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Category Archives for "Security"

RIPE 76 Sees Strong Focus on Routing Security

The RIPE 76 meeting is happening this week in Marseille, France, held at the fantastic location of the Palais du Pharo overlooking Marseille’s Old Port. And it’s also another record attendance with over 850 people registered.

The first couple of days have primarily been devoted to plenary sessions, and there’s been a big focus on routing security. Erik Bais (A2B Internet) kicked off the discussion with a presentation on ‘Why are we still seeing DDoS traffic?‘, which highlighted that DDoS attacks are still originating from the same networks. Looking at the list of the worst offenders, there’s even one amongst the regular RIPE attendees, and he called for networks to clean up their acts. This was also a good opportunity to highlight the MANRS initiative, which of course includes measures to mitigate amplification attacks, and encourages networks to make good routing practices the norm.

Alexander Azimov (Qrator Labs) reinforced this message by outlining the current problems with BGP, including the ongoing route leaks and hijacks affecting the Internet. There are currently only moral obligations to not use other providers’ address space or to support anti-spoofing policies, yet major providers (including Tier 1 providers) continue to both originate Continue reading

Why I’m Joining Cloudflare

Why I'm Joining Cloudflare

I love working as a Chief Security Officer because every day centers around building something that makes people safer. Back in 2002, as I considered leaving my role as a cybercrime federal prosecutor to work in tech on e-commerce trust and safety, a mentor told me, “You have two rewarding but very different paths: you can prosecute one bad actor at a time, or you can try to build solutions that take away many bad actors' ability to do harm at all.” And while each is rewarding in its own way, my best days are those where I get to see harm prevented—at Internet scale.

Why I'm Joining Cloudflare

In 2016, while traveling the United States to conduct hearings on the condition of Internet security as a member of President Obama's cyber commission, my co-commissioners noticed I had fallen into a pattern of asking the same question of every panelist: “Who is responsible for building a safer online environment where small businesses can set up shop without fear?” We heard many answers that all led to the same “not a through street” conclusion: Most law enforcement agencies extend their jurisdiction online, but there are no digital equivalents to the Department of Continue reading

You get TLS 1.3! You get TLS 1.3! Everyone gets TLS 1.3!

You get TLS 1.3! You get TLS 1.3! Everyone gets TLS 1.3!

It's no secret that Cloudflare has been a big proponent of TLS 1.3, the newest edition of the TLS protocol that improves both speed and security, since we have made it available to our customers starting in 2016. However, for the longest time TLS 1.3 has been a work-in-progress which meant that the feature was disabled by default in our customers’ dashboards, at least until all the kinks in the protocol could be resolved.

With the specification finally nearing its official publication, and after several years of work (as well as 28 draft versions), we are happy to announce that the TLS 1.3 feature on Cloudflare is out of beta and will be enabled by default for all new zones.

You get TLS 1.3! You get TLS 1.3! Everyone gets TLS 1.3!

For our Free and Pro customers not much changes, they already had TLS 1.3 enabled by default from the start. We have also decided to disable the 0-RTT feature by default for these plans (it was previously enabled by default as well), due to its inherent security properties. It will still be possible to explicitly enable it from the dashboard or the API (more on 0-RTT soon-ish in another blog post).

Our Business and Continue reading

Tap the Full Potential of Failsafe SD-WAN Q&A

Failsafe SD-WAN Q&A Thanks to all who joined us for the Talari Networks DemoFriday, Tap the Full Potential of Failsafe SD-WAN. During the webinar, Talari Networks demonstrated the latest innovations, product feature updates and UI enhancements to its award-winning SD-WAN platform. After the demo, we took questions from the audience. Below is the full Tap the Full Potential of Failsafe SD-WAN Q&A.

Encryption Isn’t Perfect, That’s Why Choices Are Important

Encryption is a critical building block for online trust, but it’s never perfect. Any encryption you use is the product of many steps. Encryption methods have to be defined; protocols for implementation have to be specified; and then the protocols have to be implemented. Each step is handled by different people and potentially introduces vulnerabilities along the way. Even with the best lock design in the world, if someone builds the lock with variations in the design (either intentionally or accidentally), it might be easily picked.

When you own a broken lock, you have it fixed or use a different one – encryption is no different.

Yesterday (14 May 2018), the Internet security community was alerted to newly discovered vulnerabilities in the secure email ecosystem, dubbed “EFAIL”. EFAIL can make the content of emails encrypted with PGP and S/MIME readable to an attacker. While there are some fixes users and companies can make to mitigate EFAIL, cases like this underscore the importance of choice when it comes to secure communications.

How does the EFAIL attack work?

EFAIL abuses a combination of vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP and S/MIME specifications and the way that many email clients render remote content in Continue reading

Research: Bridging the Air Gap

Way back in the old days, the unit I worked at in the US Air Force had a room with a lot of equipment used for processing classified information. Among this equipment was a Zenith Z-250 with an odd sort of keyboard and a very low resolution screen. A fine metal mesh embedded in a semi-clear substrate was glued to the surface of the monitor. This was our TEMPEST rated computer, on which we could type up classified memos, read classified email, and the like. We normally connected it to the STU-3 through a modem (remember those) to send and receive various kinds of classified information.

Elovici, Mordechai Guri, Yuval. “Bridgeware: The Air-Gap Malware.” Accessed May 13, 2018. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226377-bridgeware/abstract.

The idea of TEMPEST begins way back in 1985, when a Dutch researcher demonstrated “reading” the screen of a computer using some relatively cheap, and easy to assemble, equipment, from several feet away. The paper I’m looking at today provides a good overview of the many ways which have been discovered since this initial demonstration to transfer data from one computer to another across what should be an “air gap.” For instance, the TEMPEST rated computer described Continue reading

End-to-End Segmentation with NSX SD-WAN and NSX Data Center

As you may have read earlier this month, NSX Data Center and NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud are part of the expanded VMware NSX portfolio to enable virtual cloud networking.  A Virtual Cloud Network provides end-to-end connectivity for applications and data, whether they reside in the data center, cloud or at the edge. I wanted to follow up, and walk through an example using NSX Data Center and NSX SD-WAN of how one could build an end to end segmentation model from the data center to the branch.

NSX SD-WAN Segmentation

Beyond lowering cost and increasing agility and simplicity of branch connectivity, one of the key values provided by NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud is enterprise segmentation, which provides isolated network segments across the entire enterprise, enabling data isolation or separation by user or line of business, support for overlapping IP addresses between VLANs and support for multiple tenants. NSX SD-WAN provides this segmentation using a VRF-like concept with simplified, per-segment topology insertion. This is accomplished by inserting a “Segment ID” into the SD-WAN Overlay header as traffic is carried from one NSX SD-WAN Edge device to another Edge. Networks on the LAN-side of an NSX SD-WAN Edge with different Continue reading

Some notes on eFail

I've been busy trying to replicate the "eFail" PGP/SMIME bug. I thought I'd write up some notes.

PGP and S/MIME encrypt emails, so that eavesdroppers can't read them. The bugs potentially allow eavesdroppers to take the encrypted emails they've captured and resend them to you, reformatted in a way that allows them to decrypt the messages.

Disable remote/external content in email

The most important defense is to disable "external" or "remote" content from being automatically loaded. This is when HTML-formatted emails attempt to load images from remote websites. This happens legitimately when they want to display images, but not fill up the email with them. But most of the time this is illegitimate, they hide images on the webpage in order to track you with unique IDs and cookies. For example, this is the code at the end of an email from politician Bernie Sanders to his supporters. Notice the long random number assigned to track me, and the width/height of this image is set to one pixel, so you don't even see it:

Such trackers are so pernicious they are disabled by default in most email clients. This is an example of the settings in Thunderbird:


The problem is Continue reading

Leaking securely, for White House staffers

Spencer Ackerman has this interesting story about a guy assigned to crack down on unauthorized White House leaks. It's necessarily light on technical details, so I thought I'd write up some guesses, either as a guide for future reporters asking questions, or for people who want to better know the risks when leak information.

It should come as no surprise that your work email and phone are already monitored. They can get every email you've sent or received, even if you've deleted it. They can get every text message you've sent or received, the metadata of every phone call sent or received, and so forth.

To a lesser extent, this also applies to your well-known personal phone and email accounts. Law enforcement can get the metadata (which includes text messages) for these things without a warrant. In the above story, the person doing the investigation wasn't law enforcement, but I'm not sure that's a significant barrier if they can pass things onto the Secret Service or something.

The danger here isn't that you used these things to leak, it's that you've used these things to converse with the reporter before you made the decision to leak. That's what happened in Continue reading
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