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Category Archives for "Security"

Worth Reading: Blockchain and Trust

One of the rules of sane social media presence should be don’t ever engage with evangelists believing in a particular technology religion, more so if their funding depends on them spreading the gospel. I was called old-school networking guru from ivory tower when pointing out the drawbacks of TRILL, and clueless incompetent (in more polite words) when retweeting a tweet pointing out the realities of carbon footprint of proof-of-work technologies.

Interestingly, just a few days after that Bruce Schneier published a lengthy essay on blockchain and trust, and even the evangelists find it a bit hard to call him incompetent on security topics. Please read what he wrote every time someone comes along explaining how blockchains will save the world (or solve whatever networking problems like VTEP-to-MAC mappings).

Docker Security Update: CVE-2018-5736 and Container Security Best Practices

On Monday, February 11, Docker released an update to fix a privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2019-5736) in runC, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) runtime specification used in Docker Engine and containerd. This vulnerability makes it possible for a malicious actor that has created a specially-crafted container image to gain administrative privileges on the host. Docker engineering worked with runC maintainers on the OCI to issue a patch for this vulnerability.

Docker recommends immediately applying the update to avoid any potential security threats. For Docker Engine-Community, this means updating to 18.09.2 or 18.06.2. For Docker Engine- Enterprise, this means updating to 18.09.2, 18.03.1-ee-6, or 17.06.2-ee-19. Read the release notes before applying the update due to specific instructions for Ubuntu and RHEL operating systems.

Summary of the Docker Engine versions that address the vulnerability:

 

Docker Engine Community

Docker Engine Enterprise

18.09.2

18.09.2

18.06.2

18.03.1-ee-6

17.06.2-ee-19

To better protect the container images run by Docker Engine, here are some additional recommendations and best practices:

Use Docker Official Images

Official Images are a curated set of Docker repositories hosted on Docker Hub that are designed to:

How Bezo’s dick pics might’ve been exposed

In the news, the National Enquirer has extorted Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos by threatening to publish the sext-messages/dick-pics he sent to his mistress. How did the National Enquirer get them? There are rumors that maybe Trump's government agents or the "deep state" were involved in this sordid mess. The more likely explanation is that it was a simple hack. Teenage hackers regularly do such hacks -- they aren't hard.

This post is a description of how such hacks might've been done.


To start with, from which end were they stolen? As a billionaire, I'm guessing Bezos himself has pretty good security, so I'm going to assume it was the recipient, his girlfriend, who was hacked.

The hack starts by finding the email address she uses. People use the same email address for both public and private purposes. There are lots of "people finder" services on the Internet that you can use to track this information down. These services are partly scams, using "dark patterns" to get you to spend tons of money on them without realizing it, so be careful.

Using one of these sites, I quickly found a couple of a email accounts she's used, one at HotMail, another Continue reading

Give your automated services credentials with Access service tokens

Give your automated services credentials with Access service tokens

Cloudflare Access secures your internal sites by adding authentication. When a request is made to a site behind Access, Cloudflare asks the visitor to login with your identity provider. With service tokens, you can now extend that same level of access control by giving credentials to automated tools, scripts, and bots.

Authenticating users and bots alike

When users attempt to reach a site behind Access, Cloudflare looks for a JSON Web Token (a JWT) to determine if that visitor is allowed to reach that URL. If user does not have a JWT, we redirect them to the identity provider configured for your account. When they login successfully, we generate the JWT.

When you create an Access service token, Cloudflare generates a unique Client ID and Secret scoped to that service. When your bot sends a request with those credentials as headers, we validate them ourselves instead of redirecting to your identity provider. Access creates a JWT for that service and the bot can use that to reach your application.

Getting started

Within the Access tab of the Cloudflare dashboard, you’ll find a new section: Service Tokens. To get started, select “Generate a New Service Token.”

Give your automated services credentials with Access service tokens

You’ll be asked to Continue reading

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