stripe – Jupiter Broadcasting

Six months later, he announced on Twitter that he was leaving the car company. “Turns out that Tesla isn’t a good fit for me after all,” he said. Lattner doesn’t have a new job in mind just yet.

Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all. I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!

— Chris Lattner (@clattner_llvm) June 21, 2017

Stripe refocuses European effort with 6 new markets and expanded payments platform

Stripe serves as the technical and banking infrastructure that allows businesses and individuals to accept online payments. The company has garnered more than $400 million in equity financing from big-name backers since its inception back in 2010, including CapitalG (Google), Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, American Express, and Elon Musk. For many, the company is a prime candidate to go public, but Stripe CEO Patrick Collison stated recently that he has no intentions of pursuing an IPO anytime soon.

Blockchain raises $40 million from Lakestar and Google’s venture arm

European venture capital fund Lakestar and GV, Google’s venture capital arm, both led the round. Nokota Management and Digital Currency Group also took part in the investment, as did Blockchain’s existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mosaic Venture Partners, Prudence Holdings, Virgin, and Sir Richard Branson.

Inside Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence Comeback

“We don’t want one or two companies, which I will not name, to be the only big players in town for AI,” he says

The post Summer of GitHub | CR 262 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The Cost Of Cloud | Ask Noah 5

chris — Mon, 01 May 2017 20:55:50 +0000

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— The Cliff Notes —

— Noobs Corner —

Tips for buying used tech on Ebay

Read the description carefully
Look at the photos carefully
Ask questions before bidding
Don’t be afraid to give it a shot!
Check out bidnapper.com to automate bidding

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Find all the resources for this show on the Ask Noah Dashboard

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The post The Cost Of Cloud | Ask Noah 5 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Unix Security Trifecta | TechSNAP 292

chris — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 08:48:15 +0000

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Unix Trifecta — Patch Your Shit

This week saw the trifecta, critical vulnerabilities in 3 of the most important and widely used server applications
CVE-2016-8610 – OpenSSL: A remote attacker who can initiate handshakes with an OpenSSL based server can cause the server to consume a lot of computation power with very little bandwidth usage, and may be able to use this technique in a leveraged Denial of Service attack.
The flaw is in the way OpenSSL handles “SSL Alerts”. The SSL alert protocol is a way to communicate problems within a SSL/TLS session. Due to improper handling of alert packets, OpenSSL would consume an excessive amount of CPU time processing undefined alert messages.
- CVE-2016-8864 – Bind: A remote attacker who could cause a server to make a query deliberately chosen to trigger the failed assertions could cause named(8) to stop, resulting in a Denial of Service condition to its clients.
- A defect in BIND’s handling of responses containing a DNAME answer could cause a resolver to exit after encountering an assertion failure in db.c or resolver.c.
- CVE-2016-8858 – OpenSSH: A remote attacker may be able to cause a SSH server to allocate an excessive amount of memory. Note that the default MaxStartups setting on FreeBSD will limit the effectiveness of this attack.
During the SSH handshake procedure, the client and server exchanges the supported encryption, MAC and compression algorithms along with other information to negotiate algorithms for initial key exchange, with a message named SSH_MSG_KEXINIT.
When processing the SSH_MSG_KEXINIT message, the server could allocate up to a few hundreds of megabytes of memory per each connection, before any authentication take place.
Patches for most OSes should be out by now, make sure you install them.

LessPass, an open source, storage-less password manager? Or is it…

“Managing your Internet passwords is not easy. You probably use a password manager to help you. The system is simple, the tool generates random passwords whenever you need them and save them into a file protected with a strong password. This system is very robust, you only need to remember one password to rule them all! Now you have a unique password for each site on the Internet.”
But, there are some shortcomings to that type of password manager
How do I synchronize this file on all my devices?
How do I access a password on my parents’ computer without installing my password manager?
How do I access a password on my phone, without any installed app?
To solve this, LessPass does it differently
“The system uses a pure function, i.e. a function that given the same parameters will always give the same result. In our case, given a login, a master password, a site and options it will returns a unique password”
“No need to save your passwords in an encrypted file. You just need to access the tool to recalculate a password from information that you know (mostly the login)”
There are some issues though.
- Some sites have different password complexity requirements, such as banks that limit the length of your password, or require a PIN that is all digits
- Some sites obviously do not hash passwords correctly, and do not allow some characters
- What if you want to, or need to, change your password?
LessPass has a solution for all of these, where you specify “password profile”, to remember the different complexity settings to generate the valid password
To manage to change the password, there is also a counter, that starts at 1, and you increment to get a different password.
Of course now, you have to remember: your login, your master password, the password complexity profile for each site, and how many times you have changed your password on that site
So, they have a “connected” version, that remembers each site, your login, the password profile, and your password change counter.
There are obviously some privacy concerns, and security concerns here.
How do you restrict access in the connected version, with a username and password? Is that password the same or different from your master password. Is your profile data encrypted per user?
Of course, being an open source project, there is the option to self-host, which eliminates a number of those concerns
“You can host your own LessPass database if you do not want to use the official one. The requirement for self-hosting is to have docker and docker-compose installed on your machine.”
The fact that the installation instructions are curl | bash (written the other way around, so that when you stick sudo in front of it it works), does raise some other concerns
This leaves a few problems:
- You can never change your master password, as it will effectively change all of your passwords
- It is still technically possible for someone to brute force your master password. Each attempt will require them to do the full PBKDF2 run, but 8192 rounds will take only a small fraction of a second, and it can be parallelized quite well. If someone does compromise your master password (via brute force, or with a keylogger, or whatever), they have access to all of your passwords, but worse, they even have access to your ‘new’ passwords, if you change your password, it just changes the ‘count’ parameter, so I could generate your next 10 gmail passwords and keep them for later.
- The key-derivation seems weak, 8192 rounds of PBKDF2 is likely not enough. LastPass uses 100,000 rounds for its server-side key-derivation. FreeBSD’s GELI disk encryption uses a number of rounds that will take approximately 2 seconds, which on modern machines is over 1 million rounds. The issue is that changing this number in the future will change all of your passwords. At a minimum, it should be part of the password profile, so you can select a different value for each site, so you can change the default for new sites in the future, and increase the strength of the password for one site by changing the password.
- LessPass cannot deal with SSO (Single Sign On). There are a number of sites for which I have the same password, because they all authenticate against the same LDAP database (or ActiveDirectory). LessPass ONLY allows you to use its derived passwords, which might not always work.
There are definitely some interesting aspects to LessPass, especially being able to self host, but, I don’t think I’ll be switching to it.

A very valuable vulnerability

It all started with a facebook post by Colin Percival: “I think I just accidentally exploited a “receive arbitrarily large amounts of money” security vulnerability. Oops.”
Colin Percival is a security and cryptography expert, and a former FreeBSD Security Officer
Colin’s day job is running Tarsnap – backups for the truly paranoid.
To accept payments for his business, he uses Stripe – a credit card processing service, which also allows him to accept bitcoins
“While I very firmly wear a white hat, it is useful to be able to consider things from the perspective of the bad guys, in order to assess the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited and its potential impact. For the subset of bad guys who exploit security vulnerabilities for profit — as opposed to selling them to spy agencies, for example — I imagine that there are some criteria which would tend to make a vulnerability more valuable:”
- the vulnerability can be exploited remotely, over the internet;
the attack cannot be blocked by firewalls;
- the attack can be carried out without any account credentials on the system being attacked;
- the attack yields money (as opposed to say, credit card details which need to be separately monetized);
- once successfully exploited, there is no way for a victim to reverse or mitigate the damage; and
- the attack can be performed without writing a single line of code.
“Much to my surprise, a few weeks ago I stumbled across a vulnerability satisfying every one of these criteria.”
“The vulnerability — which has since been fixed, or else I would not be writing about it publicly — was in Stripe’s bitcoin payment functionality. Some background for readers not familiar with this: Stripe provides payment processing services, originally for credit cards but now also supporting ACH, Apple Pay, Alipay, and Bitcoin, and was designed to be the payment platform which developers would want to use; in very much the way that Amazon fixed the computing infrastructure problem with S3 and EC2 by presenting storage and compute functionality via simple APIs, Stripe fixed the “getting money from customers online” problem. I use Stripe at my startup, Tarsnap, and was in fact the first user of Stripe’s support for Bitcoin payments: Tarsnap has an unusually geeky and privacy-conscious user base, so this functionality was quite popular among Tarsnap users.”
“Despite being eager to accept Bitcoin payments, I don’t want to actually handle bitcoins; Tarsnap’s services are priced in US dollars, and that’s what I ultimately want to receive. Stripe abstracts this away for me: I tell Stripe that I want $X, and it tells me how many bitcoins my customer should send and to what address; when the bitcoin turns up, I get the US dollars I asked for. Naturally, since the exchange rate between dollars and bitcoins fluctuates, Stripe can’t guarantee the exchange rate forever; instead, they guarantee the rate for 10 minutes (presumably they figured out that the exchange rate volatility is low enough that they won’t lose much money over the course of 10 minutes). If the “bitcoin receiver” isn’t filled within 10 minutes, incoming coins are converted at the current exchange rate.”
“For a variety of reasons, it is sometimes necessary to refund bitcoin transactions: For example, a customer cancelling their order; accidentally sending in the wrong number of bitcoins; or even sending in the correct number of bitcoins, but not within the requisite time window, resulting in their value being lower than necessary. Consequently, Stripe allows for bitcoin transactions to be refunded — with the caveat that, for obvious reasons, Stripe refunds the same value of bitcoins, not the same number of bitcoins. (This is analogous to currency exchange issues with credit cards — if you use a Canadian dollar credit card to buy something in US dollars and then get a refund later, the equal USD amount will typically not translate to an equal number of CAD refunded to your credit card.)”
The vulnerability lay in the exchange rate handling. As I mentioned above, Stripe guarantees an exchange rate for 10 minutes; if the requisite number of bitcoins arrive within that window, the exchange rate is locked in. So far so good; but what Stripe did not intend was that the exchange rate was locked in permanently — and applied to any future bitcoins sent to the same address. This made a very simple attack possible:
- Pay for something using bitcoin.
- Wait until the price of bitcoin drops.
- Send more bitcoins to the address used for the initial payment.
- Ask for a refund of the excess bitcoin.
“Because the exchange rate used in step 3 was the one fixed at step 1, this allowed for bitcoins to be multiplied by the difference in exchange rates; if step 1 took place on July 2nd and steps 3/4 on August 2nd, for example, an arbitrary number of bitcoins could be increased by 30% in a matter of minutes. Moreover, the attacker does not need an account with Stripe; they merely need to find a merchant which uses Stripe for bitcoin payments and is willing to click “refund payment” (or even better, is set up to automatically refund bitcoin overpayments).”
“Needless to say, I reported this to Stripe immediately. Fortunately, their website includes a GPG key and advertises a vulnerability disclosure reward (aka. bug bounty) program; these are two things I recommend that every company does, because they advertise that you take security seriously and help to ensure that when people stumble across vulnerabilities they’ll let you know. (As it happens, I had Stripe security’s public GPG key already and like them enough that I would have taken the time to report this even without a bounty; but it’s important to maximize the odds of receiving vulnerability reports.) Since it was late on a Friday afternoon and I was concerned about how easily this could be exploited, I also hopped onto Stripe’s IRC channel to ask one of the Stripe employees there to relay a message to their security team: “Check your email before you go home!””
“Stripe’s handling of this issue was exemplary. They responded promptly to confirm that they had received my report and reproduced the issue locally; and a few days later followed up to let me know that they had tracked down the code responsible for this misbehaviour and that it had been fixed. They also awarded me a bug bounty — one significantly in excess of the $500 they advertise, too.”
“As I remarked six years ago, Isaac Asimov’s remark that in science “Eureka!” is less exciting than “That’s funny…” applies equally to security vulnerabilities. I didn’t notice this issue because I was looking for ways to exploit bitcoin exchange rates; I noticed it because a Tarsnap customer accidentally sent bitcoins to an old address and the number of coins he got back when I clicked “refund” was significantly less than what he had sent in. (Stripe has corrected this “anti-exploitation” of the vulnerability.) It’s important to keep your eyes open; and it’s important to encourage your customers to keep their eyes open, which is the largest advantage of bug bounty programs — and why Tarsnap’s bug bounty program offers rewards for all bugs, not just those which turn out to be vulnerabilities.”
“And if you have code which handles fluctuating exchange rates… now might be a good time to double-check that you’re always using the right exchange rates.”
A very interesting attack, that was only found because someone accidentally did the wrong thing

Feedback:

ipV6 vs Mirai
Freenas replication
Freenas 10 question
Backup & LUKS
Chromecast across subnets
A user wrote in about the mention of BCP38 the other week, and asked what other best practises there are: here is a list

Round Up:

The post Unix Security Trifecta | TechSNAP 292 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Let’s Get RAID | BSD Now 36

chris — Fri, 09 May 2014 09:25:39 +0000

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This week on the show we\’ll be showing you how to set up RAID arrays in FreeBSD. There\’s also an interview with David Chisnall – of the FreeBSD core team – about the switch to Clang and a lot more.

Sit back and enjoy some BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

OpenBSD 5.5 released

If you ordered a CD set then you\’ve probably had it for a little while already, but OpenBSD has formally announced the public release of 5.5
This is one of the biggest releases to date, with a very long list of changes and improvements
Some of the highlights include: time_t being 64 bit on all platforms, release sets and binary packages being signed with the new signify tool, a new autoinstall feature of the installer, SMP support on Alpha, a new AViiON port, lots of new hardware drivers including newer NICs, the new vxlan driver, relayd improvements, a new pf queue system for bandwidth shaping, dhcpd and dhclient fixes, OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 and all its new features, position-independent executables being default for i386, the RNG has been replaced with ChaCha20 as well as some other security improvements, FUSE support, tmpfs, softraid partitions larger than 2TB and a RAID 5 implementation, OpenSSH 6.6 with all its new features and fixes… and a lot more
The full list of changes is HUGE, be sure to read through it all if you\’re interested in the details
If you\’re doing an upgrade from 5.4 instead of a fresh install, pay careful attention to the upgrade guide as there are some very specific steps for this version
Also be sure to apply the errata patches on your new installations… especially those OpenSSL ones (some of which still aren\’t fixed in the other BSDs yet)
On the topic of errata patches, the project is now going to also send them out (signed) via the announce mailing list, a very welcome change
Congrats to the whole team on this great release – 5.6 is going to be even more awesome with \”Libre\”SSL and lots of other stuff that\’s currently in development

FreeBSD foundation funding highlights

The FreeBSD foundation posts a new update on how they\’re spending the money that everyone donates
\”As we embark on our 15th year of serving the FreeBSD Project and community, we are proud of what we\’ve done to help FreeBSD become the most innovative, reliable, and high-performance operation system\”
During this spring, they want to highlight the new UEFI boot support and newcons
There\’s a lot of details about what exactly UEFI is and why we need it going forward
FreeBSD has also needed some updates to its console to support UTF8 and wide characters
Hopefully this series will continue and we\’ll get to see what other work is being sponsored

OpenSSH without OpenSSL

The OpenSSH team has been hard at work, making it even better, and now OpenSSL is completely optional
Since it won\’t have access to the primitives OpenSSL uses, there will be a trade-off of features vs. security
This version will drop support for legacy SSH v1, and the only two cryptographic algorithms supported are an in-house implementation of AES (in counter mode) and the new combination of the Chacha20 stream cipher with Poly1305 for packet integrity
Key exchange is limited to elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman and the newer Curve25519 KEXs
No support for RSA, DSA or ECDSA public keys – only Ed25519
It also includes a new buffer API and a set of wrappers to make it compatible with the existing API
Believe it or not, this was planned before all the heartbleed craziness
Maybe someday soon we\’ll have a mini-openssh-portable in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc… would be really cool

BSDMag\’s April 2014 issue is out

The free monthly BSD magazine has got a new issue available for download
This time the articles include: pascal on BSD, an introduction to revision control systems and configuration management, deploying NetBSD on AWS EC2, more GIMP tutorials, an AsiaBSDCon 2014 report and a piece about how easily credit cards are stolen online
Anyone can contribute to the magazine, just send the editors an email about what you want to write
No Linux articles this time around

Interview – David Chisnall – theraven@freebsd.org

The LLVM/Clang switch, FreeBSD\’s core team, various topics

Tutorial

RAID in FreeBSD and OpenBSD

News Roundup

BSDTalk episode 240

The original BSD podcaster Will Backman has uploaded a new episode of BSDTalk, this time with our other buddy GNN as the guest – mainly to talk about NTP and keeping reliable time
Topics include the specific details of crystals used in watches and computers to keep time, how temperature affects the quality, different sources of inaccuracy, some general NTP information, why you might want extremely precise time, different time sources (GPS, satellite, etc), differences in stratum levels, the problem of packet delay and estimating the round trip time, some of the recent NTP amplification attacks, the downsides to using UDP instead of TCP and… much more
GNN also talks a little about the Precision Time Protocol and how it\’s different than NTP
Two people we\’ve interviewed talking to each other, awesome
If you\’re interested in NTP, be sure to see our tutorial too

m2k14 trip reports

We\’ve got a few more reports from the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Morocco
The first one is from Antoine Jacoutot (who is a key GNOME porter, and gave us the screenshots for the OpenBSD desktop tutorial)
\”Since I always fail at actually doing whatever I have planned for a hackathon, this time I decided to come to m2k14 unprepared about what I was going to do\”
He got lots of work done with ports and pushing GNOME-related patches back up to the main project, then worked on fixing ports\’ compatibility with LibreSSL
Speaking of LibreSSL, there\’s an article all would-be portable version writers should probably read and take into consideration
Jasper Adriaanse also writes about what he got done over there
He cleaned up and fixed the puppet port to work better with OpenBSD

Why you should use FreeBSD on your cloud VPS

Here we have a blog post from Atlantic, a VPS and hosting provider, about 10 reasons for using FreeBSD
Starts off with a little bit of BSD history for those who are unfamiliar with it and only know Linux and Windows
(Spoiler) the 10 reasons are: community, stability, collaboration, ease of use, ports, security, ZFS, GEOM, sound and having lots of options
The post goes into detail about each of them and why FreeBSD makes a great choice for a VPS OS

PCBSD weekly digest

Big changes coming in the way PCBSD manages software
The PBI system, AppCafe and related tools are all going to use pkgng now
The AppCafe will no longer be limited to PBIs, so much more software will be easily available from the ports tree
New rating system coming soon and much more

Feedback/Questions

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
The Tor and mailing list tutorials have gotten some fixes and updates
The OpenBSD router tutorial has also gotten a bit of a makeover, and now includes new scripts for 5.5 and signify
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
If you\’ve got something cool to talk about and want to come on for an interview, shoot us an email
If any listeners have a collection of old FreeBSD or OpenBSD CDs, we\’d love for you to send in a picture of the whole set together so we can show it off
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)
We will be at BSDCan next week – be sure to say hi if you run into us!

The post Let's Get RAID | BSD Now 36 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.