Microsoft and Security Incentives

Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security—in particular, Microsoft:

Grotto told us Microsoft had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” to provide logging capabilities to the government by default, and given the fact the mega-corp banked around $20 billion in revenue from security services last year, the concession was minimal at best.

[…]

“The government needs to focus on encouraging and catalyzing competition,” Grotto said. He believes it also needs to publicly scrutinize Microsoft and make sure everyone knows when it messes up.

“At the end of the day, Microsoft, any company, is going to respond most directly to market incentives,” Grotto told us. “Unless this scrutiny generates changed behavior among its customers who might want to look elsewhere, then the incentives for Microsoft to change are not going to be as strong as they should be.”

Breaking up the tech monopolies is one of the best things we can do for cybersecurity.

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Posted on April 23, 2024 at 7:09 AM • 13 Comments

Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware

Interesting social-engineering attack vector:

McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the “C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS,” known as vcpkg.

The attacker is exploiting a property of GitHub: comments to a particular repo can contain files, and those files will be associated with the project in the URL.

What this means is that someone can upload malware and “attach” it to a legitimate and trusted project.

As the file’s URL contains the name of the repository the comment was created in, and as almost every software company uses GitHub, this flaw can allow threat actors to develop extraordinarily crafty and trustworthy lures.

For example, a threat actor could upload a malware executable in NVIDIA’s driver installer repo that pretends to be a new driver fixing issues in a popular game. Or a threat actor could upload a file in a comment to the Google Chromium source code and pretend it’s a new test version of the web browser.

These URLs would also appear to belong to the company’s repositories, making them far more trustworthy.

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Posted on April 22, 2024 at 11:26 AM • 11 Comments

Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects

After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique:

The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to “address any critical vulnerabilities,” yet cited no specifics. The email author(s) wanted OpenJS to designate them as a new maintainer of the project despite having little prior involvement. This approach bears strong resemblance to the manner in which “Jia Tan” positioned themselves in the XZ/liblzma backdoor.

[…]

The OpenJS team also recognized a similar suspicious pattern in two other popular JavaScript projects not hosted by its Foundation, and immediately flagged the potential security concerns to respective OpenJS leaders, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The article includes a list of suspicious patterns, and another list of security best practices.

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Posted on April 18, 2024 at 7:06 AM • 10 Comments

X.com Automatically Changing Link Text but Not URLs

Brian Krebs reported that X (formerly known as Twitter) started automatically changing twitter.com links to x.com links. The problem is: (1) it changed any domain name that ended with “twitter.com,” and (2) it only changed the link’s appearance (anchortext), not the underlying URL. So if you were a clever phisher and registered fedetwitter.com, people would see the link as fedex.com, but it would send people to fedetwitter.com.

Thankfully, the problem has been fixed.

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Posted on April 16, 2024 at 7:00 AM • 4 Comments

New Lattice Cryptanalytic Technique

A new paper presents a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving certain hard lattice problems. This could be a big deal for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, since many of them base their security on hard lattice problems.

A few things to note. One, this paper has not yet been peer reviewed. As this comment points out: “We had already some cases where efficient quantum algorithms for lattice problems were discovered, but they turned out not being correct or only worked for simple special cases.” I expect we’ll learn more about this particular algorithm with time. And, like many of these algorithms, there will be improvements down the road.

Two, this is a quantum algorithm, which means that it has not been tested. There is a wide gulf between quantum algorithms in theory and in practice. And until we can actually code and test these algorithms, we should be suspicious of their speed and complexity claims.

And three, I am not surprised at all. We don’t have nearly enough analysis of lattice-based cryptosystems to be confident in their security.

EDITED TO ADD (4/20): The paper had a significant error, and has basically been retracted. From the new abstract:

Note: Update on April 18: Step 9 of the algorithm contains a bug, which I don’t know how to fix. See Section 3.5.9 (Page 37) for details. I sincerely thank Hongxun Wu and (independently) Thomas Vidick for finding the bug today. Now the claim of showing a polynomial time quantum algorithm for solving LWE with polynomial modulus-noise ratios does not hold. I leave the rest of the paper as it is (added a clarification of an operation in Step 8) as a hope that ideas like Complex Gaussian and windowed QFT may find other applications in quantum computation, or tackle LWE in other ways.

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Posted on April 15, 2024 at 7:04 AM • 33 Comments

Smuggling Gold by Disguising it as Machine Parts

Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold (that’s about a quarter of a cubic foot) out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts:

On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they contained gold that had been “concealed in the integral parts” of the compressors. Those gold parts had also been painted silver to match the other components in an attempt to throw customs off the trail.

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Posted on April 12, 2024 at 7:01 AM • 32 Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.