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Technology Short Take #76

Welcome to Technology Short Take #76, the first Technology Short Take of 2017. Normally, I’d publish this on a Friday, but due to extenuating circumstances (my mother-in-law’s funeral is tomorrow) I’m posting it today. Here’s hoping you find something useful!

Networking

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 The results have been laughable, with out-of-date software, bad encryption, unnecessary services, and so on.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 According to the security scans, this is a lie, as the software is all woefully out-of-date.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

Some Reading on Application Containers

One aspect of my pending migration to Ubuntu Linux on my primary laptop has been the opportunity to explore “non-traditional” uses for Linux containers. In particular, the idea of using Docker (or systemd-nspawn or rkt) to serve as a sandbox (of sorts) for GUI applications really intrigues me. This isn’t a use case that many of the container mechanisms are aiming to solve, but it’s an interesting use case nevertheless (to me, anyway).

So, in no particular order, here are a few articles I found about using Linux containers as application containers/sandboxes (mostly focused around GUI applications):

A Docker-Like Container Management using systemd
Running containers without Docker
Containerizing Graphical Applications on Linux with systemd-nspawn
Debian Containers with systemd-nspawn
Using your own containers with systemd-nspawn and overlayfs

I was successful in using Docker to containerize Firefox (see my “dockerfiles” repository on GitHub)), and was also successful in using systemd-nspawn in the same way, including the use of overlayfs. My experiments have been quite helpful and informative; I have some ideas that may percolate into future blog posts.

Response: The Orphaned Internet – Taking Over 120K Domains via a DNS Vulnerability in AWS, Google Cloud, Rackspace and Digital Ocean | The Hacker Blog

So obvious but I’m checking my unused domains to make sure they have no nameservers configured

The root of this vulnerability occurs when a managed DNS provider allows someone to add a domain to their account without any verification of ownership of the domain name itself. This is actually an incredibly common flow and is used in cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud, Rackspace and of course, Digital Ocean. The issue occurs when a domain name is used with one of these cloud services and the zone is later deleted without also changing the domain’s nameservers. This means that the domain is still fully set up for use in the cloud service but has no account with a zone file to control it. In many cloud providers this means that anyone can create a DNS zone for that domain and take full control over the domain. This allows an attacker to take full control over the domain to set up a website, issue SSL/TLS certificates, host email, etc. Worse yet, after combining the results from the various providers affected by this problem over 120,000 domains were vulnerable (likely many more).

The Orphaned Internet – Taking Over 120K Domains via Continue reading

Aerohive’s Private Pre-Shared Key Technology

ppsk-aerohiveA fairly common question I get asked when talking to people about Aerohive Networks is “what makes us different?” In other words, why should they choose Aerohive to replace their existing wireless vendor? It is a fair question. After all, plenty of vendors sell APs that can serve the most basic wireless needs. All of the vendors I compete with do a lot of the same things when it comes to general wireless.

One of the things I like to talk to potential customers about is Aerohive’s Private Pre-Shared Key(PPSK) technology. For some organizations, PPSK is not something they are interested in. Maybe they already have a pretty solid 802.1X implementation and don’t have a need for WPA2 Personal(pre-shared key) security on their wireless network. That’s perfectly fine in my book. I have other things I can always talk about with regard to an Aerohive solution. For quite a few organizations though, they see the advantage of PPSK over standard pre-shared key implementations and jump right in to using it. I wanted to briefly discuss what PPSK is and how it can be utilized with an Aerohive solution. No configuration screenshots or long demonstration videos. Just a basic 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

The Back Door Feature Problem

In Don’t Forget to Lock the Back Door! A Characterization of IPv6 Network Security Policy, the authors ran an experiment that tested for open ports in IPv4 and IPv6 across a wide swath of the network. What they discovered was interesting—

IPv6 is more open than IPv4. A given IPv6 port is nearly always more open than the same port is in IPv4. In particular, routers are twice as reachable over IPv6 for SSH, Telnet, SNMP, and BGP. While openness on IPv6 is not as severe for servers, we still find thousands of hosts open that are only open over IPv6.

This result really, on reflection, should not be all that surprising. There are probably thousands of networks in the world with “unintentional” deployments of IPv6. The vendor has shipped new products with IPv6 enabled by default, because one large customer has demanded it. Customers who have not even thought about deploying IPv6, however, end up with an unprotected attack surface.

The obvious solution to this problem is—deploy IPv6 intentionally, including security, and these problems will likely go away.

But the obvious solution, as obvious as it might be, is only one step in the right direction. Instead of just Continue reading

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