome is a popular and long standing document repository for whistle blowers and others interested in secret information
From the site: “Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance – open, secret and classified documents – but not limited to those. Documents are removed from this site only by order served directly by a US court having jurisdiction. No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here – or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if comical but otherwise ignored.”
On February 8, an attacker managed to upload some PHP code to serve an some malicious javascript that inserted an iframe and loads an attack site that exploits a vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The PHP code specifically avoids serving the exploit when the requesting IP comes from google or a number of other web scanners designed to detect malware, to avoid getting the infected sites blacklisted
By February 14, 16:30 UTC, all files had been restored from backup
Symantec has offered to help investigate the attack
The malware is very common and accounts for a large portion of all infected websites found on the internet
The exact vector that was used to infect the site is not yet known
Details Analysis
Additional Coverage
Official Announcement with extensive details

War Story:

This week we have another in the series of war story sent in by Irish_Darkshadow (the other other Alan)

I joined IBM in February 1999 as a tech support agent for US Thinkpad (laptop) support. The training regime in those days was 7 weeks long with the final 5 weeks each being dedicated to hands on experience with a different product family / line. The call center had two support sections – Aptiva (IBM desktops for home users) and Thinkpad (IBM laptops for business & home users). The most technical staff from Aptiva were usually moved onto Thinkpad support before too long as that was the flagship brand.

Major emphasis during the training for Thinkpad support was placed on never resorting to a reload to solve an issue. We had solid problem solving technique driven into us constantly for the 7 weeks. The only caveat was that if the support call exceeded 1 hour then we should ask a team leader for permission to escalate the case to 2nd level support. I got the distinct impression that to do so was an admission of defeat and the only exception with passing your case over to 2nd level was if there was some procedure or fix that required advanced skills or registry changes.

My first shft was coming in at 16:30 until 01:30 from Monday to Friday which was typical for supporting US based users. For my first few hours on the floor I simply call shadowed an existing agent to get a feel for the type of calls and how they were handled. Immediately prior to joining IBM I had been running my own computer shop but my partner swindled funds from the company and I shut it down and made my money doing freelance work until I got the “I’m pregnant” revelation from my girlfriend and decided a steady paycheck was a smarter option. This gave me a major ego when it came to these mere tech support calls compared to my level of experience and that bit me in the ass on my first time out of the gate.

I finished up my call shadowing and went to my own desk, set up my applications for creating the tickets. My workstation was a P166 running OS/2 Warp 4.0…awesome eh? So once I was settled in I hit the Avail button on my phone and awaiting my first US user encounter. It only took a minute or so for a call to come in then I dished out the scripted greeting “Thank you for calling the IBM PC Help Center. My name is Alan with Thinkpad support. How may I help you?”. Then you let the user give the opening details, capture anything that might be relevant….ask for computer type and serial number to assess warranty status and from there it’s just problem determination.

The user had just picked up a 3Com PCMCIA network card and the thinkpad wouldn’t detect it properly. It was a Win95 preload and the user seemed savvy enough to have installed the drivers properly but nonetheless, I made him go through the entire process again with me listening in. Nothing seemed to be at fault. I got the user to go into Device Manager (making sure the other agents around me could hear what an absolute BOSS I was being in handling this call). Once there I asked if he could see an entry for the card and he did, as suspected it had an exclamation mark beside it. In my head I started to jump forward to possible causes like memory address space conflicts, IRQ conflicts, corrupted drivers or even operating system updates that might be needed to support such a high tech card (yep, I said it…1999…it WAS high tech damn it!). I reckoned that the IRQ conflict was the most likely starting point and asked the user to check the IRQ view in Device Manager and tell me what he saw. As he described the device tree to me I got that sinking feeling. The one were you know that the next thing you are going to do is going to make you look like a complete and total tit in front of the colleagues that you have just been showboating for. The user had explained to me that every single hardware entry in the IRQ list showed the status of “In Use By Unknown Device”. There is only 1 explanation for that – corrupted registry. I had two choices….#1 was to do a user.da0 and system.da0 restore from DOS mode and #2 was admit defeat and reload the machine. #1 was not something that IBM wanted agents doing so I bit the bullet and called 2nd level support to explain. It turned out that the 2nd level support guy was floor walking near my seat and had heard EVERYTHING. He swaggered over with an evil smirk and told me to reload the system. My first call turned into the one solution that we were absolutely NOT supposed to resort to. To cap it all off the 2nd level guy finished with “I’ll be keepin’ an eye on you Elliott. A close eye.” and at that point the only phrase going through my head was “bollocks drink feck arse girls diddy wank!”. And so began my tech support career.

Round-Up:

The post First Day Fail | TechSNAP 45 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

SQL Injections | TechSNAP 40

chris — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:53:27 +0000

We’ll explain how SQL Injections work, plus cover tools you can use to passively discover details about everyone connected to your network.

And Adobe blames some researches for THEIR security mistakes, we’ll explain.

All that and more, on this week’s episode of TechSNAP!

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Show Notes:

Thanks to:

GoDaddy.com Use our codes TechSNAP10 to save 10% at checkout, or TechSNAP20 to save 20% on hosting!

Pick your code and save:
techsnap7: $7.99 .com
techsnap10: 10% off
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techsnap40: $10 off $40
techsnap25: 25% off new Virtual DataCenter plans

Zero day Adobe Reader vulnerability uses to target defense contractors

An extremely targeted attack was carried out against major players in the defense industry using a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader
Only 20 or so machines were targeted, spread across a number of different companies
Specially crafted .PDF files that exploited the vulnerability to execute code on the victim’s machine were sent to a very specific list of email addresses, rather than the typical spam of phishing style attack. This was likely meant to prevent the zero day vulnerability from being discovered so it could continue to be used
The payload of the exploit was the Sykipot Trojan
From analysis of the exploit , it appears to be based on previous research and a proof of concept released by Felipe Andreas Manzano in 2009
Adobe made a point of reminding security researchers that their publicly disclosed proof of concepts are often used as free R&D by cyber criminals. TechSNAP would like to remind Adobe that the point of publicly disclosing the research is free R&D to help/force Adobe to patch the vulnerabilities
The vulnerability was apparently reported to Adobe by Lockheed Martin after they discovered they had been compromised
Adobe announced the vulnerability on December 6th, and released the patch on January 10th
Previous TechSNAP Coverage
CVE Announcement

New version of the P0f network finger printing tool

The tool passively analyzes incoming network transmissions and determines the operating system and other information about the remote machine with a fairly high degree of accuracy
The feature of note with the newly rewritten version is that it can detect many types of forgery, alerting you when the remote machine is who what it claims to be
The tool also features the ability to analyze some application layer protocols such as HTTP
One of the features I the ability to detect user agent forging (spam bots pretending to be running firefox or MSIE)
It is also able to detect some other aspects of the connection, such as NAT, load balancing, PPPoE (common for DSL), VPNs, Transparent and other irregular Proxies, and even tor
This tool could be very useful for fraud screening purposes, ecommerce sites can detect when the user is attempting to mask their identity and flag the orders for additional investigation
This tool could also be used as part of a firewall or man-in-the-middle attack, to detect technologies such as VPNs and block them, in an effort to have users connect without the additional security so they can be spied upon

Verizon Business Consulting analyzes second wave attacks against RSA customers

Typical attacks using email spear-phishing to attempt to place trojans and keyloggers on machines of SecurID users
The objective is to log the username, password and the temporary PIN generated by the SecurID Token
Once a small number of these PINs are obtained, the attackers may be able to successfully clone the SecureID Token to generate valid PINs at will, allowing them to compromise the targets easily
The unconfirmed list of companies who have been targeted includes: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, The International Monetary Fund, and L–3 Communications
RSA continues to claim that the security of the SecurID tokens has not been compromised, but after being subjected to much pressure by customers, has agreed to replace the tokens of any customers who request it

Feedback:

Q: (EBeyer) You talk about it a lot on the show, and it is one of the most common security vulnerabilities on the web, but what is SQL Injection?

A: An SQL Injection attack is caused by careless coding during the construction of an application that uses an SQL database. Through some fault or other, the attacker is able to “inject” code in to the SQL statement.

The most classic example of this comes from this very poor example of a login script:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘$username’ AND password = ‘$password’

During normal operations, which would work as expected. However, if someone were to attempt to login with a username of say, “allan’ –” the executed SQL query would be:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘allan’ –‘ AND password = ‘$password’

Where – is the SQL comment indicator, causing the rest of the query to be ignored. This would allow someone to login as any user without knowing the users password

A further example, they could use the username “‘; DROP TABLE users; –”

Causing the resultant SQL query to be:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘’; DROP TABLE users; –’ AND password = ‘$password’

Which would find 0 users, then delete the entire users database table.

That is why it is important to ‘sanitize inputs’. What this means is that you must remove or escape characters with special meanings, so that they are not interpreted. Each programming language provides ways to do this, but amateurs and sloppy coders often forget or miss cases where input from the user is executed without being sanitized.
PHP for example, provides a number of methods of sanitizing the input , including the mysql_escape_string() function which attempts to escape any meta characters, but does not consider the character set. It has been deprecated and should be replaced by mysql_real_escape_string() which requires an active connection to the MySQL database (required anyway if you are going to run a query), and takes the character set, database settings and server configuration in to consideration. You can also use Prepared Statements , where the SQL query is defined with the variables, and then those variables are replaced at execution time, where they are escaped properly.

Round-Up:

The post SQL Injections | TechSNAP 40 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Great Disk Famine | TechSNAP 30

chris — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:15:36 +0000

Anonymous says it’s going after a Mexican Drug Cartel, we’ll share you the amazing details!

Plus: Our tips for controlling remote downloads, and why all I’m going to want for Christmas is hard drives!

All that and more, on this week’s TechSNAP!

Thanks to:

GoDaddy.com Use our codes TechSNAP10 to save 10% at checkout, or TechSNAP20 to save 20% on hosting!

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techsnap40: $10 off $40
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Show Notes:

Anonymous says it will go after Mexican Drug Cartel

Anonymous claims one of its members was kidnapped at a street protest
Anonymous claims it will start releasing details about journalists, taxi drivers, police officers and government officials who are on the Cartel’s payroll, if the kidnap victim is not released by November 5th (Guy Fawkes Day)
No information about the person who was allegedly kidnapped has been released
Anonymous hopes that releasing this information, the government will be able to pursue the allegedly corrupt officials. However, depending on the type of information, it is unlikely that the evidence provided would be enough to convict someone.
There are serious concerns that the release or even the threat of the release of such information could result in a violent backlash from the Cartel.
It would seem that anyone who’s name appears on the lists released by anonymous would be in serious danger. A case of mistaken identity or speculation could result in the death of an innocent person.
Anonymous has claimed it would attack a number of entities, including the NYSE and Facebook, a large number of these attacks have never taken place, or were unsuccessful and never mentioned again.

Series of spear phishing attacks against chemical and defense companies

At least 50 different companies were targeted by attackers attempting to steal research and development documents and other sensitive information.
The attacks started in July, and continued through September, it is also believed that the same attackers were targeting NGOs and the auto industry earlier this year.
The attacks where spear phishing attacks, a specialized form of the common email attack. Unlike a typical phishing scam, where an attacker poses as your bank and attempts to get you to enter your login credentials and other personal information in to a fake site designed to mimic the look of your banks site, a spear phishing attack specifically targets individuals, using information that is known about them and where they work. Spear Phishing attacks also commonly involve impersonating someone you might expect to receive such an email from.
The emails sent in this case often took the form of meeting invitations with infected attachments. In other cases when the messages were broadcast to many victims, they took the form of security bulletins, usually riding on actual vulnerability announcements for common software such as Adobe Reader and Flash Player. It also seems the attackers attached the infected files in 7Zip format, to evade many spam filters and virus scanners that block or scan .zip files. The attackers also took to encrypting the zip files with a password, and providing that password in the email, again to avoid virus scanners on the inbound mail servers.
This attackers used PoisonIvy, a common backdoor trojan written by one or more persons who speak Mandarin. The Trojan also contained the address of a Command and Control (C&C) server used to feed it additional instructions.
Once the attackers made their way in to the network through one or more infected machines, they leveraged that access to eventually gain permissions to copy sensitive documents and upload them to an external server where they could then be recovered.
One of the command and control servers was a VPS operated in the United States, owned by a Chinese individual from Hebei province. Investigators have not been able to determine if this individual was part of the attacks, if anyone else had access to the VPS, or if he was acting on behalf of another group. It is possible the server was compromised, or that it could have been made to look like that was the case.
Symantec says that there were a number of different groups attacking these companies during this time span, some using a custom developed backdoor called ‘Sogu’ and using specially crafted .doc and .pdf files. There is no word on if these additional attacks were also successful.
Full Report

Feedback:

Remote Downloads?
Q: I have a question regarding downloads, in particular, remote downloads.
A: There are a number of options, ranging in capability and ease of use.
rTorrent – A command line torrent client, works great over SSH (especially when combined with Screen). This is what Allan uses to seed the Linux Action Show torrents.
uTorrent – uTorrent (microTorrent) is available for windows, mac and linux. It offers an optional web UI (the web UI is the only option for linux) for remotely controlling the torrents, and can also automatically start downloading torrents when they are placed in a specified directory. uTorrent also incorporates an RSS reader.
wget – is a standard command line downloading tool included in most GNU Linux distros. Also available for windows
curl – A library and utility for dealing with http, it is a common feature of most web hosting servers, and easily integrates with PHP. You could write a short PHP script that would download files to the report server when prompted (possibly by an email or access from your mobile phone)

Round UP:

The post Great Disk Famine | TechSNAP 30 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Planning for Failures | TechSNAP 19

chris — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 22:05:43 +0000

The RSA leak exposes the dirty under-belly of the commercial security industry, it’s a story that sounds like it’s straight out of Hollywood.

Then – We’ve packed this episode full of Audience questions, and our answers. Find out how to plan for failure, start building a website….

All that and more, on this week’s TechSNAP!

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Show Notes:

News

EXCLUSIVE: Leaked “RSA dump” appears authentic

A massive Pastebin dump of domain names and IP addresses supposedly linked to a cyber espionage ring appears to be the real deal.
The dump claims the operation targets include private US defence firms.
The analysis, which was leaked by an attack on HBGary Federal by Anonymous in February this year, identifies each IP address as a callback address for custom malware used in espionage operations, presumably operating out of China.
The IP addresses serve a configuration file that re-directs infected hosts to an interactive command and control IP based in Hong Kong.
HBGary codenamed the operation “Soysauce”.
the HBGary document suggests that each sub-domain of each registered domain name corresponds to a successfully compromised target.
Pastebin Dump

Feedback

Q: (DreamsVoid) I have a server setup, and I am wondering what it would take to setup a backup server, that would automatically take over if the first server were to go down. What are some of the ways I could accomplish this?

A: This is a rather lengthy answer, so I will actually break it apart, and give one possible answer each week, for the next few weeks. The first possible solution, is to use something like BSD’s CARP (Common Address Redundancy Pool). With it you assign each server an IP address like normal, then on each, you create a virtual CARP interface, where you assign a shared IP between the servers in your CARP group. The servers will advertise their control of the shared IP address, whichever server does so first, will become the master for that IP. The way you configure multiple hosts to fail over in a specific order, is by setting and ‘advertisement skew’, of 100ms multiplied by the servers position in the pool. So the 3rd server will wait 200ms before advertising, and will only gain control over the IP address if the 1st and 2nd server are no longer advertising. This system basically moves the IP address of the service you are trying to keep up, to whatever machine in the pool is actually up. This CARP system requires that the servers have identical services and static copies of the content. Obviously, you don’t want to failover your webserver to your mail server, if your mail server is not running an HTTP server. CARP works best for ‘stateless’ protocols, one of the most common uses of CARP is for redundant routers. If you are using FreeBSD or a derivative such as pfSense, you can use CARP on the IP your DHCP server gives our as the default gateway, so that if one of your routers is down, the other automatically takes over. pfSense even includes a protocol to sync the NAT tables between the two routers so that open connections are not dropped. This type of setup can be important if the business running behind the router cannot afford downtime for such trivial things as OS upgrades on the routers, with CARP, you can take down one router at a time, upgrade it, and put it back in service, without effecting the end users and servers behind the routers. Another option in carp is called ‘preempt’, this causes CARP to take it’s interface offline is ANY interface on the machine goes offline, not just the one the CARP IP is on. This can be important if your routers are connected to different ISPs, if one of the links goes down, the router will take it self offline, causing traffic to be routed via the backup Internet connection.

Q: (Mattias) I have been using the NoScript addon for Firefox and have become aware of just how many sites use Google Analytics. Is it a good way for website admins track visitors, or just a way for google to track everyone?

A: Google Analytics is based on a product called Urchin that Google acquired. Google Analytics is basically just a cloud hosted version of this product. You can still buy a copy of Urchin, but they don’t mention host much it costs. Google Analytics just provides much richer detail than you get from just regular log file analyzers. One of the keys to the success of Google Analytics for e-Commerce is the integration with Adwords and other CPC/CPA sites. Google Analytics allows the store to pass good information about the purchases that are made, and Google correlates these with the keywords the user searched for, and how much was paid for the advertisement. This allow stores to optimize their bids to get the best return for their advertising.

While there are some privacy concerns about what google does with the collected data, they cannot infer all that much from it. Your personal data is never passed from the site you are visiting to Google, and only a small number of sites pass data about what you purchased back to Google, and they do this for the sales/conversion reporting, rather than for Google’s benefit. Usually, the data based back could just be an internal product id, and not provide google with any useful data about your purchase.

Find out who tracks you: Ghostery

Q: (Leon) Hi guys,

Thanks for answering my question last time.
I’ve set up a testbox here on my desk with FreeBSD to tinker with spamassassin/amavis. It’s been a long time since I did anything with FreeBSD but Allan/TechSNAP made me curious for it again.

My question: what’s the best way to keep your FreeBSD (ports) up to date? Just checking it manually/reading the security mailing lists or is there some kind of tool that Alan uses for automatically updating his servers?

Thanks again and thanks for the great show(s). The recent comment of Chris convinced me to support Jupiter with a monthly subscription.

Regards,
Leon

A: The built in tool for keeping your ports tree up to date is called portsnap. This tool will use the BSDiff algorithm to only download the changes to the ports tree since your last update, and supports a simple cron method, where it randomly sleeps before starting, so that everyone cron’ing portsnap won’t hit the server at the same time. Once your ports tree is updated, there are a number of tools that you can use to go about upgrading your various packages. The tool I use is called ‘portupgrade’, but there are also others such as ‘portmanager’ and ‘portmaster’. There are also services such as VuXML (Vulnerability and eXposure Markup Language) that provide information about vulnerable ports, and can be used to check against your installed packages, and packages you are about to install.

Q: (Dan) I was going to send this email to Chris, but since you guys are doing a Q&A session on Techsnap, I figured I might as well send it here. Do you have any recommendations on sources for building websites? I’ve got a career move pending on a creation of a website, and a deadline of next week. I haven’t done basic HTML for about 6 years, and this site will need a forum and a way to pay for a service. I’m not worried about the hosting, I will be hosting it on my home server until the site is approved and ready to hit the ‘tubes. Any suggestions or information you have would be greatly appreciated!

PS. Been watching for two years, he’s Honclbrif in the IRC Chat room!

A: There are a number of great Open Source CMS (Content Management System) platforms out there. Some of the most popular are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, all of which have huge support communities, and 1000s upon 1000s of free design templates. They also feature rich plugin architectures that allow you to add functionality such as video embedding or e-commerce. WordPress is designed for a more ‘blog’ like website, and might not fit well depending on the type of site you are building. Drupal is very extensible, but their framework can be a bit frustrating at times. You might want to look at which platform has the plugins that best fit your needs, and then go from there.

Bitcoin Blaster:

The post Planning for Failures | TechSNAP 19 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hijacking the News | TechSNAP 8

chris — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 21:32:26 +0000

Google has confirmed that 100s of Gmail accounts were being snooped on, and the targets of this attack are not happy!

The cookie catastrophe in the UK continues, we’ll share the brutal details!

And Find out about the hack that leaked the truth about Tupac.

Plus some great audience submitted questions, and our answers!

Please send in more questions so we can continue doing the Q&A section every week! techsnap@jupiterbroadcasting.com

Direct Download Links:

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Show Notes:

Topic: 100s of GMail accounts hacked from China

Users were all victims of a phishing scam
Attackers used stolen passwords and setup forwarding and delegation to be able to spy on all current and future mail for that account, even if the password was changed
Google stresses “It’s important to stress that our internal systems have not been affected—these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself.”
Targets seemed to be politically motivated, going after government officials and journalists

Topic: PBS website hacked

LulzSec, one of the hacker groups from the Sony attacks we discussed last night, managed to gain access to several areas of the PBS website.
They published the user login information they were able to siphon from the database
They were able to posted fake news stories and could have causes serious harm (however their story was that rapped Tupac Shakur was still alive and living in New Zealand)
If they had published specially crafted news stories, they could have infected the computers of visitors to the site, or have caused havoc on the stock market by falsely reporting news about various companies.
LulzSec says the attack was in protest about a PBS Frontline episode that was critical of WikiLeaks

Topic: I told you so

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/27/2249210/BBC-Site-Uses-Cookies-To-Inform-Visitors-of-Anti-Cookie-Law

In order to comply with a new UK law governing website cookies, when you visit some BBC websites such as radiotimes.com you will be presented with a message telling you about the new law. This message uses a cookie to remember that it has been displayed to you, and will not appear next time you visit the site, to avoid annoying you.
This means they are using a cookie, to tell you about how they are not going to use cookies without your consent.
In the future, without the use of something like the google/mozilla ‘do not track’ system, users who decline to accept a cookie will be prompted with such warnings every time, because there will be no way to store their acceptance of the agreement to accept cookies, without using a cookie.
This is why this issue should have been left to the users and the browsers manufactures, who already have the issue well in hand with security settings, private browsing modes, and the do-not-track system.
This law will become effectively unenforceable

Topic: Defense Contractor Lockheed Martin compromised by duplicate RSA SecureID Tokens

Attacks broke in to the secure networks of Lockheed Martin and other government contractors by creating duplicates of RSA SecureID Tokens
It is not clear what data may have been taken. It is unlikely that this information will ever be released by Lockheed Martin because it is likely highly sensitive.
RSA SecureID is a two-factor authentication system. It is designed to thwart key-loggers and similar attacks by combining the usual username/password combination with a dynamic token they changes every few seconds.
Senior defense officials claim that while contractors networks contain sensitive data, all classified data is on a separate, closed networks managed by the U.S. government
The pentagon also uses RSA SecureID tokens, but declined to say how many
Apparently the hackers learned how to duplicate the SecureID tokens using formation stolen during the Advanced Persistant Threat attacks of RSA that we discussed in episode 002 of TechSNAP
The RSA attack was followed by targeted malware and phishing attacks on customers who used the RSA SecureID system in an effort to collection the information necessary to duplicate the SecureID Tokens
This raises questions about the RSA SecureID system, can it be fixed or does the entire system need to be redesigned. It seems that it is far too easy to duplicate the SecureID tokens.

Q: (Swadhin) What are the differences between the virtualization that we do on our home pc and the virtualization that you people do on enterprise servers
A: Mostly the virtualization used in enterprises is the same as what you can do on your home PC. One of the main differences is that in an enterprise, they will have many different servers hosting the virtualized systems, but they will all use what is called ‘shared storage’. Usually something like iSCSI. This does not mean that all of the virtual disks reside on the same physical drive, just that they are accessible in a single place. The advantage to this system is that it becomes possible to ‘migrate’ a virtual machine from one physical host to another, without rebooting the virtual machine. The disk is not moved at all, so all that happens is the memory footprint is transferred between the first host and a second host. Then the virtual machine is paused, and any changes in the memory footprint are synchronized, and the virtual machine is unpaused on the new host. This allows for individual physical host machines to be shutdown for maintenance without taking down the virtual machines hosted there. It also allows for load balancing, if a few virtual machines on the same physical host are very busy, one or more of them can be moved to other less busy hosts to maintain the highest possible performance. Another feature of this system is to allow you to maximize the efficiency of your hardware. Some physical machines can be turned off when the load level is lower, and then if the currently running machines are approaching their maximum load levels, you can turn some more physical machines on, and have the load balanced to them. Then when the load levels fall again, you can turn some physical machines back off. This reduces your power usage, and makes sure you don’t have a bunch of servers just sitting around idle wasting electricity and running up your cooling bill.

Q: (Alexander) I am building a new home network for my roommates and I at college, we plan to build a virtualization server as described on the ‘build your own cloud’ episode of LAS. I have a few questions:

Should I buy a managed or an unmanaged switch

A: Likely you do not need a managed switch. Managed switches provide features like ‘VLANs’, a way to basically break the switch up in to logical groups of ports, and simulate having multiple separate switches (that can even span between physical switches). This functionality is good for keeping different parts of the network separate (like having a DMZ to put your servers in, and then separate internal LANs), but is likely unnecessary in your setup. You can save your self 100s of dollars by just getting an unmanaged switch.

Should I build a virtualization server and a storage server or one that functions as both?

A: The advantage to having the storage server setup, if you use something like iSCSI for the storage system, is the ability to move the virtual machines between physical hosts. This is really only helpful if you have more than 1 virtualization server, so again, you can probably save money by building only a single server.

How much power would you think a system like this would draw?

A: That depends, you would be able to see that in the specs for the server when you go to buy it, but overall not that much. Hard drives draw fairly little power, and a quad core processor is usually between 94 and 135 watts, unless you get a lower power version. Servers also tend to have higher efficiency power supplies, at least 80% efficient, so less of the power draw is exhausted as waste heat.

How would I run multiple web servers in my network and have them all accessible to the outside world with only one external IP address?

A: If you only have a single external IP, your options are fairly limited. Either you run each web server on a different port, which is cumbersome to the users, or you use a reverse proxy to do virtual hosting. All web servers are capable of doing Virtual Hosting, that is, serving a different page based on the ‘Host’ header that the user’s browser sends when they visit a website. The idea here would be to setup something like NGINX or LigHTTPd to listen on your single ip, and then route the connection to the right internal web server based on the hostname or path that is being requested. This solution also works for routing different parts of a website to different internal servers while maintaining a single ‘domain’, which can be important for cookies, javascript and flash ‘same domain’ policies.
Reverse Proxy: https://nginx.org/

User submitted War Story:
(StayFrosty) I was building a new Windows 2008R2 server for a small business client of mine. The machine was little more than a glorified desktop, but it had a support contract. After installing the OS I started installing the drivers, and noticed that there was a BIOS update. I figured since the machine was not in production yet, I might as well install that too. During the flashing process, one of the steps failed. I flipped the KVM over to use a different machine to research the problem, while doing so, I heard the fans in the server spin down and then back up. The machine had rebooted automatically to install some windows updates. When I flipped the KVM back, nothing but a black screen. Luckily, when I contacted the hardware provider, they told me about the BIOS recovery jumper and I was able to get the machine back online.

Download & Comment:

The post Hijacking the News | TechSNAP 8 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.