Robert Graham

Author Archives: Robert Graham

About that Giuliani website…

Rumors are that Trump is making Rudy Giuliani some sort of "cyberczar" in the new administration. Therefore, many in the cybersecurity scanned his website "www.giulianisecurity.com" to see if it was actually secure from hackers. The results have been laughable, with out-of-date software, bad encryption, unnecessary services, and so on.

But here's the deal: it's not his website. He just contracted with some generic web designer to put up a simple page with just some basic content. It's there only because people expect if you have a business, you also have a website.

That website designer in turn contracted some basic VPS hosting service from Verio. It's a service Verio exited around March of 2016, judging by the archived page.

The Verio service promised "security-hardened server software" that they "continually update and patch". According to the security scans, this is a lie, as the software is all woefully out-of-date. According OS fingerprint, the FreeBSD image it uses is 10 years old. The security is exactly what you'd expect from a legacy hosting company that's shut down some old business.

You can probably break into Giuliani's server. I know this because other FreeBSD servers in the same data Continue reading

NAT is a firewall

NAT is a firewall. It's the most common firewall. It's the best firewall.

I thought I'd point this out because most security experts might disagree, pointing to some "textbook definition". This is wrong.

A "firewall" is anything that establishes a barrier between some internal (presumably trusted) network and the outside, public, and dangerous Internet where anybody can connect to you at any time. A NAT creates exactly that sort of barrier.

What other firewalls provide (the SPI packet filters) is the ability to block outbound connections, not just incoming connections. That's nice, but that's not a critical feature. Indeed, few organizations use firewalls that way, it just causes complaints when internal users cannot access Internet resources.

Another way of using firewalls is to specify connections between a DMZ and an internal network, such as a web server exposed to the Internet that needs a hole in the firewall to access an internal database. While not technically part of the NAT definition, it's a feature of all modern NATs. It's the only way to get some games to work, for example.

There's already more than 10-billion devices on the Internet, including homes with many devices, as well as most mobile phones. Continue reading

No, Yahoo! isn’t changing its name

Trending on social media is how Yahoo is changing it's name to "Altaba" and CEO Marissa Mayer is stepping down. This is false.

What is happening instead is that everything we know of as "Yahoo" (including the brand name) is being sold to Verizon. The bits that are left are a skeleton company that holds stock in Alibaba and a few other companies. Since the brand was sold to Verizon, that investment company could no longer use it, so chose "Altaba". Since 83% of its investment is in Alibabi, "Altaba" makes sense. It's not like this new brand name means anything -- the skeleton investment company will be wound down in the next year, either as a special dividend to investors, sold off to Alibaba, or both.

Marissa Mayer is an operations CEO. Verizon didn't want her to run their newly acquired operations, since the entire point of buying them was to take the web operations in a new direction (though apparently she'll still work a bit with them through the transition). And of course she's not an appropriate CEO for an investment company. So she had no job left -- she made her own job disappear.


What happened today Continue reading

Notes about the FTC action against D-Link

Today, the FTC filed a lawsuit[*] against D-Link for security problems, such as backdoor passwords. I thought I'd write up some notes.

The suit is not "product liability", but "unfair and deceptive" business practices for promising "security". In addition, they interpret "security" different from the cybersecurity community.

This needs to be stressed because right now in our industry, there is a big discussion of product liability, insisting that everything attached to the Internet needs to be secured. People will therefore assume the FTC action is based on "liability".

Instead, all six counts are based upon the fact that D-Link offers its products for securing networks, and claims they are secure. Because they have backdoor passwords, clear-text passwords, command-injection bugs, and public private-keys, the FTC feels the claims of security to be untrue.

The key point I'm trying to make is that D-Link can resolve the suit (in theory) by simply removing all claims of "security". Sure, it can claim it supports stateful-inspection firewalls and WPA2, but not things like "WPA2 security". (Sure, the FTC may come back with a new lawsuit -- but it would solve the points raised in this one).

On the other hand, while "deception" Continue reading

Profs: you should use JavaScript to teach Computer Science

Universities struggle with the canonical programming language they should teach students for Computer Science. Ideally, as they take computer science classes, all the homework assignments and examples will be in the same language. Today, that language is usually Java or Python. It should be JavaScript.

The reason for this is simple: whatever language you learn, you will also have to learn JavaScript, because it's the lingua franca of web browsers.

Python is a fundamentally broken language. Version 3 is incompatible with version 2, but after a decade, version 2 is still more popular. It's still unforgivably slow: other languages use JITs as a matter of course to get near native speed, while Python is still nearly always interpreted. Python isn't used in the real world, it's far down the list of languages programmers will use professionally. Python is primarily a middlware language, with neither apps nor services written in it.

Java is a fine language, but there's a problem with it: it's fundamentally controlled by a single company, Oracle, who is an evil company. Consumer versions of Java come with viruses. They sue those who try to come up with competing versions of Java. It's not an "open" system necessary Continue reading

Dear Obama, From Infosec

Dear President Obama:

We are more than willing to believe Russia was responsible for the hacked emails/records that influenced our election. We believe Russian hackers were involved. Even if these hackers weren't under the direct command of Putin, we know he could put a stop to such hacking if he chose. It's like harassment of journalists and diplomats. Putin encourages a culture of thuggery that attacks opposition, without his personal direction, but with his tacit approval.

Your lame attempts to convince us of what we already agree with has irretrievably damaged your message.

Instead of communicating with the America people, you worked through your typical system of propaganda, such as stories in the New York Times quoting unnamed "senior government officials". We don't want "unnamed" officials -- we want named officials (namely you) who we can pin down and question. When you work through this system of official leaks, we believe you have something to hide, that the evidence won't stand on its own.

We still don't believe the CIA's conclusions because we don't know, precisely, what those conclusions are. Are they derived purely from companies like FireEye and CloudStrike based on digital forensics? Or do you have spies in Continue reading

Your absurd story doesn’t make me a Snowden apologist

Defending truth in the Snowden Affair doesn't make one an "apologist", for either side. There plenty of ardent supporters on either side that need to be debunked. The latest (anti-Snowden) example is the HPSCI committee report on Snowden [*], and stories like this one in the Wall Street Journal [*]. Pointing out the obvious holes doesn't make us "apologists".

As Edward Epstein documents in the WSJ story, one of the lies Snowden told was telling his employer (Booz-Allen) that he was being treated for epilepsy when in fact he was fleeing to Hong Kong in order to give documents to Greenwald and Poitras.

Well, of course he did. If you are going to leak a bunch of documents to the press, you can't do that without a bunch of lies to your employer. That's the very definition of this sort of "whistleblowing". Snowden has been quite open to the public about the lies he told his employer, including this one.

Rather than evidence that there's something wrong with Continue reading

Some notes on IoCs

Obama "sanctioned" Russia today for those DNC/election hacks, kicking out 35 diplomats, closing diplomatic compounds, seizing assets of named individuals/groups. They also published "IoCs" of those attacks, fingerprints/signatures that point back to the attackers, like virus patterns, file hashes, and IP addresses.

These IoCs are of low quality. They are published as a political tool, to prove they have evidence pointing to Russia. They have limited utility to defenders, or those publicly analyzing attacks.

Consider the Yara rule included in US-CERT's "GRIZZLY STEPPE" announcement:


What is this? What does this mean? What do I do with this information?

It's a YARA rule. YARA is a tool ostensibly for malware researchers, to quickly classify files. It's not really an anti-virus product designed to prevent or detect an intrusion/infection, but to analyze an intrusion/infection afterward -- such as attributing the attack. Signatures like this will identify a well-known file found on infected/hacked systems.

What this YARA rule detects is, as the name suggests, the "PAS TOOL WEB KIT", a web shell tool that's popular among Russia/Ukraine hackers. If you google "PAS TOOL PHP WEB KIT", the second result points to the tool in question. You can download a copy here Continue reading

IoT saves lives but infosec wants to change that

The cybersecurity industry mocks/criticizes IoT. That's because they are evil and wrong. IoT saves lives. This was demonstrated a couple weeks ago when a terrorist attempted to drive a truck through a Christmas market in German. The truck has an Internet-connected braking system. When it detected the collision, it deployed the brakes, bringing the truck to a stop. Injuries and deaths were a 10th of the similar Nice truck attack earlier in the year.

All the trucks shipped by Scania in the last five years have had mobile phone connectivity to the Internet. Scania pulls back telemetry from trucks, for the purposes of improving drivers, but also to help improve the computerized features of the trucks. They put everything under the microscope, such as how to improve air conditioning to make the trucks more environmentally friendly.

Among their features is the "Autonomous Emergency Braking" system. This is the system that saved lives in Germany.

You can read up on these features on their website, or in their annual report [*].


My point is this: the cybersecurity industry is a bunch of police-state fetishists that want to stop innovation, to solve the "security" problem first before allowing innovation Continue reading

“From Putin with Love” – a novel by the New York Times

In recent weeks, the New York Times has written many stories on Russia's hacking of the Trump election. This front page piece [*] alone takes up 9,000 words. Combined, the NYTimes coverage on this topic exceeds the length of a novel. Yet, for all this text, the number of verifiable facts also equals that of a novel, namely zero. There's no evidence this was anything other than an undirected, Anonymous-style op based on a phishing campaign.


The question that drives us

It's not that Russia isn't involved, it's that the exact nature of their involvement is complicated. Just because the hackers live in Russia doesn't automatically mean their attacks are directed by the government.

It's like the recent Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe and America. Despite ISIS claiming credit, and the perpetrators crediting ISIS, we are loathe to actually blame the attacks directly on ISIS. Overwhelmingly, it's individuals who finance and plan their attacks, with no ISIS organizational involvement other than inspiration.

The same goes for Russian hacks. The Russian hacker community is complicated. There are lots of actors with various affiliations with the government. They are almost always nationalistic, almost always pro-Putin. There are many individuals and Continue reading

That anti-Trump Recode article is terrible

Trump's a dangerous populist. However, the left-wing media's anti-Trump fetishism is doing nothing to stop Trump. It's no better than "fake news" -- it gets passed around a lot on social-media, but is intellectually bankrupt, unlikely to change anybody's mind. A good example is this op-ed on Re/Code [*] about Silicon Valley leaders visiting Trump.

The most important feature of that Re/code article is that it contains no criticism of Trump other than the fact that he's a Republican. Half the country voted for Trump. Half the country voted Republican. It's not just Trump that this piece imagines as being unreasonable, but half the country. It's a fashionable bigotry among some of Silicon Valley's leftist elite.

But CEOs live in a world where half their customers are Republican, where half their share holders are Republican. They cannot lightly take political positions that differ from their investors/customers. The Re/code piece claims CEOs said "we are duty-bound as American citizens to attend". No, what they said was "we are duty-bound as officers of our corporations to attend".

The word "officer", as in "Chief Operating Officer", isn't an arbitrary title like "Senior Software Engineer" that has no real meaning. Instead, "officer" Continue reading

Some notes on a Hamilton election

At least one elector for Trump has promised to switch his vote, becoming a "Hamilton Elector". Assuming 36 more electors (about 10% of Trump's total) do likewise, and Trump fails to get the 270 absolute majority, then what happens? Since all of the constitutional law scholars I follow haven't taken a stab at this, I thought I would write up some notes.


Foreign powers and populists

In Federalist #68, Alexander Hamilton laid out the reasons why electors should switch their vote. The founders feared bad candidates unduly influenced by foreign powers, and demagogues. Trump is unabashedly both. He criticizes our own CIA claiming what every American knows, that Russia interfered in our election. Trump is the worst sort of populist demagogue, offering no solution to problems other than he'll be a strong leader.

Therefore, electors have good reasons to change their votes. I'm not suggesting they should, only that doing so is consistent with our Constitutional principles and history.

So if 10% of Trump's electors defect, how would this actually work?

Failure to get 270 vote absolute majority (math)

Well, to start with, let's count up the number of electors. Each state gets one elector for every House Representative Continue reading

Orin’s flawed argument on IP address privacy

In the PlayPen cases, judges have ruled that if you use the Tor network, then you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. It's a silly demonstration of how the law is out of sync with reality, since the entire point of using Tor is privacy.

Law prof Orin Kerr has a post discussing it. His conclusion is correct, that when the FBI exploits 0day and runs malware on your computer, then it's a search under the Fourth Amendment, requiring a warrant upon probable cause.

However, his reasoning is partly flawed. The title of his piece, "Remotely accessing an IP address inside a target computer is a search", is factually wrong. The IP address in question is not inside a target computer. This may be meaningful.


First, let's discuss how the judge reasons that there's no expectation of privacy with Tor. This is a straightforward application if the Third Party Doctrine, that as soon as you give something to a third party, your privacy rights are lost. Since you give your IP address to Tor, you lose privacy rights over it. You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy: yes, you have an expectation of privacy, Continue reading

That “Commission on Enhancing Cybersecurity” is absurd

An Obama commission has publish a report on how to "Enhance Cybersecurity". It's promoted as having been written by neutral, bipartisan, technical experts. Instead, it's almost entirely dominated by special interests and the Democrat politics of the outgoing administration.

In this post, I'm going through a random list of some of the 53 "action items" proposed by the documents. I show how they are policy issues, not technical issues. Indeed, much of the time the technical details are warped to conform to special interests.


IoT passwords

The recommendations include such things as Action Item 2.1.4:
Initial best practices should include requirements to mandate that IoT devices be rendered unusable until users first change default usernames and passwords. 
This recommendation for changing default passwords is repeated many times. It comes from the way the Mirai worm exploits devices by using hardcoded/default passwords.

But this is a misunderstanding of how these devices work. Take, for example, the infamous Xiongmai camera. It has user accounts on the web server to control the camera. If the user forgets the password, the camera can be reset to factory defaults by pressing a button on the outside of the camera.

But here's the Continue reading

Electoral college should ignore Lessig

Reading this exchange between law profs disappoints me. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The decision Bush v Gore cites the same principle as Lessig, that our system is based on "one person one vote". But it uses that argument to explain why votes should not be changed once they are cast:
Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another.
Lessig cites the principle of "one person one vote", but in a new and novel way. He applies in an arbitrary way that devalues some of the votes that have already been cast. Specifically, he claims that votes cast for state electors should now be re-valued as direct votes for a candidate.

The United States isn't a union of people. It's a union of states. It says so right in the name. Compromises between the power of the states and power of the people have been with us for forever. That's why states get two Senators regardless of size, but Representatives to the House are assigned proportional to population. The Presidential Continue reading

No, it’s Matt Novak who is a fucking idiot

I keep seeing this Gizmodo piece entitled “Snowden is a fucking idiot”. I understand the appeal of the piece. The hero worship of Edward Snowden is getting old. But the piece itself is garbage.

The author, Matt Novak, is of the new wave of hard-core leftists intolerant of those who disagree with them. His position is that everyone is an idiot who doesn’t agree with his views: Libertarians, Republicans, moderate voters who chose Trump, and even fellow left-wingers that aren’t as hard-core.

If you carefully read his piece, you’ll see that Novak doesn’t actually prove Snowden is wrong. Novak doesn’t show how Snowden disagrees with facts, but only how Snowden disagrees with the left-wing view of the world. It’s only through deduction that we come to the conclusion: those who aren’t left-wing are idiots, Snowden is not left-wing, therefore Snowden is an idiot.

The question under debate in the piece is:
technology is more important than policy as a way to protect our liberties
In other words, if you don’t want the government spying on you, then focus on using encryption (use Signal) rather than trying to change the laws so they can’t spy on you.

On a Continue reading

The false-false-balance problem

Until recently, journalism in America prided itself on objectivity -- to report the truth, without taking sides. That's because big debates are always complexed and nuanced, and that both sides are equally reasonable. Therefore, when writing an article, reporters attempt to achieve balance by quoting people/experts/proponents on both sides of an issue.

But what about those times when one side is clearly unreasonable? You'd never try to achieve balance by citing those who believe in aliens and big-foot, for example.Thus, journalists have come up with the theory of false-balance to justify being partisan and one-sided on certain issues.

Typical examples where journalists cite false-balance is reporting on anti-vaxxers, climate-change denialists, and Creationists. More recently, false-balance has become an issue in the 2016 Trump election.

But this concept of false-balance is wrong. It's not that anti-vaxxers, denialists, Creationists, and white supremacists are reasonable. Instead, the issue is that the left-wing has reframed the debate. They've simplified it into something black-and-white, removing nuance, in a way that shows their opponents as being unreasonable. The media then adopts the reframed debate.


Let's talk anti-vaxxers. One of the policy debates is whether the government has the power to force vaccinations on people (or on Continue reading

Comments for my biracial niece

I spent the night after Trump’s victory consoling my biracial niece worried about the election. Here are my comments. You won’t like them, expecting the opposite given the title. But it’s what I said.

I preferred Hillary, but that doesn’t mean Trump is an evil choice.

Don’t give into the hate. You get most of your news via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are at best one-sided and unfair. At worst, they are completely inaccurate. Social media posts are driven by emotion, not logic. Sometimes that emotion is love of cute puppies. Mostly it’s anger, fear, and hate. Instead of blindly accepting what you read, challenge it. Find the original source. Find a better explanation. Search for context.

Don’t give into the hate. The political issues that you are most concerned about are not simple and one-sided with obvious answers. They are complex and nuanced. Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn’t mean they are unreasonable or evil. In today’s politics, it has become the norm that we can’t simply disagree with somebody, but must also vilify and hate them. We’ve redefined politics to be the fight between the virtuous (whatever side we are on) and the Continue reading

How to teach endian

On /r/programming is this post about byte-order/endianness. It gives the same information as most documents on the topic. It is wrong. It's been wrong for over 30 years. Here's how it should be taught.

One of the major disciplines in computer science is parsing/formatting. This is the process of converting the external format of data (file formats, network protocols, hardware registers) into the internal format (the data structures that software operates on).

It should be a formal computer-science discipline, because it's actually a lot more difficult than you'd expect. That's because the majority of vulnerabilities in software that hackers exploit are due to parsing bugs. Since programmers don't learn about parsing formally, they figure it out for themselves, creating ad hoc solutions that are prone to bugs. For example, programmers assume external buffers cannot be larger than internal ones, leading to buffer overflows.

An external format must be well-defined. What the first byte means must be written down somewhere, then what the second byte means, and so on. For Internet protocols, these formats are written in RFCs, such as RFC 791 for the "Internet Protocol". For file formats, these are written in documents, such as those describing GIF files, JPEG Continue reading

Yes, the FBI can review 650,000 emails in 8 days

In today's news, Comey announces the FBI have reviewed all 650,000 emails found on Anthony Wiener's computer and determined there's nothing new. Some have questioned whether this could be done in 8 days. Of course it could be -- those were 650,000 emails to Wiener, not Hillary.




Reading Wiener's own emails, those unrelated to his wife Huma or Hillary, is unlikely to be productive. Therefore, the FBI is going to filter those 650,000 Wiener emails to get at those emails that were also sent to/from Hillary and Huma.

That's easy for automated tools to do. Just search the From: and To: fields for email addresses known to be used by Hillary and associates. For example, search for [email protected] (Hillary's current email address) and [email protected] (Huma Abedin's current email).

Below is an example email header from the Podesta dump:

From: Jennifer Palmieri <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2015 11:23:56 -0400
Message-ID: <-8018289478115811964@unknownmsgid>
Subject: WJC NBC interview
To: H <[email protected]>, John Podesta <[email protected]>, 
 Huma  Continue reading
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