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Category Archives for "Security"

On science literacy…

In this WIRED article, a scientifically illiterate writer explains "science literacy". It's as horrid as you'd expect. He preaches the Aristotelian version of science that Galileo proved wrong centuries ago. His thesis is that science isn't about knowing scientific facts, but being able to think scientifically. He then claims that thinking scientifically is all about building models of how the world works.

This is profoundly wrong. Science is about observation and experimental testing of theories.

For example, consider the following question. If you had two balls of the same size, one made of lead and the other made of wood, and you dropped them at the same time, which would hit the ground first (ignoring air resistance)? For thousands of years Aristotelian scientists claimed that heavier objects fell faster, purely by reasoning about the problem. It wasn't until the time of Galileo that scientists conducted the experiment and observed that these balls hit the ground at the same time. In other words, all objects fall at the same speed, regardless or size or weight (ignoring air resistance). Feathers fall as fast as lead on the moon. If you don't believe me, drop different objects from a building and observe for yourself.

The point here is Continue reading

A lesson in BitTorrent

Hackers have now posted a second dump of Ashley-Madison, this time 20-gigabytes worth of data. Many, mostly journalists, are eagerly downloading this next dump. However, at the time of this writing, nobody has finished downloading it yet. None of the journalists have a complete copy, so you aren't seeing any new stories about the contents. It promises the full email spool of the CEO in the file name, but no journalist has yet looked into that mail spool and reported a story. Currently, the most any journalist has is 85% of the dump, slowly downloading the rest at 37-kilobytes/second.

Why is that? Is AshMad doing some sort of counter-attack to stop the downloaded (like Sony did)? Or is it overloaded because too many people are trying to download?

No, it's because it hasn't finished seeding.

BitTorrent is p2p (peer-to-peer). You download chunks from the peers, aka. the swarm, not the original source (the tracker). Instead of slowing down as more people join the swarm to download the file(s), BitTorrent downloads become faster -- the more people you can download from, the faster it goes.

But 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month. The same goes for BitTorrent. Continue reading

AshMad is prostitution not adultery

The Ashley-Madison website advertises adultery, but that's a lie. I've talked to a lot of users of the site, and none of them used it to cheat on their spouse. Instead, they used it as just a "dating" site -- and even that is a misnomer, since "dating" often just means a legal way to meet prostitutes. According to several users, prostitutes are really the only females they'd consistently meet on Ashley-Madison.

In other words, Ashley-Madison is a prostitution website, not an adultery website. "Cheating" is just the hook, to communicate to the users that they should expect sex, but not a future spouse. And the website is upfront about charging for it.

I point this out because a lot of people have gone over-the-top on the adultery angle, such as this The Intercept piece. That's rather silly since Ashley-Madison wasn't really about adultery in the first place.







Big Data for Social Engineering

First, it integrates with corporate directories such as Active Directory and social media sites like LinkedIn to map the connections between employees, as well as important outside contacts. Bell calls this the “real org chart.” Hackers can use such information to choose people they ought to impersonate while trying to scam employees. From there, AVA users can craft custom phishing campaigns, both in email and Twitter, to see how employees respond. via wired

This is a white hat tool, of course, a form of social engineering penetration testing. Two points of interest, though.

First, you can be pretty certain hackers are already using this sort of tool today to find the right person to contact, how to contact them, and to discover the things they know people will respond to. The rule of thumb you should keep in mind is — at least 80% of the time, hackers are already using the tools researchers come up with to do penetration testing. Remember all those fake people inhabiting the world of twitter, facebok, and the like? Some of them might not be just another click farm — some of them might be clickbait for hackers to find out who you Continue reading

Trump is right about the 14th Amendment

Trump sucks all the intelligence out of the room, converting otherwise intelligent and educated pundits into blithering idiots. Today's example is the claim that Trump said:
"The 14th Amendment is unconstitutional."
Of course he didn't say that. What he did say is that the 14th Amendment doesn't grant "birthright citizenship" aka. "anchor babies". And he's completely correct. The 14th Amendment says:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States"
The complicated bit is in parentheses. If you remove that bit, then of course Trump would be wrong, and anchor babies would be guaranteed by the constitution, since it would clearly say that being born in the U.S. grants citizenship.

But the phrase is there, so obviously some babies born in the U.S. aren't guaranteed (by the constitution) citizenship. Which babies are those?

The immigration law 8 U.S.C. § 1401(a) lists some of them: babies of ambassadors, heads of state, and military prisoners.

It's this law that currently grants anchor babies citizenship, not the constitution. Laws can be changed by Congress. Presumably, "illegal aliens" could easily be added to the list.

This Continue reading

Notes on the Ashley-Madison dump

Ashley-Madison is a massive dating that claims 40 million users. The site is specifically for those who want to cheat on their spouse. Recently, it was hacked. Yesterday, the hackers published the dumped data.

It appears legit. I asked my twitter followers for those who had created accounts. I have verified multiple users of the site, one of which was a throw-away account used only on the site. Assuming my followers aren't lying, this means the dump is confirmed.

It's over 36-million accounts. That's not quite what they claim, but it's pretty close. However, glancing through the data, it appears that a lot of the accounts are bogus, obviously made up things for people who just want to look at the site without creating a "real" account.

It's heavily men. I count 28-million men to 5 million woman, according to the "gender" field in the database (with 2-million undetermined). However, glancing through the credit-card transactions, I find only male names.

It's full account information. This includes full name, email, and password hash as you'd expect. It also includes dating information, like height, weight, and so forth. It appears to contain addresses, as well as GPS coordinates. I suspect that Continue reading

DNS parser, meet Go fuzzer

Here at CloudFlare we are heavy users of the github.com/miekg/dns Go DNS library and we make sure to contribute to its development as much as possible. Therefore when Dmitry Vyukov published go-fuzz and started to uncover tens of bugs in the Go standard library, our task was clear.

Hot Fuzz

Fuzzing is the technique of testing software by continuously feeding it inputs that are automatically mutated. For C/C++, the wildly successful afl-fuzz tool by Michał Zalewski uses instrumented source coverage to judge which mutations pushed the program into new paths, eventually hitting many rarely-tested branches.

go-fuzz applies the same technique to Go programs, instrumenting the source by rewriting it (like godebug does). An interesting difference between afl-fuzz and go-fuzz is that the former normally operates on file inputs to unmodified programs, while the latter asks you to write a Go function and passes inputs to that. The former usually forks a new process for each input, the latter keeps calling the function without restarting often.

There is no strong technical reason for this difference (and indeed afl recently gained the ability to behave like go-fuzz), but it's likely due to the different ecosystems in which they Continue reading

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