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Category Archives for "Security"

No, you backoff on backdoors or else

Speaking at #SXSW, President Obama threatened the tech community, telling us to backdoor our encryption ourselves or else congress will mandate a worse solution later.

No, Mr. President, it works the other way around. You'd better backoff on your encryption demands, or else the tech community will revolt, That's what's already happen with Apple's encryption efforts, as well as app developers like Signal and Wickr. Every time you turn the screws, we techies increase the encryption.

It's not a battle you can win without going full police-state. Sure, you can force Apple to backdoor its stuff, but then what about the encrypted apps? You'd have to lock them down as well. But what about encrypted apps developed in foreign countries? What about software I write myself? You aren't going to solve the "going dark" problem until you control all crypto.

If you succeed in achieving your nightmare Orwellian scenario, I promise you this: I'll emigrate to an extradition-free country, to continue the fight against the American government.

Your crypto backdoors creates a police-state beyond what even police-state advocates like Michael Hayden and Linsdey Graham can tolerate. Your point on "balance" is a lie. We've become radically unbalanced toward mass Continue reading

Can the Apple code be misused?

This post will respond to the tweet by Orin Kerr:

The government is right that the software must be signed by Apple and made to only work on Farook's phone, but the situation is more complicated than that.

The basic flaw in this picture is jailbreaks. This is a process of finding some hack that gets around Apple's "signing" security layer. Jailbreaks are popular in the user community, especially China, when people want to run software not approved by Apple. When the government says "intact security", it means "non-jailbroken".

Each new version of iOS requires the discovery of some new hack to enable jailbreaking. Hacking teams compete to see who can ship a new jailbreak to users, and other companies sell jailbreaks to intelligence agencies. Once jailbroken, the signing is bypassed, as is the second technique of locking the software specifically to Farook's phone.

Details are more complicated than this. Each jailbreak is different, and many won't allow this secret Apple software to be run. Some will. The point Continue reading

Code is expressive. Full Stop. (FBIvApple)

I write code. More than a $billion of products have been sold where my code is the key component. I've written more than a million lines of it. I point this out because I want to address this FBIvApple fight from the perspective of a coder -- from the perspective of somebody who the FBI proposes to conscript into building morally offensive code. Specifically, I want to address the First Amendment issue, whether code is expressive speech.


Consider Chris Valasek (@NudeHabasher), most recently famous for his car-hacking stunt of hacking into a Jeep from the Internet (along with Charlie Miller @CharlieMiller).

As Chris tells the story, he was on an airplane without WiFi writing code for his "CANbus-hack" tool that would hack the car. Without the Internet, he didn't have access to reference information, such as for strtok(). But he did remember from years earlier working on my (closed-source) code, and used the ideas he remembered to solve his immediate problem. No, he didn't remember the specifics of the code itself, and in any case, his CANbus-hack was unrelated to that code. Instead, it was the ideas expressed my code that he remembered.

What he came up with was this:



Continue reading

Captain America Civil War — it’s us

The next Marvel movie is Captain America: Winter Soldier. The plot is this: after the Avengers keep blowing things up, there is pushback demanding accountability. Government should be in control when to call in the Avengers, and superhumans should be forced to register with the government. Ironman is pro-accountability, as you've seen his story arc evolve toward this point in the movies. Captain America is anti-accountability.

This story arc is us, in cybersecurity. Last year, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek proved they could, through the "Internet", remotely control a car driving down the freeway. In the video, we see a frightened reporter as the engine stalls in freeway traffic. Should researchers be able to probe cars, medical equipment, and IoT devices accountable to nobody but themselves? Or should they be accountable to the public, and rules setup by government?

This story is about us personally, too. In cyberspace, many of us have superhuman powers. Should we be free to do whatever we want, without accountability, or should be be forced to register with teh government, so they can watch us? For example, I scan the Internet (the entire Internet) with relative impunity. This is what I tweeted when creating my Continue reading

RPKI ARIN Agreement Update

In December of 2014 I wrote an article about  a legal agreement that was discouraging network operators from implementing an important Internet security function.  I am happy to report, the situation has improved: ARIN no longer requires operators explicitly accept a click-through agreement in order to access the Trust Anchor Locator (TAL). Resource Public Key […]

The post RPKI ARIN Agreement Update appeared first on Packet Pushers.

RPKI ARIN Agreement Update

In December of 2014 I wrote an article about  a legal agreement that was discouraging network operators from implementing an important Internet security function.  I am happy to report, the situation has improved: ARIN no longer requires operators explicitly accept a click-through agreement in order to access the Trust Anchor Locator (TAL). Resource Public Key […]

The post RPKI ARIN Agreement Update appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Docker Security – part 4(Container image)

This is the fourth part of my Docker security series. In this blog, we will cover ways to secure Container images. Following are the other parts (1, 2, 3) Docker image signing: Docker Container images can be stored either in public or private registry. It is needed to sign Container images so that the client knows that image … Continue reading Docker Security – part 4(Container image) →

Docker Security – part 3(Engine access)

This is the third part of my Docker security series. In this blog, we will cover ways to securely access Docker engine. Following are the other parts (1, 2, 4) Docker engine access: Docker engine runs as a daemon and by default listens on the Unix socket, “unix:///var/ run/docker.sock”. Docker start options are specified in “/etc/default/docker”. To allow … Continue reading Docker Security – part 3(Engine access) →

Docker Security – part 2(Docker Engine)

This is the second part of my Docker security series. In this blog, we will cover security features around Docker engine. Following are the other parts(1, 3, 4) Namespaces: Docker makes use of the following Linux kernel Namespaces to achieve Container isolation: pid namespace mount namespace network namespace ipc namespace UTS namespace To illustrate the … Continue reading Docker Security – part 2(Docker Engine) →

Docker Security – part 1(Overview)

There is a general perception that Containers, especially Docker Containers, are insecure. It is true that Containers are not as secure as VM since all Containers in a single machine share the same kernel and compromising one Container can cause host level compromise or compromise with other Containers. There are many ways to harden Containers and … Continue reading Docker Security – part 1(Overview) →
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