The deal with DMCA 1201 reform
There are two fights in Congress now against the DMCA, the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act". One is over Section 512 covering "takedowns" on the web. The other is over Section 1201 covering "reverse engineering", which weakens cybersecurity.
Even before digital computers, since the 1880s, an important principle of cybersecurity has been openness and transparency ("Kerckhoff's Principle"). Only through making details public can security flaws be found, discussed, and fixed. This includes reverse-engineering to search for flaws.
Cybersecurity experts have long struggled against the ignorant who hold the naive belief we should instead coverup information, so that evildoers cannot find and exploit flaws. Surely, they believe, given just anybody access to critical details of our security weakens it. The ignorant have little faith in technology, that it can be made secure. They have more faith in government's ability to control information.
Technologists believe this information coverup hinders well-meaning people and protects the incompetent from embarrassment. When you hide information about how something works, you prevent people on your own side from discovering and fixing flaws. It also means that you can't hold those accountable for their security, since it's impossible to notice security flaws until after they've been exploited. At the Continue reading
Improving DNS Privacy with Oblivious DoH in 1.1.1.1
Today we are announcing support for a new proposed DNS standard — co-authored by engineers from Cloudflare, Apple, and Fastly — that separates IP addresses from queries, so that no single entity can see both at the same time. Even better, we’ve made source code available, so anyone can try out ODoH, or run their own ODoH service!
But first, a bit of context. The Domain Name System (DNS) is the foundation of a human-usable Internet. It maps usable domain names, such as cloudflare.com, to IP addresses and other information needed to connect to that domain. A quick primer about the importance and issues with DNS can be read in a previous blog post. For this post, it’s enough to know that, in the initial design and still dominant usage of DNS, queries are sent in cleartext. This means anyone on the network path between your device and the DNS resolver can see both the query that contains the hostname (or website) you want, as well as the IP address that identifies your device.
To safeguard DNS from onlookers and third parties, the IETF standardized DNS encryption with DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT). Both protocols Continue reading
OPAQUE: The Best Passwords Never Leave your Device
Passwords are a problem. They are a problem for reasons that are familiar to most readers. For us at Cloudflare, the problem lies much deeper and broader. Most readers will immediately acknowledge that passwords are hard to remember and manage, especially as password requirements grow increasingly complex. Luckily there are great software packages and browser add-ons to help manage passwords. Unfortunately, the greater underlying problem is beyond the reaches of software to solve.
The fundamental password problem is simple to explain, but hard to solve: A password that leaves your possession is guaranteed to sacrifice security, no matter its complexity or how hard it may be to guess. Passwords are insecure by their very existence.
You might say, “but passwords are always stored in encrypted format!” That would be great. More accurately, they are likely stored as a salted hash, as explained below. Even worse is that there is no way to verify the way that passwords are stored, and so we can assume that on some servers passwords are stored in cleartext. The truth is that even responsibly stored passwords can be leaked and broken, albeit (and thankfully) with enormous effort. An increasingly pressing problem stems from the Continue reading
Current Work in BGP Security
I’ve been chasing BGP security since before the publication of the soBGP drafts, way back in the early 2000’s (that’s almost 20 years for those who are math challenged). The most recent news largely centers on the RPKI, which is used to ensure the AS originating an advertisements is authorized to do so (or rather “owns” the resource or prefix). If you are not “up” on what the RPKI does, or how it works, you might find this old blog post useful—its actually the tenth post in a ten post series on the topic of BGP security.
Recent news in this space largely centers around the ongoing deployment of the RPKI. According to Wired, Google and Facebook have both recently adopted MANRS, and are adopting RPKI. While it might not seem like autonomous systems along the edge adopting BGP security best practices and the RPKI system can make much of a difference, but the “heavy hitters” among the content providers can play a pivotal role here by refusing to accept routes that appear to be hijacked. This not only helps these providers and their customers directly—a point the Wired article makes—this also helps the ‘net in a larger way Continue reading
Fun Times: Another Broken Linux ALG
Dealing with protocols that embed network-layer addresses into application-layer messages (like FTP or SIP) is great fun, more so if the said protocol traverses a NAT device that has to find the IP addresses embedded in application messages while translating the addresses in IP headers. For whatever reason, the content rewriting functionality is called application-level gateway (ALG).
Even when we’re faced with a monstrosity like FTP or SIP that should have been killed with napalm a microsecond after it was created, there’s a proper way of doing things and a fast way of doing things. You could implement a protocol-level proxy that would intercept control-plane sessions… or you could implement a hack that tries to snoop TCP payload without tracking TCP session state.
Not surprisingly, the fast way of doing things usually results in a wonderful attack surface, more so if the attacker is smart enough to construct HTTP requests that look like SIP messages. Enjoy ;)
Fun Times: Another Broken Linux ALG
Dealing with protocols that embed network-layer addresses into application-layer messages (like FTP or SIP) is great fun, more so if the said protocol traverses a NAT device that has to find the IP addresses embedded in application messages while translating the addresses in IP headers. For whatever reason, the content rewriting functionality is called application-level gateway (ALG).
Even when we’re faced with a monstrosity like FTP or SIP that should have been killed with napalm a microsecond after it was created, there’s a proper way of doing things and a fast way of doing things. You could implement a protocol-level proxy that would intercept control-plane sessions… or you could implement a hack that tries to snoop TCP payload without tracking TCP session state.
Not surprisingly, the fast way of doing things usually results in a wonderful attack surface, more so if the attacker is smart enough to construct HTTP requests that look like SIP messages. Enjoy ;)
VMware is Not New to Enterprise Security
By: Keith Luck
None of us can stop thinking about how 2020 has changed the way we go about our daily tasks. Going to school, going to the store, going out to eat — going anywhere at all. But now, for the first time, we are not even going to work! Everyone has been pushed to work from home. This change has a wide-ranging set of variables that need to be addressed, from the business limits on resources for connectivity to the employee’s limits on remote resources of space, privacy, and uninterrupted concentration.
The overnight reliance on remote, personal, shared services for connectivity from the worker to the corporation has forever put an end to the idea of a security perimeter. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) has moved from being an academic discussion to a persistent customer requests for solutions. This shift is furthered by the timely release of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s NIST Special Publication 800-207 ZTA Guide. At the same time, we now see numerous security industry vendors claiming their products will provide Zero Trust.
Naturally, many VMware customers want Continue reading
Anchoring Trust: A Hardware Secure Boot Story
As a security company, we pride ourselves on finding innovative ways to protect our platform to, in turn, protect the data of our customers. Part of this approach is implementing progressive methods in protecting our hardware at scale. While we have blogged about how we address security threats from application to memory, the attacks on hardware, as well as firmware, have increased substantially. The data cataloged in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has shown the frequency of hardware and firmware-level vulnerabilities rising year after year.
Technologies like secure boot, common in desktops and laptops, have been ported over to the server industry as a method to combat firmware-level attacks and protect a device’s boot integrity. These technologies require that you create a trust ‘anchor’, an authoritative entity for which trust is assumed and not derived. A common trust anchor is the system Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) or the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware.
While this ensures that the device boots only signed firmware and operating system bootloaders, does it protect the entire boot process? What protects the BIOS/UEFI firmware from attacks?
The Boot Process
Before we discuss how we secure our boot process, we will first Continue reading
SAD DNS Explained
This week, at the ACM CCS 2020 conference, researchers from UC Riverside and Tsinghua University announced a new attack against the Domain Name System (DNS) called SAD DNS (Side channel AttackeD DNS). This attack leverages recent features of the networking stack in modern operating systems (like Linux) to allow attackers to revive a classic attack category: DNS cache poisoning. As part of a coordinated disclosure effort earlier this year, the researchers contacted Cloudflare and other major DNS providers and we are happy to announce that 1.1.1.1 Public Resolver is no longer vulnerable to this attack.
In this post, we’ll explain what the vulnerability was, how it relates to previous attacks of this sort, what mitigation measures we have taken to protect our users, and future directions the industry should consider to prevent this class of attacks from being a problem in the future.
DNS Basics
The Domain Name System (DNS) is what allows users of the Internet to get around without memorizing long sequences of numbers. What’s often called the “phonebook of the Internet” is more like a helpful system of translators that take natural language domain names (like blog.cloudflare.com or gov.uk) and Continue reading
Automated Origin CA for Kubernetes
In 2016, we launched the Cloudflare Origin CA, a certificate authority optimized for making it easy to secure the connection between Cloudflare and an origin server. Running our own CA has allowed us to support fast issuance and renewal, simple and effective revocation, and wildcard certificates for our users.
Out of the box, managing TLS certificates and keys within Kubernetes can be challenging and error prone. The secret resources have to be constructed correctly, as components expect secrets with specific fields. Some forms of domain verification require manually rotating secrets to pass. Once you're successful, don't forget to renew before the certificate expires!
cert-manager is a project to fill this operational gap, providing Kubernetes resources that manage the lifecycle of a certificate. Today we're releasing origin-ca-issuer, an extension to cert-manager integrating with Cloudflare Origin CA to easily create and renew certificates for your account's domains.
Origin CA Integration
Creating an Issuer
After installing cert-manager and origin-ca-issuer, you can create an OriginIssuer resource. This resource creates a binding between cert-manager and the Cloudflare API for an account. Different issuers may be connected to different Cloudflare accounts in the same Kubernetes cluster.
apiVersion: cert-manager.k8s.cloudflare.com/v1
kind: OriginIssuer
metadata:
Continue readingThe Hedge #59: Dan Blum and Rational Cybersecurity
Security has taken on an aura of mystery to many network engineers—why can’t we approach security in the way we do many other topics, rationally? It turns out we can. Dan Blum joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the concepts and techniques behind rational cybersecurity.
Securing Your Work From Home
Wanna make your security team’s blood run cold? Remind them that all that time and effort they put in to securing the enterprise from attackers and data exfiltration is currently sitting unused while we all work from home. You might have even heard them screaming at the sky just now.
Enterprise security isn’t easy, nor should it be. We constantly have to be on the offensive to find new attack vectors and hunt down threats and exploits. We have spent years and careers building defense-in-depth to an artform not unlike making buttery croissants. It’s all great when that apparatus is protecting our enterprise data center and cloud presence like a Scottish castle repelling invaders. Right now we’re in the wilderness with nothing but a tired sentry to protect us from the marauders.
During Security Field Day 4, I led a discussion panel with the delegates about the challenges of working from home securely. Here’s a link to our discussion that I wanted to spend some time elaborating on:
Home Is Where the Exploits Are
BYOD was a huge watershed moment for the enterprise because we realized for the first time that we had to learn to secure other people’s Continue reading
Virtual Patching with VMware NSX Distributed IDS/IPS
Patching: The Perennial Problem
Cybersecurity consumes an ever-increasing amount of our time and budgets, yet gaps remain and are inevitably exploited by bad actors. One of the biggest gaps is unpatched vulnerabilities: a recent survey found that 60% of cyberattacks in 2019 were associated with vulnerabilities for which patches were availablei.
Most companies have a patch schedule that is barely able to keep up with applying the most important patches to the most critical vulnerabilities. Yet new ones crop up all the time: approximately 15,000 new vulnerability are discovered every year, which translates to one every 30 minutes ii. They impact all types of workloads, from multiple vendors, as well as open source projects.
It’s a constant race to try to find and fix the most dangerous vulnerabilities before the bad actors can exploit them. But ignoring them is not an option.
The Simplest Approach is Not So Simple
Why not just patch everything or fix flaws in the code? Because it’s operationally challenging – and almost impossible.
First, patching is an expensive and largely manual process. Second, applications may rely Continue reading
Fall 2020 RPKI Update
The Internet is a network of networks. In order to find the path between two points and exchange data, the network devices rely on the information from their peers. This information consists of IP addresses and Autonomous Systems (AS) which announce the addresses using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
One problem arises from this design: what protects against a malevolent peer who decides to announce incorrect information? The damage caused by route hijacks can be major.
Routing Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a framework created in 2008. Its goal is to provide a source of truth for Internet Resources (IP addresses) and ASes in signed cryptographically signed records called Route Origin Objects (ROA).
Recently, we’ve seen the significant threshold of two hundred thousands of ROAs being passed. This represents a big step in making the Internet more secure against accidental and deliberate BGP tampering.
We have talked about RPKI in the past but we thought it would be a good time for an update.
In a more technical context, the RPKI framework consists of two parts:
- IP addresses need to be cryptographically signed by their owners in a database managed by a Trust Anchor: Afrinic, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE. Those Continue reading
Introducing Bot Analytics
Bots — both good and bad — are everywhere on the Internet. Roughly 40% of Internet traffic is automated. Fortunately, Cloudflare offers a tool that can detect and block unwanted bots: we call it Bot Management. This is the most recent platform in our long history of detecting bots for our customers. In fact, Cloudflare has always offered some form of bot detection. Over the past two years, our team has focused on building advanced detection engines, innovating as bots become more sophisticated, and creating new features.
Today, we are releasing Bot Analytics to help you visualize your automated traffic.
Background
It’s worth including some background for those who are new to bots.
Many websites expect human behavior. When I shop online, I behave as anyone else would: I might search for a few items, read reviews when I find something interesting, and eventually complete an order. This is expected. It is a standard use of the Internet.
Unfortunately, without protection these sites can be ripe for exploitation. Those shoes I was looking at? They are limited edition sneakers that resell for five times the price. Sneaker hoarders clamor at the chance to buy a pair (or fifty). Or perhaps Continue reading