Robert Graham

Author Archives: Robert Graham

NetNeutrality vs. AT&T censoring Pearl Jam

So in response to my anti-netneutrality tweets/blogs, Jose Pagliery asks "what about this?"

Let's pick the first one. You can read about the details by Googling "AT&T Pearl Jam".

First of all, this obviously isn't a Net Neutrality case. The case isn't about AT&T acting as an ISP transiting network traffic. Instead, this was about AT&T being a content provider, through their "Blue Room" subsidiary, whose content traveled across other ISPs. Such things will continue to happen regardless of the most stringent enforcement of NetNeutrality rules, since the FCC doesn't regulate content providers.

Second of all, it wasn't AT&T who censored the traffic. It wasn't their Blue Room subsidiary who censored the traffic. It was a third party company they hired to bleep things like swear words and nipple slips. You are blaming AT&T for a decision by a third party that went against AT&T's wishes. It was an accident, not AT&T policy.

Thirdly, and this is the funny bit, Tim Wu, the guy who defined the Continue reading

The FCC has never defended Net Neutrality

This op-ed by a "net neutrality expert" claims the FCC has always defended "net neutrality". It's garbage.

This wrong on its face. It imagines decades ago that the FCC inshrined some plaque on the wall stating principles that subsequent FCC commissioners have diligently followed. The opposite is true. FCC commissioners are a chaotic bunch, with different interests, influenced (i.e. "lobbied" or "bribed") by different telecommunications/Internet companies. Rather than following a principle, their Internet regulatory actions have been ad hoc and arbitrary -- for decades.

Sure, you can cherry pick some of those regulatory actions as fitting a "net neutrality" narrative, but most actions don't fit that narrative, and there have been gross net neutrality violations that the FCC has ignored.


There are gross violations going on right now that the FCC is allowing. Most egregiously is the "zero-rating" of video traffic on T-Mobile. This is a clear violation of the principles of net neutrality, yet the FCC is allowing it -- despite official "net neutrality" rules in place.

The op-ed above claims that "this [net neutrality] principle was built into the architecture of the Internet". The opposite is true. Traffic discrimination was built into the architecture since Continue reading

Your Holiday Cybersecurity Guide

Many of us are visiting parents/relatives this Thanksgiving/Christmas, and will have an opportunity to help our them with cybersecurity issues. I thought I'd write up a quick guide of the most important things.

1. Stop them from reusing passwords

By far the biggest threat to average people is that they re-use the same password across many websites, so that when one website gets hacked, all their accounts get hacked.

To demonstrate the problem, go to haveibeenpwned.com and enter the email address of your relatives. This will show them a number of sites where their password has already been stolen, like LinkedIn, Adobe, etc. That should convince them of the severity of the problem.

They don't need a separate password for every site. You don't care about the majority of website whether you get hacked. Use a common password for all the meaningless sites. You only need unique passwords for important accounts, like email, Facebook, and Twitter.

Write down passwords and store them in a safe place. Sure, it's a common joke that people in offices write passwords on Post-It notes stuck on their monitors or under their keyboards. This is a common security mistake, but that's only because the Continue reading

Why Linus is right (as usual)

People are debating this email from Linus Torvalds (maintainer of the Linux kernel). It has strong language, like:
Some security people have scoffed at me when I say that security
problems are primarily "just bugs".
Those security people are f*cking morons.
Because honestly, the kind of security person who doesn't accept that
security problems are primarily just bugs, I don't want to work with.
I thought I'd explain why Linus is right.

Linus has an unwritten manifesto of how the Linux kernel should be maintained. It's not written down in one place, instead we are supposed to reverse engineer it from his scathing emails, where he calls people morons for not understanding it. This is one such scathing email. The rules he's expressing here are:
  • Large changes to the kernel should happen in small iterative steps, each one thoroughly debugged.
  • Minor security concerns aren't major emergencies; they don't allow bypassing the rules more than any other bug/feature.
Last year, some security "hardening" code was added to the kernel to prevent a class of buffer-overflow/out-of-bounds issues. This code didn't address any particular 0day vulnerability, but was designed to prevent a class of future potential exploits from being exploited. This is reasonable.

How to read newspapers

News articles don't contain the information you think. Instead, they are written according to a formula, and that formula is as much about distorting/hiding information as it is about revealing it.

A good example is the following. I claimed hate-crimes aren't increasing. The tweet below tries to disprove me, by citing a news article that claims the opposite:




But the data behind this article tells a very different story than the words.

Every November, the FBI releases its hate-crime statistics for the previous year. They've been doing this every year for a long time. When they do so, various news organizations grab the data and write a quick story around it.

By "story" I mean a story. Raw numbers don't interest people, so the writer instead has to wrap it in a narrative that does interest people. That's what the writer has done in the above story, leading with the fact that hate crimes have increased.

But is this increase meaningful? What do the numbers actually Continue reading

Some notes about the Kaspersky affair

I thought I'd write up some notes about Kaspersky, the Russian anti-virus vendor that many believe has ties to Russian intelligence.

There's two angles to this story. One is whether the accusations are true. The second is the poor way the press has handled the story, with mainstream outlets like the New York Times more intent on pushing government propaganda than informing us what's going on.


The press

Before we address Kaspersky, we need to talk about how the press covers this.

The mainstream media's stories have been pure government propaganda, like this one from the New York Times. It garbles the facts of what happened, and relies primarily on anonymous government sources that cannot be held accountable. It's so messed up that we can't easily challenge it because we aren't even sure exactly what it's claiming.

The Society of Professional Journalists have a name for this abuse of anonymous sources, the "Washington Game". Journalists can identify this as bad journalism, but the big newspapers like The New York Times continues to do it anyway, because how dare anybody criticize them?

For all that I hate the anti-American bias of The Intercept, at least they've had stories Continue reading

Some notes on the KRACK attack

This is my interpretation of the KRACK attacks paper that describes a way of decrypting encrypted WiFi traffic with an active attack.

tl;dr: Wow. Everyone needs to be afraid. It means in practice, attackers can decrypt a lot of wifi traffic, with varying levels of difficulty depending on your precise network setup. My post last July about the DEF CON network being safe was in error.

Details

This is not a crypto bug but a protocol bug (a pretty obvious and trivial protocol bug).

When a client connects to the network, the access-point will at some point send a random "key" data to use for encryption. Because this packet may be lost in transmission, it can be repeated many times.

What the hacker does is just repeatedly sends this packet, potentially hours later. Each time it does so, it resets the "keystream" back to the starting conditions. The obvious patch that device vendors will make is to only accept the first such packet it receives, ignore all the duplicates.

At this point, the protocol bug becomes a crypto bug. We know how to break crypto when we have two keystreams from the same starting position. It's not always reliable, but Continue reading

“Responsible encryption” fallacies

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave a speech recently calling for "Responsible Encryption" (aka. "Crypto Backdoors"). It's full of dangerous ideas that need to be debunked.

The importance of law enforcement

The first third of the speech talks about the importance of law enforcement, as if it's the only thing standing between us and chaos. It cites the 2016 Mirai attacks as an example of the chaos that will only get worse without stricter law enforcement.

But the Mira case demonstrated the opposite, how law enforcement is not needed. They made no arrests in the case. A year later, they still haven't a clue who did it.

Conversely, we technologists have fixed the major infrastructure issues. Specifically, those affected by the DNS outage have moved to multiple DNS providers, including a high-capacity DNS provider like Google and Amazon who can handle such large attacks easily.

In other words, we the people fixed the major Mirai problem, and law-enforcement didn't.

Moreover, instead being a solution to cyber threats, law enforcement has become a threat itself. The DNC didn't have the FBI investigate the attacks from Russia likely because they didn't want the FBI reading all their files, finding wrongdoing by the Continue reading

Microcell through a mobile hotspot

I accidentally acquired a tree farm 20 minutes outside of town. For utilities, it gets electricity and basic phone. It doesn't get water, sewer, cable, or DSL (i.e. no Internet). Also, it doesn't really get cell phone service. While you can get SMS messages up there, you usually can't get a call connected, or hold a conversation if it does.

We have found a solution -- an evil solution. We connect an AT&T "Microcell", which provides home cell phone service through your Internet connection, to an AT&T Mobile Hotspot, which provides an Internet connection through your cell phone service.


Now, you may be laughing at this, because it's a circular connection. It's like trying to make a sailboat go by blowing on the sails, or lifting up a barrel to lighten the load in the boat.

But it actually works.

Since we get some, but not enough, cellular signal, we setup a mast 20 feet high with a directional antenna pointed to the cell tower 7.5 miles to the southwest, connected to a signal amplifier. It's still an imperfect solution, as we are still getting terrain distortions in the signal, but it provides a good Continue reading

Browser hacking for 280 character tweets

Twitter has raised the limit to 280 characters for a select number of people. However, they left open a hole, allowing anybody to make large tweets with a little bit of hacking. The hacking skills needed are basic hacking skills, which I thought I'd write up in a blog post.


Specifically, the skills you will exercise are:

  • basic command-line shell
  • basic HTTP requests
  • basic browser DOM editing

The short instructions

The basic instructions were found in tweets like the following:

These instructions are clear to the average hacker, but of course, a bit difficult for those learning hacking, hence this post.

The command-line

The basics of most hacking start with knowledge of the command-line. This is the "Terminal" app under macOS or cmd.exe under Windows. Almost always when you see hacking dramatized in the movies, they are using the command-line.

5 years with home NAS/RAID

I have lots of data-sets (packet-caps, internet-scans), so I need a large RAID system to hole it all. As I described in 2012, I bought a home "NAS" system. I thought I'd give the 5 year perspective.


Reliability. I had two drives fail, which is about to be expected. Buying a new drive, swapping it in, and rebuilding the RAID went painless, though that's because I used RAID6 (two drive redundancy). RAID5 (one drive redundancy) is for chumps.

Speed. I've been unhappy with the speed, but there's not much I can do about it. Mechanical drives access times are slow, and I don't see any way of fixing that.

Cost. It's been $3000 over 5 years (including the two replacement drives). That comes out to $50/month. Amazon's "Glacier" service is $108/month. Since we all have the same hardware costs, it's unlikely that any online cloud storage can do better than doing it yourself.

Moore's Law. For the same price as I spent 5 years ago, I can now get three times the storage, including faster processors in the NAS box. From that perspective, I've only spent $33/month on storage, as the remaining third still has value.

Ease-of-use: The Continue reading

People can’t read (Equifax edition)

One of these days I'm going to write a guide for journalists reporting on the cyber. One of the items I'd stress is that they often fail to read the text of what is being said, but instead read some sort of subtext that wasn't explicitly said. This is valid sometimes -- as the subtext is what the writer intended all along, even if they didn't explicitly write it. Other times, though the imagined subtext is not what the writer intended at all.


A good example is the recent Equifax breach. The original statement says:
Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX) today announced a cybersecurity incident potentially impacting approximately 143 million U.S. consumers.
The word consumers was widely translated to customers, as in this Bloomberg story:
Equifax Inc. said its systems were struck by a cyberattack that may have affected about 143 million U.S. customers of the credit reporting agency
But these aren't the same thing. Equifax is a credit rating agency, keeping data on people who are not its own customers. It's an important difference.


Another good example is yesterday's quote "confirming" that Equifax is confirming the "Apache Struts" vulnerability was to blame:
Equifax has been intensely Continue reading

State of MAC address randomization

tldr: I went to DragonCon, a conference of 85,000 people, so sniff WiFi packets and test how many phones now uses MAC address randomization. Almost all iPhones nowadays do, but it seems only a third of Android phones do.


Ten years ago at BlackHat, we presented the "data seepage" problem, how the broadcasts from your devices allow you to be tracked. Among the things we highlighted was how WiFi probes looking to connect to access-points expose the unique hardware address burned into the phone, the MAC address. This hardware address is unique to your phone, shared by no other device in the world. Evildoers, such as the NSA or GRU, could install passive listening devices in airports and train-stations around the world in order to track your movements. This could be done with $25 devices sprinkled around a few thousand places -- within the budget of not only a police state, but also the average hacker.

In 2014, with the release of iOS 8, Apple addressed this problem by randomizing the MAC address. Every time you restart your phone, it picks a new, random, hardware address for connecting to WiFi. This causes a few problems: every time you restart Continue reading

ROI is not a cybersecurity concept

In the cybersecurity community, much time is spent trying to speak the language of business, in order to communicate to business leaders our problems. One way we do this is trying to adapt the concept of "return on investment" or "ROI" to explain why they need to spend more money. Stop doing this. It's nonsense. ROI is a concept pushed by vendors in order to justify why you should pay money for their snake oil security products. Don't play the vendor's game.

The correct concept is simply "risk analysis". Here's how it works.

List out all the risks. For each risk, calculate:

  • How often it occurs.
  • How much damage it does.
  • How to mitigate it.
  • How effective the mitigation is (reduces chance and/or cost).
  • How much the mitigation costs.

If you have risk of something that'll happen once-per-day on average, costing $1000 each time, then a mitigation costing $500/day that reduces likelihood to once-per-week is a clear win for investment.

Now, ROI should in theory fit directly into this model. If you are paying $500/day to reduce that risk, I could use ROI to show you hypothetical products that will ...

  • ...reduce the remaining risk to once-per-month for an additional $10/day.
  • ... Continue reading

On ISO standardization of blockchains

So ISO, the primary international standards organization, is seeking to standardize blockchain technologies. On the surface, this seems a reasonable idea, creating a common standard that everyone can interoperate with.

But it can be silly idea in practice. I mean, it should not be assumed that this is a good thing to do.

The value of official standards

You don't need the official imprimatur of a government committee for something to be a "standard". The Internet itself is a prime example of that.

In the 1980s, the ISO and the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) pursued competing standards for creating a world-wide "internet". The IETF was an informal group of technologist that had essentially no official standing.

The ISO version of the Internet failed. Their process was to bring multiple stakeholders from business, government, and universities together in committees to debate competing interests. The result was something so horrible that it could never work in practice.

The IETF succeeded. It consisted of engineers just building things. Rather than officially "standardized", these things were "described", so that others knew enough to build their own version that interoperated. Once lots of different people built interoperating versions of something, then it became a Continue reading

Announcement: IPS code

So after 20 years, IBM is killing off my BlackICE code created in April 1998. So it's time that I rewrite it.

BlackICE was the first "inline" intrusion-detection system, aka. an "intrusion prevention system" or IPS. ISS purchased my company in 2001 and replaced their RealSecure engine with it, and later renamed it Proventia. Then IBM purchased ISS in 2006. Now, they are formally canceling the project and moving customers onto Cisco's products, which are based on Snort.

So now is a good time to write a replacement. The reason is that BlackICE worked fundamentally differently than Snort, using protocol analysis rather than pattern-matching. In this way, it worked more like Bro than Snort. The biggest benefit of protocol-analysis is speed, making it many times faster than Snort. The second benefit is better detection ability, as I describe in this post on Heartbleed.

So my plan is to create a new project. I'll be checking in the starter bits into GitHub starting a couple weeks from now. I need to figure out a new name for the project, so I don't have to rip off a name from William Gibson like I did last time :).

Some notes:

Why that “file-copy” forensics of DNC hack is wrong

People keep asking me about this story about how forensics "experts" have found proof the DNC hack was an inside job, because files were copied at 22-megabytes-per-second, faster than is reasonable for Internet connections.

This story is bogus.

Yes, the forensics is correct that at some point, files were copied at 22-mBps. But there's no evidence this was the point at Internet transfer out of the DNC.

One point might from one computer to another within the DNC. Indeed, as someone experienced doing this sort of hack, it's almost certain that at some point, such a copy happened. The computers you are able to hack into are rarely the computers that have the data you want. Instead, you have to copy the data from other computers to the hacked computer, and then exfiltrate the data out of the hacked computer.

Another point might have been from one computer to another within the hacker's own network, after the data was stolen. As a hacker, I can tell you that I frequently do this. Indeed, as this story points out, the timestamps of the file shows that the 22-mBps copy happened months after the hack was detected.

If the 22-mBps was Continue reading

Query name minimization

One new thing you need to add your DNS security policies is "query name minimizations" (RFC 7816). I thought I'd mention it since many haven't heard about it.

Right now, when DNS resolvers lookup a name like "www.example.com.", they send the entire name to the root server (like a.root-servers.net.). When it gets back the answer to the .com DNS server a.gtld-servers.net), it then resends the full "www.example.com" query to that server.

This is obviously unnecessary. The first query should be just .com. to the root server, then example.com. to the next server -- the minimal amount needed for each query, not the full query.

The reason this is important is that everyone is listening in on root name server queries. Universities and independent researchers do this to maintain the DNS system, and to track malware. Security companies do this also to track malware, bots, command-and-control channels, and so forth. The world's biggest spy agencies do this in order just to spy on people. Minimizing your queries prevents them from spying on you.

An example where this is important is that story of lookups from AlfaBank in Continue reading

Top 10 Most Obvious Hacks of All Time (v0.9)

For teaching hacking/cybersecurity, I thought I'd create of the most obvious hacks of all time. Not the best hacks, the most sophisticated hacks, or the hacks with the biggest impact, but the most obvious hacks -- ones that even the least knowledgeable among us should be able to understand. Below I propose some hacks that fit this bill, though in no particular order.

The reason I'm writing this is that my niece wants me to teach her some hacking. I thought I'd start with the obvious stuff first.


Shared Passwords

If you use the same password for every website, and one of those websites gets hacked, then the hacker has your password for all your websites. The reason your Facebook account got hacked wasn't because of anything Facebook did, but because you used the same email-address and password when creating an account on "beagleforums.com", which got hacked last year.

I've heard people say "I'm sure, because I choose a complex password and use it everywhere". No, this is the very worst thing you can do. Sure, you can the use the same password on all sites you don't care much about, but for Facebook, your email account, and your bank, Continue reading

Is DefCon Wifi safe?

DEF CON is the largest U.S. hacker conference that takes place every summer in Las Vegas. It offers WiFi service. Is it safe?

Probably.

The trick is that you need to download the certificate from https://wifireg.defcon.org and import it into your computer. They have instructions for all your various operating systems. For macOS, it was as simple as downloading "dc25.mobileconfig" and importing it.

I haven't validated the DefCon team did the right thing for all platforms, but I know that safety is possible. If a hacker could easily hack into arbitrary WiFi, then equipment vendors would fix it. Corporations widely use WiFi -- they couldn't do this if it weren't safe.

The first step in safety is encryption, obviously. WPA does encryption well, you you are good there.

The second step is authentication -- proving that the access-point is who it says it is. Otherwise, somebody could setup their own access-point claiming to be "DefCon", and you'd happily connect to it. Encrypted connect to the evil access-point doesn't help you. This is what the certificate you download does -- you import it into your system, so that you'll trust only the "DefCon" access-point that has Continue reading
1 … 5 6 7 8 9 … 23