Expiring The Internet
An article came out this week that really made me sigh. The title was “Six Aging Protocols That Could Cripple The Internet“. I dove right in, expecting to see how things like Finger were old and needed to be disabled and removed. Imagine my surprise when I saw things like BGP4 and SMTP on the list. I really tried not to smack my own forehead as I flipped through the slideshow of how the foundation of the Internet is old and is at risk of meltdown.
If It Ain’t Broke
Engineers love the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”. We spend our careers planning and implementing. We also spend a lot of time not touching things afterwards in order to prevent it from collapsing in a big heap. Once something is put in place, it tends to stay that way until something necessitates a change.
BGP is a perfect example. The basics of BGP remain largely the same from when it was first implemented years ago. BGP4 has been in use since 1994 even though RFC 4271 didn’t officially formalize it until 2006. It remains a critical part of how the Continue reading
Ask a nerd
One should probably consult a lawyer on legal questions. Likewise, lawyers should probably consult nerds on technical questions. I point this out because of this crappy Lawfare post. It's on the right side of the debate (FBI's evidence pointing to North Korea is bad), but it's still crap.For example, it says: "One hears a lot in cybersecurity circles that the government has “solved” the attribution problem". That's not true, you hear the opposite among cybersecurity experts. I suspect he gets this wrong because he's not talking about technical experts, but government circles. What government types in Washington D.C. say about cybersecurity is wholly divorced from reality -- you really ought to consult technical people.
He then says: "it is at least possible that some other nation is spoofing a North Korean attack". This is moronic, accepting most of the FBI's premise that a nation state sponsored the attack, and that we are only looking for which nation state this might be. In reality, the Sony hack is well within the capabilities of teenagers. The evidence is solid that Sony had essentially no internal security -- it required no special sophistication by the hacker. Anybody Continue reading
Sony hack was the work of SPECTRE
The problem with hacking is that people try to understand it through analogies with things they understand. They try to fit new information into old stories/tropes they are familiar with. This doesn't work -- hacking needs to be understood in its own terms.But since you persist in doing it this way, let me use the trope of SPECTRE to explain the Sony hack. This is the evil criminal/terrosist organization in the James Bond films that is independent of all governments. Let's imagine that it's SPECTRE who is responsible for the Sony hack, and how that fits within the available evidence.
This trope adequately explains the FBI "evidence" pointing to North Korea. SPECTRE has done work for North Korea, selling them weapons, laundering their money, and conducting hacking for them. While North Korea is one of their many customers, they aren't controlled by North Korea.
The FBI evidence also points to Iran, with the Sony malware similar to that used in the massive Saudi Aramco hack. That would make sense, since an evil organization like SPECTRE does business with all the evil countries. Conversely, the Iranian connection doesn't make sense if the Sony hack were purely the work of the Continue reading
The FBI’s North Korea evidence is nonsense
The FBI has posted a press release describing why they think it's North Korea. While there may be more things we don't know, on its face it's complete nonsense. It sounds like they've decided on a conclusion and are trying to make the evidence fit. They don't use straight forward language, but confusing weasel words, like saying "North Korea actors" instead of simply "North Korea". They don't give details.The reason it's nonsense is that the hacker underground shares code. They share everything: tools, techniques, exploits, owned-systems, botnets, and infrastructure. Different groups even share members. It is implausible that North Korea would develop it's own malware from scratch.
Here's the thing with computer evidence: you don't need to keep it secret. It wouldn't harm Sony and wouldn't harm the investigation. It would help anti-virus and security vendors develop signatures to stop it. It would crowd source analysis, to see who it really points to. We don't need to take the FBI's word for it, we should be able to see the evidence ourselves. In other words, instead of saying "IP addresses associated with North Korea", then can tell us what those IP addresses are, like "203.131.222.102".
But Continue reading
I just bought a ticket for The Interview
Free speech is only partly a government issue ("1st Amendment"). Throughout the world, speech is chilled more by thugs than by police. It could be youth gangs beating up journalists like in Russia, or Islamists killing cartoonists and movie makers. Even in America, we increasingly have a culture that seeks to silence debate, rather than countering bad speech with more speech.
There is action we can take, and it's this: when some are threatened, they should not stand alone. They can't kill, beat up, or dox all of us when we are many. We should draw pictures of Mohamed. We should criticize the despotic rule of Putin. We should buy tickets to The Interview and brag about it online.
What they miss about Uber/Lyft pay
In this story, writer Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) becomes a Lyft driver for a week. He focuses on the political questions, such as the controversially low pay. He makes the same mistakes that everyone else makes.Lyft (and Uber) pay can be low for the same reason McDonalds is open at midnight. In absolute terms, McDonalds loses money staying open late. But, when you take into account all the sunk costs for operating during the day, they would lose even more money by not remaining open late. In other words, staying open late is marginally better.
The same is true of Lyft/Uber drivers. I take Uber/UberX on a regular basis and always interview the drivers. Without exception, it's a side business.
This one time, my UberX driver was a college student. He spent his time between pickups studying. When calculating wait-time plus drive-time, he may have been earning minimum wage. However, when calculating just drive-time, he was earning a great wage for a student -- better than other jobs open to students.
Without exception, all the Uber black-car drivers have their own business. They have fixed contracts with companies to drive employees/clients. Or, they have more personal relationships with Continue reading
Notes on the CIA light-torture report
I'm reading through the Senate report on the CIA's light-torture program, and I came across this giggly bit:#10: The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques. The CIA's Office of Public Affairs and senior CIA officials coordinated to share classified information on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to select members of the media to counter public criticism, shape public opinionOf course they did, but then so did the Senate committee itself. They've been selectively leaking bits of the report for over a year. Their description of the "CIA hacking" scandal was completely inaccurate.
Moreover, this Executive Summary wasn't simply published, but given to select people in the media beforehand in order to shape the message.
There's no doubt that the CIA's brutal treatment of prisoners is evil, a stain on the nation's honor, and something that should be prosecuted. But Senator Feinstein and her colleagues are as guilty of this as anybody else. This report is political garbage designed to shield Feinstein from the blame she shares.
All malware defeats 90% of defenses
When the FBI speaks, you can tell they don't know anything about hacking. An example of this quote by Joseph Demarest, the assistant director of the FBI’s cyberdivision:"The malware that was used would have slipped, probably would have gotten past 90% of the net defenses that are out there today in private industry, and I would challenge to even say government”
He's trying to show how sophisticated, organized, and unprecedented the hackers were.
This is nonsense. All malware defeats 90% of defenses. Hackers need do nothing terribly sophisticated in order to do what they did to Sony.
Take, for example, a pentest we did of a Fortune 500 financial firm. We had some USB drives made with the logo of the corporation we were pen-testing. We grabbed a flash game off the Internet, changed the graphics so that they were punching the logo of their main competitor, and put text in the Final Score screen suggesting "email this to your friends and see what they get". We then added some malware components to it. We then dropped the USB drives in the parking lot.
This gave us everything in the company as people passed the game around. The CEO and Continue reading
Are SDN Controllers a Security Risk ?
No. When compared to the operation of existing networks, SDN is much more secure.
The post Are SDN Controllers a Security Risk ? appeared first on EtherealMind.
BGPSEC: Protections Offered
In my last post on the subject of BGPSEC, I explained the basic operation of the modifications to BGP itself. In this post, I’ll begin looking at some of the properties — both good and bad — of these extensions to BGP. To being, we’ll look at the simple network illustrated here, and see what […]
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The post BGPSEC: Protections Offered appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.
FYI: Snowden made things worse
Snowden appeared at a #CatoSpyCon, and cited evidence of how things have improved since his disclosures (dislaimer: as Libertarian, I'm a fan of both CATO and Snowden). He cited some pretty compelling graphs, such as a sharp increase of SSL encryption. However, at the moment, I'm pretty sure he's made things worse.The thing is, governments didn't know such surveillance was possible. Now that Snowden showed what the NSA was doing, governments around the world are following that blueprint, dramatically increasing their Internet surveillance. Not only do they now know how to do it, they are given good justifications. If the United States (the moral leader in "freedoms") says it's okay, then it must be okay for more repressive governments (like France). There is also the sense of competition, that if the NSA knows what's going on across the Internet, then they need to know, too.
This is a problem within the United Sates, too. The NSA collected everyone's phone records over the last 7 years. Before Snowden, that database was accessed rarely, and really for only terrorism purposes. However, now that everyone else in government knows the database exists, they are showing up at the NSA with warrants to Continue reading
EFF: We’ve always been at war with EastAsia
As a populist organization, the EFF is frequently Orwellian. That's demonstrated in their recent post about the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace", where they say:
"The Declaration resounds eerily today. We live in an era where net neutrality is threatened by corporations that want to remove competition and force customers to pay more to have equal access to some sites."
This is self-contradictory. The Declaration says, unequivocally, that governments should not regulate cyberspace ("You have no sovereignty where we gather"), and should not make it into a public utility. The current EFF position is exactly the opposite, that government needs to regulate cyberspace as a public utility.
It is like that bit in 1984 where Orwell's government changes allegiances, going from being an ally with Eastasia to becoming their enemy, and then claim that they had always been at war with Eastasia. They made the change in mid-rally. Orwell describes how the mob quickly switched their beliefs, agreeing that they'd always been at war with Eastasia.
When I read 1984, I thought this was a bit over the top, that the mob would not behave so illogically. But we see the EFF mob today acts exactly that way Continue reading
RPKI: BGP Security Hammpered by a Legal Agreement
Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a relatively new standard for establishing BGP route origination. I wrote a brief introductory article here. Apologies for the self-promotion, but rather than rehash the basics here, I raise another issue that needs community attention: ARIN’s Relying Party Agreement (RPA: PDF link). Having said that, some basics are needed. […]
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War Stories: Unix Security
A different kind of war story this time: Unix security blunders. Old-school Unix-types will mutter about how much more secure Unix systems are than Windows, but that glosses over a lot. In a former life I worked as an HP-UX sysadmin, and I saw some shocking default configurations. I liked HP-UX – so much better laid out than Solaris – but it was very insecure by default. Here’s a few things I’ve come across:
Gaining Root
We’d lost the root password for a test HP-UX server. We had user access, but not root. The server was located in a different DC, and we didn’t really feel like going and plugging in a console cable to reset the root password. So we started looking around at how we might get access. After a while I found these two things:
- Root’s home directory was ‘/‘ – this was the default on HP-UX
- The Remote Login service was running
And now for the kicker:
hpux lhill$ ls -ld / drwxrwxrwx 30 root wheel 1020 1 Nov 13:57 /
Put those together, and you can see it’s easy to gain root. All we needed to do was create /.rhosts, and add whatever Continue reading
The Pando Tor conspiracy troll
Tor, also known as The Onion Router, bounces your traffic through several random Internet servers, thus hiding the source. It means you can surf a website without them knowing who you are. Your IP address may appear to be coming from Germany when in fact you live in San Francisco. When used correctly, it prevents eavesdropping by law enforcement, the NSA, and so on. It's used by people wanting to hide their actions from prying eyes, from political dissidents, to CIA operatives, to child pornographers.Recently, Pando (and Internet infotainment site) released a story accusing Tor of being some sort of government conspiracy.
This is nonsense, of course. Pando's tell-all exposé of the conspiracy contains nothing that isn't already widely known. We in the community have long joked about this. We often pretend there is a conspiracy in order to annoy uptight Tor activists like Jacob Appelbaum, but we know there isn't any truth to it. This really annoys me -- how can I troll about Tor's government connections when Pando claims there's actually truth to the conspiracy?
The military and government throws research money around with reckless abandon. That no more means they created Tor than it means they created the Continue reading
That wraps it up for end-to-end
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This was a radical design at the time. Big corporations and big government still believed in the opposite model, with all the intelligence in big "mainframe" computers at the core of the network. Users would just interact with "dumb terminals" on the ends.
The reason the Internet was radical was the way it gave power to the users. Take video phones, for example. AT&T had been promising this since the 1960s, as the short segment in "2001 A Space Odyssey" showed. However, getting that feature to work meant replacing all the equipment inside the telephone network. Telephone switches would need to know the difference between a normal phone call and a video call. Moreover, there could be only one standard, world wide, so that calling Japan or Europe would work with their video telephone systems. Users were powerless to develop video calling on their own -- they would have to wait for the big telcom monopolies to develop it, however long it took.
That changed with Continue reading
Juniper SRX-110H EoL
Somehow I missed this when it was announced, but the Juniper SRX-110H-VA is End of Life, and is no longer supported for new software releases.
End of Life announcement is here, with extra detail in this PDF. Announcement was Dec 10 2013, with “Last software engineering support” date Dec 20 2013.
This is now starting to take effect, with 12.1X47 not supported on this platform:
Note: Upgrading to Junos OS Release 12.1X47-D10 or later is not supported on the J Series devices or on the low-memory versions of the SRX100 and SRX200 lines. If you attempt to upgrade one of these devices to Junos OS 12.1X47-D10, installation will be aborted with the following error message:
ERROR: Unsupported platform <platform-name >for 12.1X47 and higher
The replacement hardware is the SRX-110H2-VA, which has 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB. Otherwise it’s exactly the same, which seems a missed opportunity to at least update to local 1Gb switching.
Michael Dale has a little more info here, along with tips for tricking a 240H into installing 12.1X47.
So I decided to see if I could work around this and trick JunOS into installing on my 240H, I Continue reading
Complexity vs Security
Many of the ‘security’ measures in our networks add complexity. That may be an acceptable tradeoff, if we make a meaningful difference to security. But often it feels like we just add complexity for no real benefit.
Here’s some examples of what I’m talking about:
- Multiple Firewall Layers: Many networks use multiple layers of firewalls. If you have a strong policy that says all traffic must go via a server within a DMZ, this makes sense. But often we end up with the same connections going through multiple firewalls. We end up configuring the same rules in multiple places. No security benefit, but increased chance of making mistakes, and added troubleshooting complexity.
- Chained proxies: It’s pretty common to use a proxy server, to enforce HR and security controls on what users browse. But some organisations have chained proxies, where an internal proxy server connects to an upstream proxy server to get Internet access. The upstream proxy doesn’t add anything from a policy or control perspective. It’s just another point to configure and troubleshoot.
- NAT/Routing: First let me be clear: NAT is not complete security in itself, but it can form a valid part of your overall network security policy. That Continue reading
Getting started with Cisco ASA
Even with people who work in networking, as soon as you say the word “firewall” a lot of people tend to stare at that far away place that only exists in their minds. I think some of this comes from the fact that “it’s not a router”. Another reason is that people just haven’t taken the time to get familiar with firewalls. The ASA is Ciscos firewall or VPN device. Though the ASA can do a lot of things, in this post I will cover the basics such as how you set it up and connect the device to the Internet.
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Scaling the Cloud Security Groups
Most overlay virtual networking and cloud orchestration products support security groups – more-or-less-statefulish ACLs inserted between VM NIC and virtual switch.
The lure of security groups is obvious: if you’re willing to change your network security paradigm, you can stop thinking in subnets and focus on specifying who can exchange what traffic (usually specified as TCP/UDP port#) with whom.
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