Robert Graham

Author Archives: Robert Graham

Doing a ‘full scan’ of the Internet right now

So I'm doing a "full" scan of the Internet, all TCP ports 0-65535 on all addresses. This explains the odd stuff you see from 209.126.230.7x.


I'm scanning at only 125kpps from 4 source IP addresses, or roughly 30kpps from each source address. This is so that I'll get below many thresholds for IDSs, which trigger when they see fast scans from a single address. The issue isn't to avoid detection, but to avoid generating work for people who get unnecessarily paranoid about the noise they see in their IDS logs.

This scan won't finish at this speed, of course, it won't get even close. Technically, it'd take 50 years to complete at this rate.

The point isn't create a comprehensive scan, but to do sampling scan. I'll let it run a week like this, which will get 0.1% of the Internet, and then stop the scan.

What am I looking for? I don't know. I'm just doing something weird in order to see what happens. With that said, I am testing any port I connect to with Heartbleed. This should give us an estimation of how many Internet-of-Things devices are still vulnerable to that bug. I'm Continue reading

Hiroshima is a complex memorial

In the news is Obama's visit to the Hiroshima atomic bomb memorial. The memorial is more complex than you think. It's not a simple condemnation of the bomb. Instead, it's a much more subtle presentation of the complexity of what happened.

I mention this because of articles like this one at Foreign Policy magazine, in which the author starts by claiming he frequently re-visits Hiroshima. He claims that the memorial has a clear meaning, a message, that he takes back from the site. It doesn't.

The museum puts the bombing into context. It shows how Japan had been in a constant state of war since the 1890s, with militaristic roots going back further in to Samurai culture. It showed how Japan would probably have continued their militaristic ways had the United States not demanded complete surrender, a near abdication of the emperor, and imposed a pacifist constitution on the country.

In other words, Japan accepts partial responsibility for having been bombed.

It doesn't shy away from the horror of the bomb. It makes it clear that such bombs should never again be used on humans. But even that has complexity. More people were killed in the Tokyo firebombing than Hiroshima Continue reading

The EFF is Orwellian as fuck

As this blog has documented many times * * * *, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is exactly the populist demagogues that Orwell targets in his books 1984 and Animal Farm. Today, the EFF performed yet another amusingly Orwellian stunt. Urging the FCC to regulate cyberspace, it cites the exact law that it had previously repudiated.

Specifically, the EFF frequently champions the document Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, written by one of its founders, John Perry Barlow. This document says:
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
Specifically, Barlow is talking about a then recent act of Congress:
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
That 1996 Act adds sections to the telcom laws, such as this portion:
Continue reading

Technology betrays everyone

Kelly Jackson Higgins has a story about how I hacked her 10 years ago, by sniffing her email password via WiFi and displaying it on screen. It wasn't her fault -- it was technology's fault. Sooner or later, it will betray you.

The same thing happened to me at CanSecWest around the year 2001, for pretty much exactly the same reasons. I think it was HD Moore who sniffed my email password. The thing is, I'm an expert, who writes tools that sniff these passwords, so it wasn't like I was an innocent party here. Instead, simply opening my laptop with Outlook running the background was enough for it to automatically connect to WiFi, then connect to a POP3 server across the Internet. I thought I was in control of the evil technology -- but this incident proved I wasn't.

By 2006, though, major email services were now supporting email wholly across SSL, so that this would no longer happen -- in theory. In practice, they still left the old non-encrypted ports open. Users could secure themselves, if they tried hard, but they usually weren't secured.

Today, in 2016, the situation is much better. If you use Yahoo! Mail Continue reading

Freaking out over the DBIR

Many in the community are upset over the recent "Verizon DBIR" because it claims widespread exploitation of the "FREAK" vulnerability. They know this is impossible, because of the vulnerability details. But really, the problem lies in misconceptions about how "intrusion detection" (IDS) works. As a sort of expert in intrusion detection (by which, I mean the expert), I thought I'd describe what really went wrong.

First let's talk FREAK. It's a man-in-the-middle attack. In other words, you can't attack a web server remotely by sending bad data at it. Instead, you have to break into a network somewhere and install a man-in-the-middle computer. This fact alone means it cannot be the most widely exploited attack.

Second, let's talk FREAK. It works by downgrading RSA to 512-bit keys, which can be cracked by supercomputers. This fact alone means it cannot be the most widely exploited attack -- even the NSA does not have sufficient compute power to crack as many keys as the Verizon DBIR claim were cracked.

Now let's talk about how Verizon calculates when a vulnerability is responsible for an attack. They use this methodology:
  1. look at a compromised system (identified by AV scanning, IoCs, etc.)
  2. look at Continue reading

Vulns are sparse, code is dense

The question posed by Bruce Schneier is whether vulnerabilities are "sparse" or "dense". If they are sparse, then finding and fixing them will improve things. If they are "dense", then all this work put into finding/disclosing/fixing them is really doing nothing to improve things.

I propose a third option: vulns are sparse, but code is dense.

In other words, we can secure specific things, like OpenSSL and Chrome, by researching the heck out of them, finding vulns, and patching them. The vulns in those projects are sparse.

But, the amount of code out there is enormous, considering all software in the world. And it changes fast -- adding new vulns faster than our feeble efforts at disclosing/fixing them.

So measured across all software, no, the secure community hasn't found any significant amount of bugs. But when looking at critical software, like OpenSSL and Chrome, I think we've made great strides forward.

More importantly, let's ignore the actual benefits/costs of fixing bugs for the moment. What all this effort has done is teach us about the nature of vulns. Critical software is written to day in a vastly more secure manner than it was in the 1980s, 1990s, or even the Continue reading

Satoshi: how Craig Wright’s deception worked

My previous post shows how anybody can verify Satoshi using a GUI. In this post, I'll do the same, with command-line tools (openssl). It's just a simple application of crypto (hashes, public-keys) to the problem.

I go through this step-by-step discussion in order to demonstrate Craig Wright's scam. Dan Kaminsky's post and the redditors comes to the same point through a different sequence, but I think my way is clearer.

Step #1: the Bitcoin address


We know certain Bitcoin addresses correspond to Satoshi Nakamoto him/her self. For the sake of discussion, we'll use the address 15fszyyM95UANiEeVa4H5L6va7Z7UFZCYP. It's actually my address, but we'll pretend it's Satoshi's. In this post, I'm going to prove that this address belongs to me.

The address isn't the public-key, as you'd expect, but the hash of the public-key. Hashes are a lot shorter, and easier to pass around. We only pull out the public-key when we need to do a transaction. The hashing algorithm is explained on this website [http://gobittest.appspot.com/Address]. It's basically base58(ripemd(sha256(public-key)).

Step #2: You get the public-key


Hashes are one-way, so given a Bitcoin address, we can't immediately convert it into a public-key. Instead, we have to look it Continue reading

Satoshi: That’s not how any of this works

In this WIRED article, Gaven Andresen says why he believes Craig Wright's claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto:
“It’s certainly possible I was bamboozled,” Andresen says. “I could spin stories of how they hacked the hotel Wi-fi so that the insecure connection gave us a bad version of the software. But that just seems incredibly unlikely. It seems the simpler explanation is that this person is Satoshi.”
That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

The entire point of Bitcoin is that it's decentralized. We don't need to take Andresen's word for it. We don't need to take anybody's word for it. Nobody needs to fly to London and check it out on a private computer. Instead, you can just send somebody the signature, and they can verify it themselves. That the story was embargoed means nothing -- either way, Andresen was constrained by an NDA. Since they didn't do it the correct way, and were doing it the roundabout way, the simpler explanation is that he was being bamboozled.

Below is an example of this, using the Electrum Bitcoin wallet software:


This proves that the owner of the Bitcoin Address has signed the Message Continue reading

Touch Wipe: a question for you lawyers

Whether the police can force you to unlock your iPhone depends upon technicalities. They can't ask you for your passcode, because that would violate the 5th Amendment right against "self incrimination". On the other hand, they can force you to press your finger on the TouchID button, or (as it has been demonstrated) unlock the phone themselves using only your fingerprint.

So I propose adding a new technicality into the mix: "Touch Wipe". In addition to recording fingerprints to unlock the phone, Apple/Android should add the feature where users record fingerprints to wipe (erase) the phone. For example, I may choose my thumb to unlock, and my forefinger to wipe.

Indeed, I may record only one digit to unlock, and all nine remaining digits to wipe. Or even, I may decide to record all 10 digits on both hands to wipe, and not use Touch ID at all to unlock (relying solely on the passcode).

This now presents the problem for the police. They can't force me to unlock the phone. They can't get around that by using my fingerprints, because they might inadvertently destroy evidence.

The legal system is resilient against legal trickery such as this. If think you've Continue reading

My next scan

So starting next week, running for a week, I plan on scanning for ports 0-65535 (TCP). Each probe will be completely random selection of IP+port. The purpose is to answer the question about the most common open ports.

This would take a couple years to scan for all ports, so I'm not going to do that. But, scanning for a week should give me a good statistical sampling of 1% of the total possible combinations.

Specifically, the scan will open a connection and wait a few seconds for a banner. Protocols like FTP, SSH, and VNC reply first with data, before you send requests. Doing this should find such things lurking at odd ports. We know that port 22 is the most common for SSH, but what is the second most common?

Then, if I get no banner in response, I'll send an SSL "Hello" message. We know that port 443 is the most common SSL port, but what is the second most common?

In other words, by waiting for SSH, then sending SSL, I'll find SSH even it's on the (wrong) port of 443, and I'll find SSL even if it's on port 22. And all other ports, too.

Continue reading

Defining “Gray Hat”

WIRED has written an article defining “White Hat”, “Black Hat”, and “Grey Hat”. It’s incomplete and partisan.

Black Hats are the bad guys: cybercriminals (like Russian cybercrime gangs), cyberspies (like the Chinese state-sponsored hackers that broke into OPM), or cyberterrorists (ISIS hackers who want to crash the power grid). They may or may not include cybervandals (like some Anonymous activity) that simply defaces websites. Black Hats are those who want to cause damage or profit at the expense of others.

White Hats do the same thing as Black Hats, but are the good guys. The break into networks (as pentesters), but only with permission, when a company/organization hires them to break into their own network. They research the security art, such vulnerabilities, exploits, and viruses. When they find vulnerabilities, they typically work to fix/patch them. (That you frequently have to apply security updates to your computers/devices is primarily due to White Hats). They develop products and tools for use by good guys (even though they sometimes can be used by the bad guys). The movie “Sneakers” refers to a team of White Hat hackers.

Grey Hat is anything that doesn’t fit nicely within these Continue reading

No, Internet should be capitalized

The AP Stylebook and others are now declaring that "Internet" should no longer be capitalized, that you should just say "internet" instead. This is wrong, because the Internet is just an internet.

Internet is short for internetwork. This was a term developed in the 1970s to describe interconnecting networks together.

There were many internetworks back then. Each major computer manufacturer had its own, incompatible internetworking "protocol". IBM with it's SNA, DEC with it's DECnet, Xerox with XNS, and later Apple with its AppleTalk.

Since it would be nice to interconnect all computers, and not be locked into a single manufacturer, many efforts were taken to standardize internetworking protocols, so that all computers could be placed on the same network. Most people put their support behind GOSIP, the "Government Open Systems Interconnect Profile", a standard created by the biggest corporations and the biggest governments.

However, in 1982, the DoD paid a consulting company to added Xerox's XNS and a research project called "TCP/IP" into an early form of Unix. This form of Unix, called "BSD", was popular among universities. The DoD's goal was to make it easier for researchers who it funded to talk to each other. After this point, universities Continue reading

Some notes on Ubuntu Bash on Windows 10

So the latest news is that you can run Ubuntu and bash on Windows 10. In other words, from the bash command-line, you execute apt-get to get/run any Ubuntu binary -- the same binary that runs on Linux. How do it work?

I don't know yet, but browsing around on the Internet suggests that it's a kernel driver in Windows that emulates Linux system calls.

Remember, the operating system is two parts: the kernel and user-space. The interaction between them is ~300 system-calls. Most of these are pretty straight-forward, such as opening a file, reading from the file, and closing the file.

To make a system call, you put the integer number in eax/rax register, fill in the other registers as needed, then calling the SYSENTER instruction.

Each process maintains a table of what the system calls do. In fact, a hacker/debugging/reversing technique is to edit that table in order to hook system calls, do some hackery things, then call the original system call.

That means Microsoft can write a driver, that runs in the kernel, that replaces the system calls for a process, from Windows ones to Linux ones. This driver then needs to emulate the Linux functionality. Continue reading

tl;dr of LambdaConf drama

Short: SJWs dont like person's politics, try to shutdown small programming con due to person being speaker. (from @jcase).

Longer: LambdaConf (a tiny conference for LISP-like programming languages) accepted a speaker with objectionable political views, who under a pseudonym spouted Nazi-like propaganda. "Social justice" activists complained. The conference refused to un-invite the speaker, since his talk content was purely technical, not political. Also, because free-speech. Activists then leaned on sponsors, many of whom withdrew their support of the conference. Free-speech activists took up a collection, and replaced the lost money, so that the conference could continue.

Much longer:

LambaConf is just a tiny conference put on by a small number of people. It exists because, in the last few years, there has been a resurgent interest in "functional languages".

The speaker in question is Curtis Yarvin. He has weird views, like wanting to establish a monarchy. Last year, he was censored from a similar conference "Strangeloop" for a similar reason: a technical, non-political talk censored because people couldn't tolerate his politics. The current talk seems to be similar to last one, about his "Urbit" project.

LambdaConf, in the spirit of diversity, stripped the authors names when Continue reading

Sometimes techy details matter

How terrorists use encryption is going to become central to the Cryptowars 2.0 debate. Both sides are going to cite the case of Reda Hame described in this NYTimes article. On one hand, it shows that terrorists do indeed use encryption. On the other hand, the terrorists used TrueCrypt, which can't be stopped, no matter how many "backdoor" laws the police-state tries to pass.

The problem with the NYTimes article is that the technical details are garbled. (Update: at the bottom, I correct them). Normally, that's not a problem, because we experts can fill in the details using basic assumptions. But the technique ISIS used is bizarre, using TrueCrypt containers uploaded to a file-sharing site. This is a horrible way to pass messages -- assumptions we make trying to fill in the blanks are likely flawed.

Moreover, there is good reason to distrust the NYTimes article. Small details conflict with a similar article in the French newspaper Le Monde from January 6. Both articles are based on the same confession by Reda Hame from last August.

For example, in discussing a training accident with a grenade, the NYTimes article says "Mr. Hame did not throw it far Continue reading

How to detect TrueCrypt blobs being passed around

So, challenge accepted:

tl;dr: The NSA should be able to go back through it's rolling 90 day backlog of Internet metadata and find all other terrorist cells using this method.

From what we can piece together from the NYTimes article, it appears that ISIS is passing around TrueCrypt container files as a way of messaging. This is really weird. It has the has the property of security through obscurity, which is that it has the nice property of evading detection for a while because we'd never consider that ISIS would do such a strange thing. But it has the bad property that once discovered, it now becomes easier to track. With the keys found on the USB drive, we can now start decrypting things that were a mystery before.

We are going off of very little information at the moment, but let's imagine some fictional things.

First, we need to figure out what is meant by a file or hosting site in Turkey. Such hosting sites are all over the place, as you can find with a Continue reading

Some other comments on the ISIS dead-drop system

So, by the time I finished this, this New York Times article has more details. Apparently, it really is just TrueCrypt. What's still missing is how the messages are created. Presumably, it's just notepad. It's also missing the protocol used. It is HTTP/FTP file upload? Or do they log on via SMB? Or is it a service like DropBox?

Anyway, I think my way is better for sending messages that I describe below:


Old post:

CNN is reporting on how the Euro-ISIS terrorists are using encryption. The details are garbled, because neither the terrorists, the police, or the reporters understand what's going on. @thegrugq tries to untangle this nonsense in his post, but I have a different theory. It's pure guesswork, trying to create something that is plausibly useful that somehow fits the garbled story.

I assume what's really going is this.

The terrorist is given a USB drive with the TrueCrypt software and an encrypted partition/file. The first thing the terrorist does is put the USB drive into a computer, run the TrueCrypt program, then mount the file/partition, entering a password. In other words, all you see on the USB drive is the directory "TrueCrypt", and a large Continue reading

Comments on the FBI success in hacking Farook’s iPhone

Left-wing groups like the ACLU and the EFF have put out "official" responses to the news the FBI cracked Farook's phone without help from the Apple. I thought I'd give a response from a libertarian/technologist angle.

First, thank you FBI for diligently trying to protect us from terrorism. No matter how much I oppose you on the "crypto backdoors" policy question, and the constitutional questions brought up in this court case, I still expect you to keep trying to protect us.

Likewise, thank you FBI for continuing to be open to alternative means to crack the phone. I suppose you could've wrangled things to ignore people coming forward with new information, in order to pursue the precedent, in the longer term policy battle. I disagree with the many people in my Twitter timeline who believe this was some sort of FBI plot -- I believe it's probably just what the FBI says it is: they first had no other solution, then they did.

Though, I do wonder if the FBI's lawyers told them they would likely lose the appeal, thus setting a bad precedent, thus incentivizing the FBI to start looking for an alternative to get out of the case. Continue reading

How the media really created Trump

This NYTimes op-ed claims to diagnose the press's failings with regard to Trump, but in its first sentence demonstrates how little press understands the problem. The problem isn't with Trump, but with the press.

The reason for Trump is that the press has discarded its principle of "objectivity". Reasonable people disagree. The failing of the press is that they misrepresent one side, the Republicans, as being unreasonable. You see that in the op-ed above, where the very first sentence decries the "Republican Party’s toxic manipulation of racial resentments". In fact, both parties are equally reasonable, or unreasonable as the case may be, with regards to race.

The article suggests the press should have done more to debunk Trump in the"form of fact checks and robust examination of policy proposals". But the press doesn't do that for Democrats, so why should a Republican candidate they don't like get singled out? No amount of attacking Trump sticks because the press is blatantly unfair.

Hillary clearly is complicit in the "Benghazi" affair, because she led the charge to inject weapons into Libya to take down Ghadaffi, then ignored Chris Steven's efforts to clean up the mess. Hillary's use of her own Continue reading

I’m skeptical of NAND mirroring

Many have proposed "NAND mirroring" as the solution to the FBI's troubles in recovering data from the San Bernadino shooter's iPhone. Experts don't see any problem with this approach, but that doesn't mean experts know it will work, either. There are problems.

The problem is that iPhone's erase the flash after 10 guesses. The solution is to therefore create a backup, or "mirror", of the flash chips. When they get erased, just restore from backup, and try again.

The flaw with this approach is that it's time consuming. After every 10 failed attempts, the chips need to be removed the phone, reflashed, and reinserted back into the phone. Then the phone needs to be rebooted.

For a 4-digit passcode, this process will need to be repeated a thousand times.This is doable in a couples of days. For a 6-digit passcode that is standard on iOS 9, this needs to be repeated 100,000 times, which will take many months of nonstop effort 24-hours a day. Presumably, you can make this more efficient by pipelining the process, using multiple sets of flash chips, so that a new fresh set can be swapped in within a few seconds, but it still takes Continue reading
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