“Change Password”
Oops:
Instead of telling you when it’s safe to cross the street, the walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating ‘CHANGE PASSWORD.’ Something’s gone terribly wrong here.
EDITED TO ADD (4/13): Details of what happened.
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Breaking RSA through Insufficiently Random Primes
Basically, the SafeZone library doesn’t sufficiently randomize the two prime numbers it used to generate RSA keys. They’re too close to each other, which makes them vulnerable to recovery.
There aren’t many weak keys out there, but there are some:
So far, Böck has identified only a handful of keys in the wild that are vulnerable to the factorization attack. Some of the keys are from printers from two manufacturers, Canon and Fujifilm (originally branded as Fuji Xerox). Printer users can use the keys to generate a Certificate Signing Request. The creation date for the all the weak keys was 2020 or later. The weak Canon keys are tracked as CVE-2022-26351.
Böck also found four vulnerable PGP keys, typically used to encrypt email, on SKS PGP key servers. A user ID tied to the keys implied they were created for testing, so he doesn’t believe they’re in active use.
US Critical Infrastructure Companies Will Have to Report When They Are Hacked
This will be law soon:
Companies critical to U.S. national interests will now have to report when they’re hacked or they pay ransomware, according to new rules approved by Congress.
[…]
The reporting requirement legislation was approved by the House and the Senate on Thursday and is expected to be signed into law by President Joe Biden soon. It requires any entity that’s considered part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, which includes the finance, transportation and energy sectors, to report any “substantial cyber incident” to the government within three days and any ransomware payment made within 24 hours.
Even better would be if they had to report it to the public.
Upcoming Speaking Events
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
- I’m participating in an online panel discussion on “Ukraine and Russia: The Online War,” hosted by UMass Amherst, at 5:00 PM Eastern on March 31, 2022.
- I’m speaking at Future Summits in Antwerp, Belgium on May 18, 2022.
- I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2022 in Vienna on June 2, 2022.
- I’m speaking at the 14th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, CyCon 2022, in Tallinn, Estonia on June 3, 2022.
- I’m speaking at the RSA Conference 2022 in San Francisco, June 6-9, 2022.
- I’m speaking at the Dublin Tech Summit in Dublin, Ireland, June 15-16, 2022.
The list is maintained on this page.
Leak of Russian Censorship Data
The transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets has released 800GB of data from Roskomnadzor, the Russian government censorship organization.
Specifically, Distributed Denial of Secrets says the data comes from the Roskomnadzor of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The Republic of Bashkortostan is in the west of the country.
[…]
The data is split into two main categories: a series of over 360,000 files totalling in at 526.9GB and which date up to as recently as March 5, and then two databases that are 290.6GB in size, according to Distributed Denial of Secrets’ website.
Friday Squid Blog: 328-million-year-old Vampire Squid Ancestor Discovered
A fossilized ancestor of the vampire squid—with ten arms—was discovered and named Syllipsimopodi bideni after President Biden.
Here’s the research paper. Note: Vampire squids are not squids. (Yes, it’s weird.)
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Where’s the Russia-Ukraine Cyberwar?
It has been interesting to notice how unimportant and ineffective cyber operations have been in the Russia-Ukraine war. Russia launched a wiper against Ukraine at the beginning, but it was found and neutered. Near as I can tell, the only thing that worked was the disabling of regional KA-SAT SATCOM terminals.
It’s probably too early to reach any conclusions, but people are starting to write about this, with varying theories.
I want to write about this, too, but I’m waiting for things to progress more.
EDITED TO ADD (3/12): Two additional takes.
EDITED TO ADD (3/22): Thomas Rid comments
Fraud on Zelle
Zelle is rife with fraud:
Zelle’s immediacy has also made it a favorite of fraudsters. Other types of bank transfers or transactions involving payment cards typically take at least a day to clear. But once crooks scare or trick victims into handing over money via Zelle, they can siphon away thousands of dollars in seconds. There’s no way for customers—and in many cases, the banks themselves—to retrieve the money.
[…]
It’s not clear who is legally liable for such losses. Banks say that returning money to defrauded customers is not their responsibility, since the federal law covering electronic transfers—known in the industry as Regulation E —requires them to cover only “unauthorized” transactions, and the fairly common scam that Mr. Faunce fell prey to tricks people into making the transfers themselves. Victims say because they were duped into sending the money, the transaction is unauthorized. Regulatory guidance has so far been murky.
When swindled customers, already upset to find themselves on the hook, search for other means of redress, many are enraged to find out that Zelle is owned and operated by banks.
[…]
The Zelle network is operated by Early Warning Services, a company created and owned by seven banks: Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, Truist, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo. Early Warning, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., manages the system’s technical infrastructure. But the 1,425 banks and credit unions that use Zelle can customize the app and add their own security settings.
Using Radar to Read Body Language
Yet another method of surveillance:
Radar can detect you moving closer to a computer and entering its personal space. This might mean the computer can then choose to perform certain actions, like booting up the screen without requiring you to press a button. This kind of interaction already exists in current Google Nest smart displays, though instead of radar, Google employs ultrasonic sound waves to measure a person’s distance from the device. When a Nest Hub notices you’re moving closer, it highlights current reminders, calendar events, or other important notifications.
Proximity alone isn’t enough. What if you just ended up walking past the machine and looking in a different direction? To solve this, Soli can capture greater subtleties in movements and gestures, such as body orientation, the pathway you might be taking, and the direction your head is facing—aided by machine learning algorithms that further refine the data. All this rich radar information helps it better guess if you are indeed about to start an interaction with the device, and what the type of engagement might be.
[…]
The ATAP team chose to use radar because it’s one of the more privacy-friendly methods of gathering rich spatial data. (It also has really low latency, works in the dark, and external factors like sound or temperature don’t affect it.) Unlike a camera, radar doesn’t capture and store distinguishable images of your body, your face, or other means of identification. “It’s more like an advanced motion sensor,” Giusti says. Soli has a detectable range of around 9 feet—less than most cameras—but multiple gadgets in your home with the Soli sensor could effectively blanket your space and create an effective mesh network for tracking your whereabouts in a home.
“Privacy-friendly” is a relative term.
These technologies are coming. They’re going to be an essential part of the Internet of Things.
Hacking Alexa through Alexa’s Speech
An Alexa can respond to voice commands it issues. This can be exploited:
The attack works by using the device’s speaker to issue voice commands. As long as the speech contains the device wake word (usually “Alexa” or “Echo”) followed by a permissible command, the Echo will carry it out, researchers from Royal Holloway University in London and Italy’s University of Catania found. Even when devices require verbal confirmation before executing sensitive commands, it’s trivial to bypass the measure by adding the word “yes” about six seconds after issuing the command. Attackers can also exploit what the researchers call the “FVV,” or full voice vulnerability, which allows Echos to make self-issued commands without temporarily reducing the device volume.
It does require proximate access, though, at least to set the attack up:
It requires only a few seconds of proximity to a vulnerable device while it’s turned on so an attacker can utter a voice command instructing it to pair with an attacker’s Bluetooth-enabled device. As long as the device remains within radio range of the Echo, the attacker will be able to issue commands.
Research paper.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.