Weekend Reads 051818: Botnets and Throwhammer

The Facebook freak-out provides an outlet for fears regarding the digital environment we inhabit. A few companies control most channels of information. The gadgets that we use for convenience and entertainment also create the mechanisms for near-total surveillance, from tracking devices in our pockets to wiretaps in our homes—hi, Alexa! Someone besides Santa is watching and knows whether you have been naughty or nice. —Nathanael Blake @Public Discourse

Within just 10 days of the disclosure of two critical vulnerabilities in GPON router at least 5 botnet families have been found exploiting the flaws to build an army of million devices. Security researchers from Chinese-based cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 Netlab have spotted 5 botnet families, including Mettle, Muhstik, Mirai, Hajime, and Satori, making use of the GPON exploit in the wild. —Swati Khandelwal @The Hacker News

Exploitation of Rowhammer attack just got easier. Dubbed ‘Throwhammer,’ the newly discovered technique could allow attackers to launch Rowhammer attack on the targeted systems just by sending specially crafted packets to the vulnerable network cards over the local area network. Known since 2012, Rowhammer is a severe issue with recent generation dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory Continue reading

Saints in Form

Worth Reading: TLS 3.0

Rest assured, the day TLS 1.3 is official won’t be a “Y2K bug” moment for encrypted traffic — and for everyday Web users, the update will likely go unnoticed. However, for security teams, the time to prepare for the new standard is now. —Mark Urban @Dark Reading

Worth Reading: Google asks for “please”

Google on Monday showed off a slew of new features coming to its wide range of consumer products, from an addition to its Android OS that encourage users to take breaks to a feature in its Google Assistant that praises kids (and, perhaps, adults) for using the word “please.” —Rachel Metz @Technology Review

Worth Reading: Securing Geolocation

Geolocation is often targeted for manipulation in order to impersonate (if location is used to reinforce authentication) or other location-dependent benefits, such as access to copyright-protected media and localized news. —AbdelRahman Abdou @APNIC

Short Take: Telecommuting

Worth Reading: Supply Chain Security

All of our computerized systems are deeply international, and we have no choice but to trust the companies and governments that touch those systems. And while we can ban a few specific products, services or companies, no country can isolate itself from potential foreign interference. —Schneier on Security

Worth Reading: The Spin Bit

The spin bit and VEC were designed to be a minimal-risk, maximum-utility signal fit for a single purpose: on-path measurement of end-to-end RTT, to generate RTT samples for a variety of passive latency measurement tasks. —Brian Trammell @APNIC

History of Networking: BGP Security

Worth Reading: Pay attention to performance

In some recent design situations, I’ve spent some time looking at routers and firewalls, looking for some fairly hefty performance characteristics. That’s where it became quite clear (if it wasn’t clear enough already), that router and firewall performance costs a lot more, compared to switches. As covered in the previous blog. —Pete Welcher @Netcraftsmen

Worth Reading: The Internet is going the wrong way

Facebook is taking the place of blogs, but doesn’t permit linking, styles. Posts can’t have titles or include podcasts. As a result these essential features are falling into disuse. We’re returning to AOL. Linking, especially is essential. @Scripting News

Research: Bridging the Air Gap

Way back in the old days, the unit I worked at in the US Air Force had a room with a lot of equipment used for processing classified information. Among this equipment was a Zenith Z-250 with an odd sort of keyboard and a very low resolution screen. A fine metal mesh embedded in a semi-clear substrate was glued to the surface of the monitor. This was our TEMPEST rated computer, on which we could type up classified memos, read classified email, and the like. We normally connected it to the STU-3 through a modem (remember those) to send and receive various kinds of classified information.

Elovici, Mordechai Guri, Yuval. “Bridgeware: The Air-Gap Malware.” Accessed May 13, 2018. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226377-bridgeware/abstract.

The idea of TEMPEST begins way back in 1985, when a Dutch researcher demonstrated “reading” the screen of a computer using some relatively cheap, and easy to assemble, equipment, from several feet away. The paper I’m looking at today provides a good overview of the many ways which have been discovered since this initial demonstration to transfer data from one computer to another across what should be an “air gap.” For instance, the TEMPEST rated computer described Continue reading

Worth Reading: Back to Basics?

We, as the stewards of networking, need to help this process along. We need to spend more time talking about design and theory. We need to dissect protocols and help people understand how to use the tools they have rather than hoping someone will build the best mousetrap ever to solve each piece of a complicated puzzle. We need to teach people to be thinkers and problem solvers. And, yes, that does mean a bit less complaining about things like vendor code quality and VAR behavior. —Tom @The Networking Nerd

Weekend Reads: 051118: New spectre-class vulnerabilities, scraping data, and no middle ground on encryption

A team of security researchers has reportedly discovered a total of eight new “Spectre-class” vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs, which also affect at least a small number of ARM processors and may impact AMD processor architecture as well. Dubbed Spectre-Next Generation, or Spectre-NG, the partial details of the vulnerabilities were first leaked to journalists at German computer magazine Heise, which claims that Intel has classified four of the new vulnerabilities as “high risk” and remaining four as “medium.” —Mohit Kumar @Hacker News

As cities get smarter, their appetite and access to information is also increasing. The rise of data-generating technologies has given government agencies unprecedented opportunities to harness useful, real-time information about citizens. But governments often lack dedicated expertise and resources to collect, analyze, and ultimately turn such data into actionable information, and so have turned to private-sector companies and academic researchers to get at this information. —Joseph Jerome @CDT

Despite this renewed rhetoric, most experts continue to agree that exceptional access, no matter how you implement it, weakens security. The terminology might have changed, but the essential question has not: should technology companies be forced to develop a system that inherently harms their users? The answer hasn’t changed either: Continue reading

You can Fly!

Worth Reading: Why DDoS Won’t Die

Most every organization has been affected by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in some way: whether they were hit directly in a traffic-flooding attack, or if they suffered the fallout from one of their partners or suppliers getting victimized. —Kelly Jackson Higgins @Dark Reading

On the ‘net: Is Networking a Commodity?

It seems, based on this, that all businesses care about, in terms of the network, is the ability to move packets. To use a comparison that is often made: It might be “nice” to drive a “nicer car,” but in the end, a car is a car is a car. All that matters in cars is that they get you from point A to point B, wherever those points might be. If all the data a business cares about can be packed up into packets, and all that matters is getting them from point A to point B—wherever those two places might be, then the kind of equipment you use to move packets does not matter. @ECI

Worth Reading: Silver linings and clouds

Clearly, your management has never heard the phrase, “You get what you pay for.” Or perhaps they heard it and didn’t realize it applied to them. The savings in cloud computing comes at the expense of a loss of control over your systems, which is summed up best in the popular nerd sticker that says, “The Cloud is Just Other People’s Computers.” —Kode Vicious @ACM

Worth Reading: Cisco to MicroTik

One of the hardest things to do quickly in network engineering, is learn a new syntax for a NOS. Especially if you have a tight deadline and need to stand up equipment you’ve never worked with before. The command structure for RouterOS can be cumbersome if you are used to the Cisco CLI. —Kevin Myers @Stubarea51

RIPE NCC: The Future of BGP Security

I was recently invited to a webinar for the RIPE NCC about the future of BGP security. The entire series is well worth watching; I was in the final session, which was a panel discussion on where we are now, and where we might go to make BGP security better.